Swiss Pharmacy

LONGEVITY SCIENCE: CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR

So, you've noticed. Although we have the potential to live to 120 years, the reality is unpleasantly different. We are getting closer, we're just not there yet. On the other hand, just look how far we've come.

In a Japanese burial ground 236 skeletons were found that were estimated to be seven thousand years old. Scientists were able to determine that the average body buried there never made it past fifteen.

There is a cemetery on the island of Cyprus that researchers believe is ov. r five thousand years old. Tests on those bodies buried there show life expectancy at birth way back then was sixteen.

In the Stone Age life expectancy was seventeen.

Even though ancient Greeks influenced our thinking for almost three thousand years, they couldn't extend their own lives much past the age of thirty.

The same goes for the mighty Romans. An examination of Roman epitaphs on over ten thousand gravestones found that the average age at death was twenty-two.

At the time of the American Revolution, the average age at death for most colonists in this brave new world was thirty-five.

By the turn of this century, 1900, things were better and Americans were living to the ripe old age of forty-seven!

Ninety-plus years later, we have extended our lives, finally reaching that biblical "three score years and ten" and even beating it by a few years or so, to seventy-five. That's a jump of almost thirty years in just one century! We're getting closer, but we still have a long way to go.

Explorer Juan Ponce de Leon was 53 when he set out to look for the fountain of youth in 1513. By the life expectancy standards of the Middle Ages, that made him a very old man indeed.

So what's the forecast? Are we going to be able to live those 1 million hours? Are we going to make it to 120? Some of us will. But not very many. By the year 2050 the average life expectancy will be 100 (103 for women). How many of us will reach that magic number? Again experts agree. There will be 1 million Americans over the age of 100. The question is, will you be?

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