Category: Aging

At Age 84 Scolnick Has the Passion to Persevere at Curing His Son’s Illness

Many of those with the passion to persevere in overcoming the necessary and unnecessary (regulatory) obstacles to medical innovation, do so because they have a sense of urgency due to skin in the game–they or a relative is directly affected by the disease they are passionate to cure. Dr. Edward Scolnick whose story I quote below, is a great example. In the story, we find another example, Ted Stanley, who donated $100 million to Scolnick because Stanley’s son is also suffering mental illness. And perhaps an indirect example? Rienhoff does not directly have skin in the game, but he is playing a key role because of Scolnick’s passion, and Scolnick’s passion is due to his skin in the game.

If we want more cures we will reduce the unnecessary (regulatory) obstacles so that those with less skin in the game (and so less passion to persevere) will also innovate.

[“Skin in the game” has been emphasized by Taleb in his book with that title.]

(p. A1) Dr. Edward Scolnick figures he needs five, maybe 10 more years to solve one of the brain’s greatest mysteries.

Scolnick, 84 years old, has spent most of the past two decades working to understand and find better ways to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, mental illnesses suffered by tens of millions of people, including his son.

“I know I can crack it,” said Scolnick, a noted drug developer who spent his career plumbing the building blocks of DNA for new treatments.

Long before his latest quest, Scolnick spent 22 years at Merck, mostly as head of the drug giant’s laboratory research. He led development of more than two dozen medicines, including the first approved statin to lower cholesterol, an osteoporosis treatment and an anti-HIV therapy.

. . .

(p. A9) In 2021, Scolnick learned that a group of scientists analyzing DNA from thousands of people with schizophrenia had found mutations in 10 genes that substantially increased the risk of developing the illness. They estimated that a mutation on a single gene, called Setd1a, raised the risk 20-fold.

“It got my blood boiling,” Scolnick said. He began pursuing an emerging class of treatments called LSD1 inhibitors, hoping to develop a new drug. Scolnick enlisted Dr. Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr., who recently developed an LSD1 inhibitor to treat blood disorders.

. . .

Rienhoff anticipates testing a new drug for safety as early as next year, first in animals. He said he saw Scolnick’s passion about fielding a breakthrough treatment but didn’t fully understand why until Scolnick shared about his son’s lifelong struggles with mental illness.

Jason Scolnick, 54, said his doctor has been regularly fine-tuning his medications for bipolar disorder over the years to minimize their debilitating side effects. Using the drugs currently prescribed for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is like undergoing chemotherapy, he said. “There’s no guarantee it will work and it makes you feel terrible, but the cancer will feel worse or kill you.”

There remains a long road ahead for any new medicine. It takes more than a decade, on average, to get a drug from the research lab through government approvals to patients.

. . .

After leaving Merck, Scolnick was hired in 2004 by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to lead research on psychiatric disorders. He fostered ties with Ted Stanley, a memorabilia entrepreneur whose son also suffered with mental illness. In 2007, Stanley gave $100 million to launch the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad, headed by Scolnick for five years.

. . .

Scolnick and Rienhoff had sat together at a Blackstone dinner years earlier. During the meal, Scolnick shared stories with his table companions about Merck’s development of Crixivan, the anti-HIV drug. “I was hearing a piece of history,” Rienhoff said, “not just HIV history.”

Scolnick became emotional describing how the drug developers, facing various obstacles, wrestled with whether or not to keep going. He pushed for the study to continue, given the urgency. At the time, AIDS was killing tens of thousands of people a year in the U.S.

“I said to Ed, ‘You are thinking like a doctor not a scientist,’” Rienhoff said. “That was the beginning of our relationship.”

. . .

Rienhoff has a team of chemists making and testing compounds at labs in the U.S. and abroad.

“I am optimistic something will come of this,” Rienhoff said. “I can do it, but I wouldn’t have done it if not for Ed. I am, really, doing this in a way for Ed.”

. . .

Biotech company Oryzon Genomics in Spain is developing LSD1 inhibitors for cancer and other conditions. Columbia University researchers tried Oryzon’s drug in mice and found it reversed cognitive impairments caused by the Setd1a genetic mutation connected to schizophrenia. Oryzon is running a small trial in Spain of the LSD1 inhibitor in patients with schizophrenia.

Dr. Joseph Gogos, who led the Columbia research, said it was possible such treatments would be approved for people.

Scolnick is more certain—of both a revolutionary new treatment and his living to witness it.

“Before I die, we will see new medicines, new diagnostics, better outcomes for patients burdened by schizophrenia or bipolar illness,” he said. “I will not be happy to die. But I will die happy that my life helped.”

For the full story see:

Amy Dockser Marcus. “Aging Scientist Races Against Time.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 29, 2024): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 26, 2024, and has the title “A Scientist’s Final Quest Is to Find New Schizophrenia Drugs. Will He Live to See Them?”)

Keep Raging at “the Dying of the Light”

I still remember as an undergraduate at Wabash College reading in our intro psychology textbook of an experiment in which a dog was put in a box. Every time the dog tried to leap out of the box, he received an electric shock. Eventually the electric current was turned off. But the dog never again tried to leap. Are we like the dog, too discouraged by past constraints, so that we are resigned to accept the Biblical limit of “three score and 10” (Psalm 90:10)?

But there is a paradox. Kloc cites an article claiming a very high market value for expanded lifespans. But then where are the voters urgently demanding that medical entrepreneurs be unbound? Where are the citizens demanding that regulators stop mandating Phase 3 clinical trials? Citizens with a sense of urgency can make a difference–see the Act-Up movement in the early years of AIDs. When will they?

(p. 1) 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.

. . .

(p. 24) 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.

For the full story see:

Joe Kloc. “Gilgamesh, Ponce and the Quest to Live Forever.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, January 19, 2025): 1 & 24.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 18, 2025, and has the title “The Centuries-Old, Incredibly Male Quest to Live Forever.”)

When Kloc mentions estimates of possible human lifespan “closer to 1,000” he links to a Scientific American interview with João Pedro de Magalhães, professor of biogerontology at England’s University of Birmingham. João Pedro de Magalhães believes that in principle humans could live to 1,000:

Gifford, Bill. “How Old Can Humans Get?” Scientific American (July 31, 2023). Available from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-old-can-humans-get/.

When Kloc says that some “even try to reverse aging itself” he links to:

Poganik, Jesse R., Bohan Zhang, Gurpreet S. Baht, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, Amy Deik, Csaba Kerepesi, Sun Hee Yim, Ake T. Lu, Amin Haghani, Tong Gong, Anna M. Hedman, Ellika Andolf, Göran Pershagen, Catarina Almqvist, Clary B. Clish, Steve Horvath, James P. White, and Vadim N. Gladyshev. “Biological Age Is Increased by Stress and Restored Upon Recovery.” Cell Metabolism 35, no. 5 (2023): 807-20.

Kloc also links to estimates of the economic value of extending lifespans by one year, and by a decade, as given in:

Scott, Andrew J., Martin Ellison, and David A. Sinclair. “The Economic Value of Targeting Aging.” Nature Aging 1, no. 7 (July 2021): 616-23.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” is a line from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

Drugs for Dog Longevity May Also Aid Human Longevity

Dogs have long contributed to advances in human medicine. For instance C. Walton Lillehei experimented on dogs to develop his path-breaking human open-heart operations (see the book King of Hearts). What pains me about those dog contributions is that the dogs themselves died in the experiments. In the more recent dog contributions to human medicine, as discussed in the passages quoted below, the dogs themselves have a good chance to benefit as they contribute to human health. I like that a lot better.

(p. A11) In the quest to help people live longer, scientists and companies are turning to dogs.

. . .

Behind the growing enthusiasm is a mix of scientists and entrepreneurs—building on the surging interest from people aiming to live longer. These groups say insights into dog longevity could provide lessons and perhaps eventually treatments that could help people, too.

. . .

On Tuesday [Nov. 28, 2023], a biotech startup that’s hoping to have the first FDA-approved treatment to extend healthy lifespan in dogs, took a step toward that goal. In a letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal, the Food and Drug Administration affirmed that its drug had demonstrated “reasonable expectation of effectiveness.”

The company, called Loyal, still has to complete several more steps before it can market the drug, and it’s only aimed at canines.

. . .

Celine Halioua, chief executive of Loyal, the biotech startup working toward conditional approval of its lifespan drug, says there is a larger aim in addition to helping dogs live healthier for longer. The company has set a possible precedent for other drugs to be approved for lifespan extension, potentially opening a door for other animal—or human—drug companies to follow.

“I think we can both take the opportunity to build better medicines for our dogs and also to better understand these really complex diseases,” says Halioua, whose own 85-pound Rottweiler mix, Della, is nearing the end of her projected lifespan.

The firm’s drug is an injectable that is designed to reduce levels of IGF-1, a hormone that drives cell growth, in large dogs. High blood levels of IGF-1 have been associated with shorter lifespans in some animal and human studies.

The company’s research has indicated that the drug can reduce those hormone levels, but it would still need a large clinical trial demonstrating it can extend dog lifespans in order to achieve full FDA approval. It also needs the agency’s signoff on the drug’s safety and proper manufacturing before getting conditional approval and beginning to sell it, which Loyal hopes to do in 2026.

Still, the FDA nod this week is a promising next step for the field, dog aging researchers say, and will likely drive more interest from biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

“If it is proven that the drug is effective in dogs then there is a higher chance that it will work in the case of humans, too,” says Eniko Kubinyi, a biologist studying dog behavior and cognition with the Budapest-based Family Dog Project.

For the full story see:

Alex Janin. “Secrets of Anti-Aging, Gleaned From Dogs.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023 [sic]): A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 29, 2023 [sic], and has the title “The Clues to Longer Life That Are Coming From Dogs.” The last four paragraphs quoted above appeared in the more detailed online version, but not the print version, of the article. Some of the earlier quoted sentences are quoted in the longer form that appeared in the online version.)

The biography of Lillehei mentioned in my opening comments above is:

Miller, G. Wayne. King of Hearts: The True Story of the Maverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery. New York: Crown, 2000.

Medical Researchers Have Incentive to Exclude Older Patients from Clinical Trials

As human beings, medical researchers would like to offer experimental therapies to whoever needs them and is willing to take the risks and uncertainty of new frontiers. But as practical medical researchers medical researchers know their careers depend on the success of their clinical trials, and the success of their clinical trials depends on the number of patients who thrive on the new therapy. So their personal incentive is to cherry-pick clinical trial enrollees, picking only the most robust who are most likely to thrive. The solution? Allow medical researchers to be both human beings and medical researchers. Allow them to give the therapy to those at high risk, based on their cumulative experience and judgement. Not all sound actionable knowledge arises from randomized double-blind clinical trials.

(p. A5) Many cancer trials cap enrollment at age 65. Even when trials for older people are available, oncologists are reluctant to enroll elderly patients because frailties might make them less resilient against side effects from toxic treatments, according to a 2020 study in an American Cancer Society journal. People over 70 represent a growing share of the cancer-patient population but are vastly underrepresented in clinical trials, the study said.

“How can we make decisions for people over 70 if people over 70 are not included in the trials that we use to base our decision making?” said Dr. Mina Sedrak, deputy director of the Center for Cancer and Aging at City of Hope, a cancer center near Los Angeles and an author of the paper.

. . .

The Food and Drug Administration guidelines recommend “adequate representation” of the elderly in cancer trials, including people over age 75. The Journal of the National Cancer Institute in December 2022 published a series of papers presented at a workshop focused on how to improve trial enrollment of older people.

Researchers have developed geriatric assessment tools that try to predict patients’ survival chances based on more than age alone. Professional groups are also working to try to address gaps. Despite these efforts, enrollment of older patients still lags behind, cancer doctors said.

. . .

To participate in many trials involving transplants, patients would have to undergo the more intense chemotherapy whether randomly assigned to receive an experimental treatment or the standard of care. That makes it harder to incorporate older patients into randomized trials, cancer doctors said.

For the full story see:

Amy Dockser Marcus. “Cancer Patient Contests Age Limit for Clinical Trials.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 9, 2023 [sic]): A5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 8, 2023 [sic], and has the title “71-Year-Old Cancer Patient Broke Trial Age Limits for a Chance at a Cure.”)

A preface to the “series of papers” about how to improve trial enrollment of older people,” mentioned above, is:

St. Germain, Diane, and Supriya G Mohile. “Preface: Engaging Older Adults in Cancer Clinical Trials Conducted in the National Cancer Institute Clinical Trials Network: Opportunities to Enhance Accrual.” JNCI Monographs 2022, no. 60 (Dec. 2022): 107-10.

If Immortality Does Not Violate the Laws of Physics, Entrepreneurs Can Achieve It

The late Nobel-Prize-winning physicist and idiosyncratic Richard Feynman also said something similar to the quote attributed to Arram Sabeti below.

I do not believe that Feynman was explicitly named, or had any lines, in the movie “Opennheimer,” but you can see his character in the background of one scene playing the bongo drums. Perhaps he was eccentric, but I liked his views on methodology and his unpretentious, optimistic, and straightforward spirit.

(p. 9) As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.”

For the full commentary see:

Dara Horn. “The Men Who Want to Live Forever.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, January 28, 2018 [sic]): 9.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 25, 2018 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

Gene Mutation Doubles Lifespan of Worms

(p. D2) Once there was a mutant worm in an experiment. It lived for 46 days. This was much longer than the oldest normal worm, which lived just 22.

Researchers identified the mutated gene that had lengthened the worm’s life, which led to a breakthrough in the study of aging — it seemed to be controlled by metabolic processes. Later, as researchers studied these processes, all signs seemed to point to the nucleolus.

. . .

“We think the nucleolus plays an important role in regulating the life span of animals,” said Adam Antebi, a cellular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany. He’s an author of a new review published last week in Trends in Cell Biology that examines all the new ways that researchers have fallen in love with the nucleolus — especially its role in aging.

For the full story see:

JoAnna Klein. “Slithering Sleuths: Finding a Methuselah Of Worms, and a Key To the Aging Process.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 22, 2018 [sic]): D2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2018 [sic], and has the title “The Thing Inside Your Cells That Might Determine How Long You Live.”)

The academic study of the role of the nucleolus in extending lifespans, mentioned above, is:

Tiku, Varnesh, and Adam Antebi. “Nucleolar Function in Lifespan Regulation.” Trends in Cell Biology 28, no. 8 (Aug. 2018): 662-72.

Loners Live Longer (At Least if You Are a Marmot)

(p. D2) For many mammals, a busy social life can be an important contributor to a long life. But some animals need more alone time than others, and failure to get it could be lethal, according to new research.

Consider the marmot. After spending 13 years tracking their interactions and life spans in Colorado, Daniel T. Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found in a study published Wednesday [Jan. 17, 2018] in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives tended to die younger than those that avoided interactions.

For the full story see:

Douglas Quenqua. “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots at Least.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018 [sic]): D2.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 17, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots.” The Latin words in the first quoted sentence appear in italics in the original version.)

The academic study of Marmots discussed in the passages above is:

Blumstein, Daniel T., Dana M. Williams, Alexandra N. Lim, Svenja Kroeger, and Julien G. A. Martin. “Strong Social Relationships Are Associated with Decreased Longevity in a Facultatively Social Mammal.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285, no. 1871 (Jan. 2018): 20171934.

Formal and Tacit Knowledge Are Located in Different Parts of the Brain

Brenda Milner turned 106 on July 15, 2024.

(p. D5) At 98, Dr. Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions — frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right — usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. It’s science first with Dr. Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life.

Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by moldering towers of old files, she volleyed questions rather than answering them. “People think because I’m 98 years old I must be emerita,” she said. “Well, not at all. I’m still nosy, you know, curious.”

. . .

Dr. Milner changed the course of brain science for good as a newly minted Ph.D. in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation.

She did so by observing the behavior of a 29-year-old Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures. The operation was an experiment: On a hunch, the surgeon suctioned out two trenches of tissue from the man’s brain, one from each of his medial temporal lobes, located deep below the skull about level with the ears. The seizures subsided.

But the patient, an assembly line worker named Henry Molaison, was forever altered. He could no longer form new memories.

. . .

In a landmark 1957 paper Dr. Milner wrote with Mr. Molaison’s surgeon, she concluded that the medial temporal areas — including, importantly, an organ called the hippocampus — must be critical to memory formation. That finding, though slow to sink in, would upend the accepted teaching at the time, which held that no single area was critical to supporting memory.

Dr. Milner continued to work with Mr. Molaison and later showed that his motor memory was intact: He remembered how to perform certain physical drawing tests, even if he had no memory of learning them.

The finding, reported in 1962, demonstrated that there are at least two systems in the brain for processing memory: one that is explicit and handles names, faces and experiences; and another that is implicit and incorporates skills, like riding a bike or playing a guitar.

“I clearly remember to this day my excitement, sitting there with H. M. and watching this beautiful learning curve develop right there in front of me,” Dr. Milner said. “I knew very well I was witnessing something important.”

. . .

For Dr. Milner, after a lifetime exploring the brain, the motive for the work is personal as well as professional. “I live very close; it’s a 10-minute walk up the hill,” she said. “So it gives me a good reason to come in regularly.”

For the full story see:

Benedict Carey. “At 98, ‘Still Nosy’ About the Brain.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 16, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “Brenda Milner, Eminent Brain Scientist, Is ‘Still Nosy’ at 98.”)

The “landmark 1957 paper” mentioned above is:

Scoville, William Beecher, and Brenda Milner. “Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 20, no. 1 (Feb. 1957): 11-21.

Hayflick Said Lifespans Are Limited by Maximum Times Cells Can Divide (the “Hayflick Limit”)

Hayflick thought the “Hayflick limit” was a permanently binding constraint on the maximum lifespans that humans could achieve. But cancer cells provide a proof-of-concept that some cells are able to escape the limit. The challenge is to engineer cells that escape the limit without otherwise killing us. (Hayflick himself died of cancer.)

(p. A20) Leonard Hayflick, a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times — setting a limit on the human life span and frustrating would-be-immortalists everywhere — died on Aug. 1 [2024] at his home in Sea Ranch, Calif. He was 96.

His son, Joel Hayflick, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.

He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.

. . .

This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.

. . .

Dr. Hayflick made other important contributions to science. He developed a particularly vibrant cell line, WI-38, which has been used for decades to make vaccines.

. . .

The National Institutes of Health had funded the research on his WI-38 cell line but declined to fund its distribution, even as other researchers clamored for samples. Dr. Hayflick established a company to process orders, charged a minimal fee for shipping and set the proceeds aside until ownership was clarified.

But in a private report that was released to the news media, the N.I.H. accused Dr. Hayflick of theft. He sued the institute, charging invasion of privacy and reputational damage, including a forced resignation from his position at Stanford. The litigation took six years and ended in a settlement that allowed him to keep some of the money and cell samples.

During those six years, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows scientists to profit off government-funded research. The law, which would have made Dr. Hayflick’s earlier actions unquestionably legal, helped catalyze the biotech industry.

For the full obituary see:

Clay Risen. “Leonard Hayflick, 96, Explorer of Cells Who Showed Why No One Lives Forever.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 20, 2024): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Aug. 19, 2024, and has the title “Leonard Hayflick, Who Discovered Why No One Lives Forever, Dies at 96.”)

Is Longevity Constrained by Nature or by Government Regulations?

I am a longevity optimist. If regulatory constraints are loosened, I believe entrepreneurs will bring us quicker progress.

(p. A12) S. Jay Olshansky, who studies the upper bounds of human longevity at the University of Illinois Chicago, believes people shouldn’t expect to live to 100.

. . .

Kaare Christensen, co-author of a paper predicting most newborns born in the 2000s would live to 100 if medical progress continued, said it is too soon to know who is right. Future advances could make up for stalled life expectancy gains.

“The setback could be temporary,” he said.

Christensen, who runs studies on very old people at the Danish Aging Research Center in Denmark, said people in their 90s have better cognitive function and healthier teeth over their lifetimes than counterparts of the same age born just 10 years earlier.

“I would say prepare for your 90s instead,” Christensen said.

Old-age debate

Olshansky’s foray into the limits of lifespan began in 1990 when he published a paper in Science stating that life expectancy wouldn’t rise dramatically even if diseases including cancer and heart disease are eliminated. He has been fighting about it ever since.

James Vaupel, a demographer, pushed back. In a 2021 paper, Vaupel pointed to statistics showing that since around 1840 life expectancy at birth has increased almost 2.5 years per decade in some countries.

Vaupel and Olshansky published dueling papers over the decades until Vaupel’s death at age 76 in 2022.

Steven Austad, a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was asked at a 2001 scientific meeting when he thought the first person to live to 150 would be born. “I think that person is already alive,” Austad replied. Austad said he based his answer on optimism that scientists will figure out how to change the biology of aging.

When Olshansky heard about the exchange, he bet Austad that wasn’t true. In 150 years, he argued, there still wouldn’t be a person alive at 150. The men wagered $150 each, which they put in a fund to pay out in 150 years, with the winner’s heirs to reap the profit. A decade ago, they each added another $150 to the account.

Austad said he agreed with Olshansky that most newborns born now won’t live to 100. But he thinks his optimism that someone will live to 150 is justified. He pointed to a study showing the compound rapamycin extended the lifespan of mice, even if they start getting it later in life. Some longevity enthusiasts are taking rapamycin themselves. Studies on other potentially antiaging compounds are under way.

“If any turn out to work,” Austad said, “they will win my bet for me.”

For the full story see:

Amy Dockser Marcus. “Live Until 100? Our Chances Are Slim.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 17, 2024): A12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 11, 2024, and has the title “Think You Will Live to 100? These Scientists Think You’re Wrong.”)

The paper co-authored by Christensen and mentioned above, is:

Christensen, Kaare, Gabriele Doblhammer, Roland Rau, and James W. Vaupel. “Ageing Populations: The Challenges Ahead.” Lancet 374, no. 9696 (Oct. 3, 2009): 1196-208.

The 2021 paper co-authored by Vaupel and mentioned above, is:

Vaupel, James W., Francisco Villavicencio, and Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher. “Demographic Perspectives on the Rise of Longevity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 9 (2021): e2019536118.

Diet Low in Fat and Sugar May Have Helped Morera Become Oldest Person in World

But at least it appears that she was able to keep drinking coffee. She also apparently embraced new technology and stayed intellectually sharp (maybe the coffee helped ;).

(p. A1) Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish woman believed to be the oldest person in the world, died on Monday [Aug. 19, 2024] in Olot, Spain. She was 117.

Her family wrote in a post on her X account that she had died in her sleep. She had been living in a nursing home.

“A few days ago she told us: ‘One day I will leave here. I will not try coffee again, nor eat yogurt, nor pet my dog,’” her family wrote in Catalan in the post. “‘I will also leave my memories, my reflections, and I will cease to exist in this body. One day I don’t know, but it’s very close, this long journey will be over.’”

. . .

Having been born before the emergence of the telephone, Ms. Branyas came to embrace the digital revolution, fashioning herself on social media as “Super Àvia Catalana,” or “Super Catalan Grandma.” She posted bite-size pieces of life advice, observations and jokes to thousands of followers.

In her biography on X, she wrote, “I’m old, very old, but not an idiot.”

. . .

Like many supercentenarians, Ms. Branyas became the subject of scientific fascination. Dr. Esteller, the researcher who studied her genetics and lifestyle, found that her genes were protective against DNA damage, and that she had low levels of fat and sugar in her blood — all of which he said was helpful for living a long life. His research also found that her cells aged much slower than she did, meaning that she had a lower “biological age” than her actual age.

The Catalan diet, which is similar to the Mediterranean diet and includes a lot of olive oil, has also been linked to longer survival, he said. He added that Ms. Branyas liked to eat yogurt.

“What do you expect from life?” a doctor once asked Ms. Branyas while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Ms. Branyas, unmoved, answered simply: “Death.”

For the full obituary see:

Ali Watkins. “Maria Branyas Morera, 117; Was Oldest Person in the World.” The New York Times (Friday, August 23, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Aug. 22, 2024, and has the title “Maria Branyas Morera, World’s Oldest Person, Dies at 117.”)