Spring Chicken Page 3
If you happen to stroll through Westminster Abbey in London, you might spot a rather extraordinary marble gravestone in the south transept. It marks the resting spot of one Thomas Parr, who according to the marker had lived for 152 years and through the reigns of ten kings. That is not a typo. Parr was a laborer in the Shropshire countryside who was famed for having lived well more than a century; indeed, he had reputedly fathered a child at the age of 122. Some earl heard about Parr and invited him to the court of King Charles I in 1635, where he enjoyed a brief celebrity that included having his portrait taken by Peter Paul Rubens. But his ride on the celebrity gravy train was cut short when, after a few weeks’ exposure to disease-ridden London and its horrific pollution, he died.
Old Parr would have been the oldest human ever to have lived—if his claimed age were even remotely close to the truth. Doubts began to arise not long after his autopsy by famed surgeon William Harvey, who noted that his internal organs were in rather good condition for being a century and a half old. Notwithstanding the age on his tombstone, modern scholars now believe “Old Parr” was actually the grandson of the original Old Parr, and the title was simply passed on down the line. Birth records in Shropshire were pretty spotty in the 1500s, so who can know for sure?
More recently, in the 1960s, it was claimed that residents of the Abkhazia region of the then Soviet Union, deep in the Caucasus Mountains, also routinely lived past the age of 140. Their longevity was attributed to their consumption of yogurt, which has been hugely popular ever since, despite the fact that their claims have been thoroughly debunked. Just in the last few years there’s been a resurgence of highly wizened individuals popping up in places like Bolivia and rural China, claiming to be 125 years old or more. One thing these wrinkled shysters all have in common with Old Parr is that they too lack trustworthy birth certificates, so their claims cannot be verified.
The longest-lived documented human being in history was an otherwise unremarkable Frenchwoman named Madame Jeanne Calment, who was born in Arles in 1875 and claimed to have met Vincent van Gogh in the art shop of her uncle. (Not a nice man, in her opinion.) When she was around eighty, Madame Calment made a deal to sell her apartment to a lawyer friend who was then in his late forties. Under the deal, common in France, the buyer would pay her 2,500 francs per month for the rest of her life, and would take possession of the place after she died. There was only one hitch, which was that she failed to die, year after year after year. She rode a bicycle until she was 100, and smoked until she was 117; quitting might have been a mistake, because she only lasted 5 more years before she gave up the ghost at the age of 122. By that time, the poor schnook himself had died, having paid her twice what her place was actually worth.
“I’ve only ever had one wrinkle,” she famously said, “and I’m sitting on it.”
So that’s lifespan. Nobody has topped Madame Calment, before or since. Period.
Life expectancy, on the other hand, is a statistical prediction of how long a baby born this year is likely to live, based on a dull-seeming document known as the life table. To you and me, the life table looks like an eye-glazing compendium of random numbers, about as exciting as the phone book. It lists current mortality rates—that is, the risk of dying for individuals at every single age, over the last year. So, for example, the chance that a forty-year-old American woman would die in 2010 was 1.3 in 1,000, or 0.13 percent; for a sixty-year-old female, it was 6.5 out of 1,000, a fivefold increase. If you take our hypothetical infant, and march her through this statistical gauntlet, you’ll come up with her average life expectancy.
Demographers treat the life table with Talmudic reverence. It is the foundation on which the insurance industry and the retirement system are built. And it also affords a sort of window into the future. According to the life table compiled by the U.S. Social Security Administration, and used as the basis of its online calculator, a forty-seven-year-old white American male (that is, me) can expect to live for another thirty-five years. That gets me to eighty-two. Not bad, but not even as good as my grandfather. So I sought a second opinion. I downloaded an app (for real) called Days of Life that also purports to calculate one’s remaining life expectancy, based on gender, age, and country of residence. Unfortunately, it said I had even less time left, more like thirty years—and for the next several weeks, my phone buzzed with daily reminders: “You have 10,832 days of life remaining…”
Needless to say, I deleted it. In the real world, we can’t know whether we’ll die at eighty-two, sixty-two, or 2 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. And, luckily, the only reliable thing about life-expectancy predictions, like weather forecasts, is that they will change.
Back in the 1920s, a prominent American demographer named Louis I. Dublin, who was chief actuary of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, declared that average human life expectancy would peak at precisely 64.75 years—coincidentally, just three months shy of the official retirement age of 65, designated in the Social Security Act of 1933. Back then, a typical sixty-five-year-old must have looked, felt, and smelled rather old. But it was by no means the limit. When Dublin was informed that women in New Zealand were already topping sixty-six years, he revised his estimate upward, to nearly seventy. But that also proved to be too low; even my poor great-uncle Emerson beat it.
Around the world, life expectancies have been going up relentlessly for nearly two centuries. About a decade ago, another noted American demographer named James Vaupel compiled all of the known—and reliable—historical lifespan statistics he could find, going all the way back to eighteenth-century Sweden, which kept excellent birth and death records. For each year, Vaupel and his coauthor Jim Oeppen, and their Herculean research team, identified the country where people were living the longest, according to available data—the lifespan leaders, if you will. To their astonishment, it plotted out to a straight, unbroken line, ascending steadily as an airliner out of JFK.
Beginning in about 1840, Vaupel’s graph showed, average female life expectancy in the world’s longest-lived country has increased at a steady rate of about 2.4 years per decade. And while the status of leading country has changed hands a few times, from Sweden to Norway to New Zealand to Iceland to now Japan, one thing has held true: Every four years, humans have steadily gained one extra year of potential life expectancy. Or if you prefer, every day buys us another six hours.
“The straight line absolutely astonished me,” says Vaupel, from his office at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. “The fact that it’s held for two centuries is really amazing.” Not only that, but the line plowed through many smart people’s predictions that lifespan would plateau, from Dublin’s to the various UN agencies to those of rival demographers, with no sign of slowing. Provocatively, he titled his study “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy.”
The explanations for this relentless rise in lifespan invariably come back to the handful of factors we have already discussed: better sanitation and better medical care. Things like penicillin, sterilization, and even blood-pressure medicine have let us live longer by escaping the early deaths that plagued our ancestors. And in the developing world, this change is still happening: Globally, according to the World Health Organization, average life expectancy has increased by six years since 1990.
But in the developed world, Vaupel argues that the steady increase in lifespan actually reflects much deeper environmental changes that are affecting the way all of us age. “Before 1950, most of the gain in life expectancy was due to large reductions in death rates at younger ages,” he wrote in his seminal Science paper in 2002. “In the second half of the 20th century, improvements in survival after age 65 propelled the rise in the length of people’s lives.”
It started with better medical technology: The mere fact that former vice president Dick Cheney is still alive, after his multiple heart attacks and surgeries, has to count as a marvel. Even if we’re not getting new heart valves put in, we all enjoy cleaner water, cleaner air, better housi
ng, and fewer mass epidemics than even fifty years ago. That helps explain why my grandfather’s brother Emerson made it into his early seventies without any medical care at all: His world was much cleaner and safer than that of his ancestors. In fact, if he hadn’t smoked—his one break with Christian Science orthodoxy—Emerson might have survived almost as long as his brother.
Indeed, widespread smoking bans have reduced everyone’s exposure to tobacco smoke, a potent carcinogen, likely pushing up life expectancy even farther (although a few puffs didn’t seem to hurt Madame Calment). Thanks to our ever-more-protected environment, Vaupel argues, we not only escape early death, but we are actually aging more slowly than our dirty, uncomfortable, smoke-breathing, disease-battling ancestors. “Lifespan is amazingly plastic,” he says. “Seventy-year-old people today are about as healthy as sixty-year-olds were a few decades ago. They get disease and disability later; those bad five years at the end of life are now occurring at age eighty or eighty-five instead of age seventy.”
Old isn’t so old anymore, in other words. People are living less like Emerson, who was already ancient by the time he turned sixty, and more like my grandfather, who stayed relatively youngish into his seventies. The boundary of “old” keeps getting pushed out, by people like Diana Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Key West at the age of sixty-four, just months shy of traditional retirement age. “Sixty is the new forty” was practically her mantra. She’s not that much of an outlier, either: Two of my regular bike-riding partners are guys who are on Medicare, and they make me suffer to keep up with them. And yet when Humphrey Bogart played the world-weary, decrepit-seeming Rick in Casablanca, filmed in 1942, he was all of forty-two years old. (Maybe it was all the smoking?)
If sixty is the new forty, then ninety-five might also be the new eighty: A recent Danish study of cognitive aging showed that the current crop of ninety-five-year-olds had reached that age in markedly better possession of their marbles than the cohort just a decade older than them. Vaupel, and others, believe that these older people are actually aging more slowly than people in previous generations. “What has become apparent over the last thirty years is that a completely new and completely unforeseen driver of the continuing increase in longevity has emerged,” says Thomas Kirkwood, a prominent biologist at the University of Newcastle in England who heads up a study of the “oldest old,” those older than eighty-five, “and that is the fact that people are reaching old age in better shape than they ever did before.”
But can this two-century increase in lifespan continue? Will the Vaupel slope keep climbing?
Not everyone thinks so, and one leading expert believes human longevity is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction.
Jay Olshansky met me at the door of his house in suburban Chicago, and we drove to a popular hot-dog joint called Superdawg, because if there’s one thing Chicago does well, it’s cased-meat products. Olshansky admitted to loving hot dogs, and although he claimed he rarely ate them, he seemed to know a great deal about where to get the best ones. “As long as you don’t eat like this every day, you’re fine,” he assured me as we pulled into the parking lot.
Which was interesting, because one thing he is known for is his firm conviction that things like “healthy lifestyles” don’t ultimately affect longevity all that much. In the life-expectancy business, he is known as a strong skeptic. On the drive over, he was complaining about a billboard from the Prudential financial-services company that warned, “The first person to live to be 150 is alive today. Better be prepared.”
“They’re using made-up numbers,” he fumed. “It has no basis in science.”
Worse, if Prudential is right, then Olshansky will have lost a major bet. In 2000, he made a wager with a colleague, an evolutionary biologist named Steven Austad (whom we’ll meet later on). Austad bet that in the year 2150, there will be at least one 150-year-old living on earth—in other words, that Prudential is right. Olshansky said no way. They each put up a symbolic $150—but thanks to his shrewd investments in gold, Olshansky bragged, their original $300 has grown to more than $1,200. By 2150, if this rate of return continues, the pot will be worth around $1 billion, which he fully expects his great-grandchildren to collect.
Olshansky believes that Madame Calment’s 122 years represents the upper limit of human lifespan, a limit programmed into our genome and perhaps our very biochemistry. And that maximum figure has not changed; if anything, the old Frenchwoman was a bit of an outlier. Nobody has come close since she died in 1997. At this writing, the world’s oldest person is a 116-year-old Japanese woman named Misao Okawa, born in 1898, followed closely by Gertrude Weaver, an African American woman born in Arkansas to sharecropper parents; both are among the top ten oldest people ever, but they seem unlikely to steal the crown from La Calment.
As for average life expectancy, Olshansky expects that to plateau around eighty-five, for most of the world—and, if anything, to begin to decline in some countries, such as ours.
But what about the Vaupel chart?
“It’s a fantasy, a pure fantasy,” he growled, between bites of meaty goodness. He explained his reasoning: “If we extrapolate historical records for running the mile, using the same methodology, you’d come to the conclusion that in a couple hundred years from now, people will be running a mile instantaneously. Which is ridiculous.”
Of course it is, although there is one important difference: Record times in the mile are getting shorter, while lifespans are getting longer. “There’s a reason why you can’t run a mile in zero, but there’s no limit to how long you can live,” Vaupel insists. And nobody is arguing that lifespans will someday be infinite. (Well, actually, one guy is arguing that, and we’ll meet him soon.)
The Olshansky-Vaupel debate has gotten so heated and so personal that for a while, the two men would take pains to avoid attending the same conferences, lest they inadvertently run into each other. But at the core of their rivalry lies an important question: How flexible, exactly, is human longevity? What are the limits, if any?
Olshansky’s basic point is worth investigating: “There are biological forces that influence how fast we can run, and biological forces that limit how long we can live,” he insisted. “It’s like putting air in a tire,” he continued, breaking out another user-friendly analogy. “When you start pumping, it’s easy, but as the tire fills up, it gets harder and harder.”
For example, he said, even if we somehow cured half of all fatal cancers—the second-leading cause of death in the United States—average life expectancy would rise by a little more than three years. That’s all. And even if we managed to cure heart disease, cancer, and stroke, the top three killers, we’d still only earn about ten years—a substantial jump, but one that still puts us short of the century mark. “You don’t come close to 100,” he said, “and 120 is even crazier, by several orders of magnitude.”
But plenty of his colleagues would disagree—starting with Vaupel, who gleefully notes that his famous slope has already blown past Olshansky’s predicted life expectancy limits. In 1990, Olshansky had confidently declared that life expectancies would soon top out around age eighty-five. Within a decade, though, Japanese women were already pushing eighty-eight. Men and women in Monaco, the world’s wealthiest “nation,” are already butting up against the threshold of ninety.
“You can think of the slope as the frontier of possibility, the frontier of what humans can do in terms of achieving life expectancy,” Vaupel had told me.
Yes, Olshansky replied, the frontier is one thing; but how people are actually living, and more important dying, is quite another. If anything, he believes lifespans will soon begin to decline in many areas of the developed world—something else that has rarely been seen in modern history, except for times of war and widespread disease. “There are lots of things you can do to shorten your life, but lengthening it is a different issue,” he said.
One good way to shorten your life, statistically, is by becoming obese. Olshansky bel
ieves that the epidemic of tubbiness that began in the United States in the early 1980s has already slowed the growth in life expectancy. A third of the population is officially obese, with another third clocking in as overweight, meaning with a body-mass index (BMI) between twenty-five and thirty. As a result, in nearly half of all U.S. counties, many of them in the rural Southeast, female mortality rates have already started rising again, after dropping for decades. In some parts of Mississippi and West Virginia, life expectancy for men and women is lower than in Guatemala.
The problem is not limited to country folk: A recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study showed that the Baby Boom generation is the first in centuries that has actually turned out to be less healthy than their parents, thanks largely to diabetes, poor diet, and general physical laziness. The percentage of women who said they never engaged in physical activity has tripled since 1994, from 19 percent to nearly 60 percent. Younger generations are faring even worse, succumbing to obesity at ever younger ages, particularly women between nineteen and thirty-nine. Another study, compiling data from autopsies of people who died in accidents prior to age sixty-four, showed that their cardiovascular risk factors were actually much worse than expected, meaning the long-running improvement in Americans’ heart health that has been going on since the 1960s appears to have stalled. For these folks, sixty is not the new forty; forty is the new sixty.