This is from a recent article, mice living 60% longer:
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Scientists are great at making mice live longer.
Rapamycin, widely prescribed to prevent organ rejection after a transplant, increases the life expectancy of middle-age mice by as much as 60 percent. Drugs called senolytics help geriatric mice stay sprightly long after their peers have died. The diabetes drugs metformin and acarbose, extreme calorie restriction, and, by one biotech investor’s count, about 90 other interventions keep mice skittering around lab cages well past their usual expiration date. The newest scheme is to hack the aging process itself by reprogramming old cells to a younger state.
“If you’re a mouse, you’re a lucky creature because there are a lot of ways to extend your life span,” says Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist whose breakthrough work decades ago catalyzed what is now a research frenzy. “And long-lived mice seem very happy.”
What about us? How far can scientists stretch our life span? And how far should they go? Between 1900 and 2020, human life expectancy more than doubled, to 73.4 years. But that remarkable gain has come at a cost: a staggering rise in chronic and degenerative illnesses. Aging remains the biggest risk factor for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, lung disease, and just about every other major illness. It’s hard to imagine anyone wants to live much longer if it means more years of debility and dependence.
But if those mouse experiments lead to drugs that clean up the molecular and biochemical wreckage at the root of so many health problems in old age, or to therapies that slow—or, better yet, prevent—that messy buildup, then many more of us would reach our mid-80s or 90s without the aches and ailments that can make those years a mixed blessing. And more might reach what is believed to be the natural maximum human life span, 120 to 125 years. Few people get anywhere close. In industrialized nations, about one in 6,000 reaches the century mark and one in five million makes it past 110. The record holder, Jeanne Calment in France, died in 1997 at 122 years, 164 days."