The longevity industry is coming off perhaps its best run on record. The expected span of an American life has increased by about three decades since 1900 — to around 78 as of 2023. But for many people, even 78 years just won’t do.
The Methuselah Foundation, a biomedical charity, for example, wants to “make 90 the new 50,” and scientists at one biotechnology firm have argued that, unencumbered by disease, the body could potentially make it all the way to age 150. Even more optimistic estimates put the number closer to 1,000.
Whatever the maximum human life span may be, people appear increasingly determined to find it — in particular men, who are more inclined to favor radically extending life, maybe even indefinitely. Last year, nearly 6,000 studies of longevity made their way onto PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences papers; that’s almost five times as many as two decades ago.
Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a sizable supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, search out life-extending diets and even try to reverse aging itself. It’s the same mix of solid science, quixotic experimentation and questionable advice that has, for much of recorded history, defined the pursuit.
Humanity’s oldest epic is a doomed quest for immortality: Around four millenniums ago, the Sumerians told of a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who set out to find life everlasting and briefly located a youth-restoring plant, only to lose it on his way home. Two millenniums later, as the story goes, a Chinese magician named Xu Fu convinced the emperor that there was an elixir granting eternal life across the Yellow Sea. The emperor provided Xu Fu with ships and the 3,000 virgins that the magician claimed were essential to the quest. When the emperor found out he had made little progress, Xu Fu said he also needed an army, which the emperor furnished. Xu Fu set sail, and the emperor never saw him again.
The desire to live forever also animated stories of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great and the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. They too ended in failure. It’s a lesson that was lost on alchemists, who for centuries sought to create a drink that granted immortality. Among them was Isaac Newton, who went to his grave in the early 1700s believing his alchemical research would one day prove more consequential than his laws of motion.
But even before Newton’s death, Enlightenment thinkers were trading the dream of immortality for the less ambitious goal of living a little longer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “longevity” first emerged in the 1500s. As did the first longevity diet book, after an Italian nobleman named Luigi Cornaro began to suspect his penchant for alcohol, lavish feasts and late nights was negatively affecting his health. Henceforth, he subjected himself to sparse daily portions, including a lot of eggs, milk, broth and vegetables, and lived into his 80s, when he wrote of his eating habits in “Discourses on a Sober Life.” Its advice proved arguably better than that of many of its successors, among them the ill-advised American offerings “Meat for Every Occasion” and “Calories Don’t Count.”
Cornaro had stumbled upon the modern notion of caloric restriction, a practice that researchers have since shown increases the life spans of dogs, mice, monkeys, worms and — according to one large study — maybe even humans. But Cornaro also seemingly favored other, less scientific restrictions like abstinence, which he believed would preserve his vitality. He was misguided, but hardly alone. This line of thinking remained in fashion for centuries after his death. In Chicago, one urologist began replacing people’s testicles, including his own, with those of younger men. Nine years later, in 1923, he died at 65.
That same year, the Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach was trumpeting a new genital surgery to treat the diseases of aging. Among the early recipients of the operation was Sigmund Freud, who nevertheless died of cancer at 83. But the operation, called a vasectomy, lives on, albeit for a decidedly different purpose.
By the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-aging gurus, newspaper writers and charlatans all regularly promoted lifestyle changes: avoiding “excessive sleep,” forgoing water, marrying and even moving to Nantucket (“where none die young”). Also proposed was banning novels that “poison the public mind” and even, among life insurance companies, being Jewish (“The London companies prefer to insure one Jew rather than two Christians,” The New York Times reported in 1880).
At many times, their goal was to make money, as when soda fountain clerks told customers that drinking their sour milk would cause one to “live to be two hundred years old,” or when cosmetic companies sold electrotherapy devices already well established as useless. But much of the very worst strategies came from the oldest Americans themselves, who told reporters they drank a daily bottle of “old and good wine,” eschewed medicine, ate candy, hunted whales and smoked “at least one cigar every day,” albeit while taking a long walk.
Associations cropped up with names like the Jolly Young Men’s Club and The Hundred Years Club, the latter being an outfit whose members gathered in the Waldorf Astoria hotel New York City to “maintain a library” of the “theories of India, Egypt and the ancient Hebrews.” Guest speakers included Cyrus Edson, a doctor who told the audience that “men of genius” live remarkably long lives. (He died three years later, in his mid-40s.) Nevertheless, the popularity of the “art of longevity,” as the Club called it, grew. Although, as the president of the Centenarian Club in London noted in the late 1920s, even then it was “chiefly men and not women who are most interested in living long.”
By the middle of the 20th century, according to one tracker, mentions of “longevity” had surpassed “immortality” in published books. Expected life spans rose, thanks in large part to the establishment of public water filtration and chlorination, the discovery of antibiotics like penicillin and the arrival of vaccines for deadly diseases like polio.
What was once the realm of magicians had — with the help of breakthroughs like the discovery of DNA — become a more legitimate pursuit. And yet, even among some of the era’s most esteemed scientists, the old eccentric diversions continued apace. Alexander Bogomolets, once the head of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, for example, developed a serum made from horse blood and cadaver marrow that he believed would allow one to “live to the age of 150 years.” And Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, claimed to have kept alive the tissue of a chicken heart for years.
There was also Linus Pauling, one of the founders of molecular biology and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, who for much of his career also promoted megadoses of vitamin C as a way to prevent 75 percent of cancers and extend life to the elusive age of 150. By the time Pauling died of cancer in 1994, at 93, his longevity research had been, in the eyes of many, discredited.
Immortality, as the old stories warned, may be a doomed endeavor. But the pursuit of a longer life is unlikely to stop soon. As one Catholic priest noted in New York City in 1927, when he observed his followers’ intractable desire to skirt death, “Men have always been interested in the prolonging of their lives, no matter how wretched and unfortunate their lives have been.” Researchers at Harvard and Oxford recently tried to gauge that interest in the marketplace today. They estimated that the total value of any scientific breakthrough that added another decade to global life expectancy would be worth $367 trillion.
But here, too, the ancients advised caution. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder told of a time when there was no shortage of men who had survived well into their 800s. So tired with life did they become, he said, that they tossed themselves in the sea.
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