Life Extension: What Does it Mean for Humanity’s Future? “Would you want to live forever if you could?” This is by no means a new question or concept. But what about the question, “would you want to live to 150 years or older if you could retain the health and vitality of your youth?” Likely, more people would be interested. This is the form of biotechnology that life extension scientists are working on and even testing in clinical trials right now. What exactly is life extension and why is it something that might change the future of aging? The process of aging involves deterioration in our bodies on many levels. This bodily degeneration includes telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfuntion, cellular senescence, and stem cell exhaustion, among others. Of course, when taken as a jargon-filled list of inevitable physical failings, the challenges of aging seem bleak. However, researchers in the field of life extension do not believe this has to be the case. An informative video on the subject, researched by a Germany-based science channel, explains: “Scientists are trying to shift the attention of the medical community from optimizing lifespans to optimizing healthspans, the part of our lives during which we’re disease-free.” Considering the multiple areas which contribute to the aging process, scientists will need to tackle more than one of these complications at a time to lengthen healthspan and halt age-related diseases. While this is a future objective for life extension research, current experimentation focuses on addressing a few of the individual detrimental aspects of aging. Lifespan.io, a nonprofit organization promoting, amplifying, and tracking aging and life extension research, describes its goal as making “chronologically old and chronologically young people, at every level, indistinguishable from each 52
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