Global life expectancy has increased by over 30 years in the past century, and scientists have now predicted that the first person to live to 150 may already be alive today.
Many of us are looking for this key to longevity and optimal health. Whether it’s through exercise, diets, cold plunges, saunas, light therapy, skin care, supplement stacking — the list goes on. You name it, we’ve probably tried it.
Yet biohackers with deep pockets are taking the quest for eternal youth to the next level.
Trailing and testing innovative medical therapies, lifestyle protocols and extreme diets, wealthy life-extension enthusiasts are funding expensive and experimental science that is pushing the cutting edge of human advancement.
One of the prominent figures in this race is now celebrating his birthday every 19 months.
Spending around $2 million a year on turning back his biological clock, 46-year-old Bryan Johnson has now successfully slowed down his ageing by around five years.
Some of these life-extension therapies have very high price tags, and dishing out millions annually to live a little longer is way out of reach for the average person. So is optimal health and a longer life a luxury reserved only for the wealthy?
The quest for longevity
The idea of extending life and creating an optimal human being is not new. While the legend of the regenerative powers of the Fountain of Youth has appeared across the globe for thousands of years, biologist Julian Huxley first coined the term “transhumanism” in 1927, believing that one day, human beings would overcome the limitations of our nature.
Today, thanks to modern medicine and incredible advancements in science and technology, the average life expectancy is around 70 years old — almost double what it was in the 1800s.
A number of scientific breakthroughs have advanced our understanding of ageing over the past 100 years, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950s and the discovery of telomeres — protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that play a crucial role in ageing — in the 1970s. This has allowed researchers to begin studying the ageing process and learn more about how we might reverse our biological age.
While our chronological age tells us how many years we have been alive, our biological age is the functional age of our cells. It tells us how fast we are ageing at a cellular level and how long our lifespan might be. Unlike chronological age, everyone’s biological age progresses at a different rate.
In the early 2000s, Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, dubbed the “Godfather of Longevity”, proposed strat…
