Human longevity is having a moment. There are at least three reasons why, the first being demography: the world is greying at the temples, with the International Monetary Fund describing population ageing, not rapid population growth, as the planet’s “most formidable demographic challenge”. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030 one in six people will be aged 60 or over; by 2050, their number will exceed two billion, with almost half a billion of them older than 80.
The second is science. There has been an explosion of scientific revelations about the biology of ageing in the last half-century. Essentially, we age because our cells accumulate damage over time and gradually lose the ability to repair and renew themselves. The unlovely consequences include frailty, dementia, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, stroke and eventually death.
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