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Asked by ggd03 to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 22 Mar 2011.
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Eoin Lettice answered on 21 Mar 2011:
Hi ggd03,
There is an old saying that we should be trying to “add life to years rather than add years to life”.
That means that we should concentrate our efforts to make sure that everybody in the world lives happy and healthy lives to a “normal” duration. After that, maybe we should think about extending the human lifetime, but maybe not everbody would want that.
We (in the UK and Ireland) already live much, much longer than our ancestors did at the start of the last century, so we’ve come quite a long way since then.Eoin.
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Jemma Ransom answered on 21 Mar 2011:
Eventually I think it will be possible to vastly prolong our lives, possible into the hundreds of years bracket. However it won’t be one single medicine that will do the trick. We will need medicines to cure all diseases of old age (dementia, Parkinson’s disease, cancers etc) and then we will need drugs to prolong the life of our brains which deteriorate over time. It may be possible in the future that we can engineer organs in the lab such that when say our livers come to the end of their working life, we can simply replace it.
That all being said, I don’t think that it will be possible for us to live forever, and neither do I think it is ethical – the world simply hasn’t got the resources (food, fuel etc) for us to live forever and to continue to reproduce. But modern medicine is working towards us living much longer lives than we currently do.
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Stephen Moss answered on 21 Mar 2011:
Hi Ggd
The ancient civilisations were always searching for the ‘elixir of life’, some magic brew that would give you immortality. I could imagine modern medicine extending life to perhaps 120 or 130 years, but it would take a remarkable leap in science to getting people to live for ever. At the moment I can’t see that happening.
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Charlie Ryan answered on 22 Mar 2011:
hi ggd03 i don’t know sorry. We are living much longer than we did a hundred years ago already, and i think they reckon that the babies born today die on average when they are a hundred. How they work this out though i have no idea!
I’m not sure if i want to live forever anyway! Might get a little dull – and once you’ve experienced everything on earth that you wish to experience, you might just want to try out death! Sorry that’s a little bit of a morbid thought! -
Julian Rayner answered on 22 Mar 2011:
Hi ggd03. Fantastic question. Would you really want to live forever? I am not sure I would, although I would certainly like to live a good long time.
Philosophy aside, there are several reasons why we probably will not be able to live forever. As we get older, our DNA accumulates mutations, which can lead to all sorts of problems, cancer being one of them. Any medicine would have to come up with a way of cleaning up all those mutations, which probably is not possible at the level of your whole body. There are various other things that your cells do as you get older which are also hard to imagine ever being reversed.
Perhaps the best hope though are things called stem cells. We all started out as a single cell, and that cell contained the instructions to make our whole body. As cells divide and specialise, they lose that ability – a brain cell can not turn into a skin cell, for example. Stem cells are cells that still have the potential to turn into lots of other kinds of cells, and some scientists have great hopes that they could cure important diseases – regrow spinal cords in people who have had spinal injuries, replace brain cells in patients with brain conditions like Parkinsons, that sort of thing. So in theory, as you grow older, worn out bits of you could get replaced by new bits grown in the lab from stem cells. Might not make us live for ever, but maybe for quite a lot longer…
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