Despite advances in public health and medicine, and trendy biohacking experiments, many people still won’t live to 100, according to experts quoted in a Jan. 30, 2025, Popular Science article. As Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Will Mair explained in the article, there’s a difference between life expectancy and the rate of aging, which refers to the speed at which bodies deteriorate due to cellular damage, genetics, and environmental exposures.
“When you think about life expectancy, what has really happened in the last 100 years, certainly in developed countries like the U.S. and increasingly across the world, is we’ve added a phenomenal amount of time to human life expectancy,” said Mair, professor of molecular metabolism and director of the Harvard Chan School Aging Initiative. “But those additional years have absolutely really nothing to do with making our bodies intrinsically age slower.”
Mair noted that as advances have reduced the likelihood of dying prematurely, the problems of aging have shifted to later in life. “Now, many of us are living to our seventies; we’re experiencing this built-in obsolescence of humans that manifests itself in age-related chronic conditions,” he said.
Read the Popular Science article: What’s the maximum human life expectancy?
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Life expectancy may be reaching upper limits—for now (Harvard Chan School news)
