How long can we live?

New research is intensifying the debate — with profound implications for the future of the planet, writes Ferris Jabr

David Sinclair, a director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, envisions a future in which people receive treatments every decade or so to undo the effects of aging throughout the body. 

In 1990, not long after Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard began conducting a nationwide study of French centenarians, one of their software programmes spat out an error message. An individual in the study was marked as 115 years old, a number outside the programme’s range of acceptable age values. 

They called their collaborators in Arles, where the subject lived, and asked them to double-check the information they had provided, recalls Allard, who was then the director of the IPSEN Foundation, a non-profit research organisation. Perhaps they made a mistake when transcribing her birth date? Maybe this Jeanne Calment was actually born in 1885, not 1875? No, the collaborators said. We’ve seen her birth certificate. The data is correct.