Did you know that life extension is impossible? I didn’t until the keen minds over at the Guardian informed me as such. Fortunately before I decided to give up my career in regenerative medicine I decided to look into exactly how the Guardian came to such a revelation. What I discovered was so earth shattering that it rocked my very understanding of the world, and made me question everything I thought I knew. That realisation was that, despite their consistent insistence to the contrary, the media lies, a lot.
Ok maybe this was not as shocking as I made it out to be, in fact it’s pretty widely known by now that the media is generally no stranger to the odd lie here and there. If you are not familiar with the story allow me to give you a recap. A recent study was conducted in order to find out if human lifespans have actually increased due to advanced in medicine. To do this, scientists used statistical models to remove non-age related causes of death from historical records (such as murder, death in child birth, plague etc) in order to determine what the uninterrupted human lifespan is, and if it has increased over time. What was found is that our medical science is yet to fundamentally extend human lifespan. This comes as no surprise to anyone in the field of longevity research as we know full well that none of our current medical treatments address causes of ageing. What this study does not conclude however is that life extension is impossible.
