How prolonged can human beings dwell? Even though existence expectancy has improved substantially above the previous century, many thanks mainly to improved sanitation and medication, exploration into hunter-gatherer populations suggests that people today who escaped sickness and violent fatalities could live to about their seventh or eighth ten years. This usually means our regular human life span may be static: all around 70 decades, with an added ten years or so for advanced healthcare care and cautious habits. Some geneticists believe a hard limit of of about 115 decades is basically programmed into our genome by evolution.

Other researchers in the speedy-moving discipline of getting old exploration, or geroscience, believe we can live substantially extended. A handful of compounds have been proven to lengthen the lifetime spans of laboratory animals slightly, yet some researchers are more ambitious—a large amount much more formidable.

João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the Institute of Irritation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham in England, thinks people could live for 1,000 many years. He has scrutinized the genomes of pretty prolonged-lived animals such as the bowhead whale (which can access 200 decades) and the naked mole rat. His surprising conclusion: if we eradicated growing old at the mobile stage, individuals could are living for a millennium—and probably as extensive as 20,000 years.

How can that be? If getting old is programmed, scientists could theoretically reprogram our cells by tweaking genes that are central to growing older. This would require engineering that we really don’t presently have, but Magalhães thinks it can be produced. His terrific-grandfather died of pneumonia—a major induce of mortality in the 1920s. When Magalhães contracted the identical disorder as a boy or girl, he was healed with a simple dose of penicillin. He thinks scientists can equally create therapies for growing old, an endeavor to which he has now devoted his job. “I want to cheat dying,” he suggests bluntly.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How has dishonest dying labored out so significantly?

I really do not assume we’re heading to have a drug that “cures” growing old the way penicillin cures infections whenever before long. But a compound named rapamycin is pretty promising. It extends life span by 10 to 15 p.c in animals, and it is permitted for human use, this kind of as for organ transplant recipients. It does have side consequences. I am optimistic that we will acquire medicines akin to statins [taken daily to lessen risk of heart disease] that we take each working day for longevity applications. If you could slow down human growing old 10 or even 5 per cent, that would still be fairly awesome.

How does rapamycin function?

Rapamycin does very a number of issues in the mobile, but a great deal of its outcomes [involve] slowing down progress and slowing down mobile fat burning capacity, which is why it has an effect on ageing.

Your grandmother lived to be 103 a long time previous. Did she take rapamycin, or was her lengthy daily life joined to something else?

I believe it was the sunlight and the seashore [laughs]. We know that to become a centenarian is largely genetic. My grandmother didn’t genuinely work out, and she didn’t eat extremely healthily. She didn’t smoke she didn’t have pretty poor behavior, but she also didn’t have significantly wholesome patterns. Yet she was pretty healthier practically until finally the end—she was scarcely in clinic. With her it arrived down to genetics, surroundings and some luck.

You’ve sequenced genomes of really lengthy-lived animals these as the bowhead whale, which life up to 200 decades. How are their genes unique from ours, and what can we learn from them?

Various very long-lived animals, such as humans, whales and elephants, all have to cope with the similar problems, these types of as most cancers, but they use distinctive molecular tips to attain their longevity. With bowhead whales, they feel to have considerably improved DNA maintenance. My desire experiment is to consider a bowhead whale gene and implant it in a mouse to see if the mouse would then reside longer. One more obvious example would be the p53 gene, which is very strongly linked with most cancers suppression. Elephants have multiple copies of this gene, which makes them resistant to most cancers. There are a few other prospect genes that we have identified, not only in whales but in rodents these kinds of as the bare mole rat.

Why are naked mole rats so exciting?

Bare mole rats are intriguing because they can live up to 30 a long time, nevertheless they are lesser than a rat, which only life to about four several years. So you have a little rodent which is related to mice and rats but lives a great deal more time and is really cancer-resistant.

What’s their secret?

In terms of most cancers resistance and likely in general growing older as nicely, it is their potential to respond to and fix DNA injury. But the threshold for a mouse cell to become a cancer cell is a lot lessen than [the threshold] in individuals. If you expose mouse cells to DNA destruction, they will get cancer if you expose naked mole rat cells to the same destruction, it’s going to be fastened. They won’t get most cancers.

So if mice dwell numerous many years, and bare mole rats stay 30 several years, and we are living about 80 decades, does that mean life spans are genetically programmed?

The dominant concept of aging was about have on and tear—damage accumulating in our cells and factors of our system like autos that crack down more than time. I’ve in no way seriously preferred that for the reason that individuals are not inanimate objects. There is destruction, of training course, and usually growing old appears to be to be really deterministic, just about like a program. A mouse will age 20 to 30 times more rapidly than a human becoming. There are a good deal of getting old [characteristics] that just occur to everyone and even throughout species, these types of as decline of muscle mass. This does not look like one thing that is random it appears predetermined. So I think of growing old as a lot more akin to a computer software challenge than a components problem.

My speculation is that we have a very intricate established of computerlike programs in our DNA that change us into an adult human being. But probably some of these similar packages, as they keep on into later everyday living, turn into harmful.

What’s an case in point of that?

A traditional instance would be thymus involution. Your thymus is a gland that produces T cells, which are quite crucial to your immune procedure. But it disappears quite early in daily life, around age 20—earlier if you’re overweight later on if you’re an athlete. Mainly it turns into body fat. That strikes me as extremely programmatic. It’s a basic scenario of antagonistic pleiotropy, where by a procedure that is beneficial earlier in everyday living gets to be damaging afterwards on.

Why is the immune program essential in ageing?

The immune procedure, I consider, is a small-hanging fruit in phrases of targeting ageing. It has systemic impacts, and it declines above time, which is why diseases like COVID turn into very perilous to outdated people today. But there are distinct tissues, this sort of as the thymus, that you can goal for rejuvenation. To me, that is a person way of beginning. There are experiments in mice that display that if you adjust just a single transcription element [a protein that acts on genetic material], the thymus regenerates. In idea, I am persuaded we can have radical interventions like this—to rewrite our genetic “software” and redesign human biology—to hold off or even reverse aging. In observe, it is tough, but in idea, I consider there is a massive prospective.

How a great deal prospective is there? How extensive could we are living if we acquired rid of getting old?

I in fact did some calculations yrs in the past and discovered that if we could “cure” human getting old, common human life span would be much more than 1,000 a long time. Utmost everyday living span, barring incidents and violent loss of life, could be as lengthy as 20,000 decades. This may audio like a large amount, but some species can already dwell hundreds of years—and in some situations countless numbers of yrs [such as the hexactinellid sponge and the Great Basin bristlecone pine]. If we could redesign our biology to eliminate cancer and evade the harmful steps of our genetic program method, the health positive aspects would be head-boggling.

This sounds excessive. Are this kind of profound interventions even feasible?

I think it is probable. Is it heading to transpire shortly? I imagine it’s very unlikely. Even if you can determine out how getting older will work, it is not simple to develop interventions. I am an aspiring science-fiction writer as nicely, and a single point I’ve discovered are these novels that are set 100 or 1,000 many years from now, in a future with all varieties of technological innovation that permits individuals to do remarkable factors, these as travel concerning stars—and people today are nevertheless getting old. But I think we’ll determine out getting older by then.