I did an experiment. When I gave public lectures on what we know about aging, I asked this question. "If you could be healthy and active, would you like to live 300 years?" More that 95% said, "Yes!" They not only wanted to live 300 years, they were eager. Many wanted to live forever. When you think about it, that isn't surprising. Our strongest instinct is to stay alive. Writings throughout history, from Genesis to James Hilton's classic novel, LOST HORIZON, express mankind's dream of long life, even immortality.
"Whoa!" someone says. " Live 300 years? Impossible."
That was the feeling in my audiences. They wanted to live 300 years, but were certain it was impossible.
To a scientist, there is nothing impossible about it. Something is impossible if it violates a physical law. If it doesn't, it's possible. This is a basic tenet of science. Living 300 years doesn't violate a physical law, so it has always been possible. It is a human failing to think that something we haven't done is impossible. Instead of following facts to their logical conclusion, we follow intuition, which tells us that the earth is flat and a heavy thing, such as an airplane, can't possibly fly.
When I was at CalTech in the 1950's, I heard a lecture by Dr. Wernher von Braun, the rocket pioneer. He described how man could fly through space to land on the moon and planets.
"Impossible!" I thought. "This is Buck Rogers stuff."
I couldn't believe that he was serious. At the time, the United States had launched few rockets, and I'd watched on television as most of them exploded spectacularly.
Fifteen years later, on a hot morning in July, I stood in bright sunshine on the roof of my laboratory building at Cape Canaveral. Several miles behind me was a crowd as vast as all the Super Bowls combined. A million persons were on hand, and hundreds of millions watched on television. In front of me, a Saturn rocket rose with thunder that shook the ground. It lifted an Apollo spacecraft on its way to land on the moon. From "impossible" to success took fifteen years.
Why the big change in so few years? Space flight violated no physical law, so it was possible. Success came from dividing the problem of going to the moon into smaller problems, breaking those into still-smaller problems, and solving each.
Today, it's as difficult for man to accept the idea of a 300-year life as it was for people in the 1950's to accept travel to the moon. For example, a few years ago, a scientist told the media that we can't expect to live past eighty-five. Today, people living past eighty-five are our fastest-growing age group. More recently, an elderly gerontologist wrote that 115 is the absolute limit for human life. The many persons who have now lived beyond 115 must find his statement fascinating. There is no evidence of a limit to how long we can live.
Equally important, biomedical science is moving us toward a 300-year life at an ever-faster pace, and we are further along than you may think. Today, for the first time in history, health-conscious adults can expect to live 100 years. The US Census Bureau found an astonishing increase in the number of people living past 100.
You may have read that we can only expect to live an average of seventy-six years, but that is misleading. Seventy-six is what you can expect if you are a newborn baby reading this. A thirty-five year-old can expect to live to seventy-eight, and a sixty-five year-old to eighty-two. This is because they have overcome many hazards that a newborn must face. Even seventy-eight or eighty-two are deceptive because they are averages for the whole U.S., including forty million smokers, ten million drug users, a million AIDS victims, a million illegal aliens, and millions of couch potatoes, all averaging lives shorter than seventy-six. But if you are in the population of health-conscious people (nonsmokers who exercise, eat a healthy diet, and use all of medicine's means to keep fit), you can expect to live past 100.
Today's 100 years are a milestone in mankind's dream of long life. Future generations will look back on today as a harbinger of things to come, because 100 is only the beginning. If research advances at its present rate (and all evidence is that it will), it projects an ability in coming decades to extend life past 100 to 150, 300, and beyond. This is of enormous importance because it will affect us more than anything in history. Scholars predict vast effects on our economy, society, and personal life. It will transform our populace, business, employment, retirement, insurance, family, education, and nearly everything else. Above all, it will affect you personally. How do you feel about 150 years, 300 years, or an unlimited span of healthy, active life?
We always seem unprepared for science's latest leap forward. Before the advance, people scoff at the possibility, only to be stunned when it occurs. Yet, to a scientist, there are clear signs of what is coming. For example, when polio held the nation in its grip, the media were gloomy about an end to the death or paralysis of its pitiful victims, especially children. At the time, my lab at CalTech was across the hall from that of Renato Dulbecco, later a Nobel laureate, who was doing work on polio virus. Just from chatter drifting across the hallway, it was clear that a vaccine was coming. I'm sure virologists knew it, but when it came, it stunned the world. Scientists get wind of coming advances in many ways. We put together the findings in numerous reports, often obscure, in scientific journals. We hear them at scientific meetings. We pick up gossip, and the Internet buzzes with exciting, new information.
This is my reason for writing. As a scientist, I see evidence everywhere of rapid movement to extend healthy life to astonishing lengths. It's high time we talk of it.
I wrote this for non-scientists. Although it is based on hard science, it is not a scientific treatise. A great problem in our society is failure of scientists to communicate with people outside the world of science. This has hurt support for science and, as described by Carl Sagan in his book, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD, has let pseudoscience grow to an alarming degree. This book is for those of you who want to know how we are extending life, but are put off by incomprehensible, scientific talk.
The book is two things. It's a no-nonsense guide to living 100 healthy, active years today. It's also a view ahead along the rising trends of discoveries to the conquest of diseases and aging. They are already coming into view. When you reach them, you will be as close to immortality as it is possible to get. Ready? Let's go!