WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER Eternal life serious scientists and charlatans have been looking for a fountain of youth since time immemorial from the ancient Egyptians to Chinese natural healers to Botox injecting cosmetic surgeons The problem is that aging is a complex process with countless players involved in our body At least even without snake oil human life ex pectancy has been increasing from generation to generation see chart thanks to steadily improving healthcare and healthier lifestyles However the still young sector of anti aging medicine is not inclined to settle for these advances but determined to keep putting the brakes on aging Caenorhabditis elegans a nematode is an important helper in this en deavor The genome of the tiny mollusk is not unlike that of humans and in its short lifespan of only two to three weeks it ages in fast forward mode Anti aging scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in the United States have now managed to block an enzyme in C elegans and thus increase its life expectancy by 45 percent after 30 days half of the worms active ly tested were still alive while all those in the control group had died long before them Al though it s still a long journey from C elegans to Homo sapiens who knows maybe this dialog between immortal Connor MacLeod and pathologist Brenda Wyatt in the movie Highlander will one day not sound like such a fantasy anymore I ve been alive for four and a half centuries and I cannot die Well everyone has got their problems EU Oceania USA Asia Worldwide Africa INCREASE IN LIFE EXPECTANCY SINCE 1770 Sources pre 1990 statistics 1990 James Riley post 1990 WHO and World Bank Currently Iceland is the country with the highest life ex pectancy men live for 81 3 and women for 87 3 years there The Central African Republic is in the bottom spot of the ranking 50 3 54 In most cases the difference between men and women is 4 to 8 years and around 10 years in many countries of the former USSR 1770 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 80 1800 1850 1900 1950 2015 78 79

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