Can time turn back? Scientists have reached somewhere in race
The focus of ageing research now is to abandon unrealistic, and ethically questionable goal of helping us live forever, but instead pursue the goal of making sure the years we have are lived in good health.
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Is it possible to live forever? In short, no. There are no known organisms on Earth that live for eternity.
But there are a surprising number that live for a very long time. And some of them have very similar biology to our own.
It's that fact that makes some scientists believe that healthy human lifespans can be extended well beyond their current limit of a hundred years or so.
In 2008, maverick British mathematician and ageing scientist Aubrey de Gray claimed that the first human to live for 1000 years had probably already been born.
However, few scientists in the field saw any hard evidence for this claims. In one review, 28 scientists wrote that none of de Grey's hypotheses "has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans."
But in recent years, science has begun to show that anti-ageing medicine might have a significant contribution to make.
Experiments in animals including mammals like mice, have suggested some of the "hallmarks" of ageing, can be modified using drugs.
If transferred into humans, it could make major differences to how we age.
"There have been biomedical breakthroughs that elevated the anti-ageing field from a little bit of an exotic area that attracted non-rigorous science and extraordinary claims to a very rigorous discipline," says Professor Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, a pioneer in the field of ageing.
The health spanners
Rather than promising immortality, the new buzzword in the science of ageing is 'health span.'
The majority of people in wealthy countries can already look forward to much longer lifespans than previous generations. But many of us spend the last decade or more of our lives suffering from diseases of ageing like heart disease, dementia or cancer.
The focus of ageing research now is to abandon unrealistic, and ethically questionable goal of helping us live forever, but instead pursue the goal of making sure the years we have are lived in good health.
The promise, or perhaps the hope, of this approach is to tackle ageing as a 'cause' of disease, rather than focusing on individual diseases themselves.
"Ageing is not the same as rust accumulating on a car, it’s not just breakdown," says Prof Horvath.
"Rather, there are processes that can be manipulated, you can tweak it. In certain ways, I interpret ageing as a software error."
Take the phenomenon of low-grade inflammation that seems common in people who age 'faster' than average. The inflammatory response is known to be an underlying factor in conditions as varied as dementia and cancer.
If we could understand why, and how, inflammation becomes elevated as we age, it might be possible to prevent a number of 'downstream' ill-effects, allowing us to enjoy healthier later lives and potentially, slightly longer ones as well.
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