In one sentence
If aging becomes increasingly treatable, society must redesign institutions built around a short, fixed life course. Arrison argues that longer—and ideally healthier—lives could expand human capability and prosperity, but only if culture, policy, markets, and individuals adapt in advance.
Overview
The book combines an accessible tour of life-extension research with futurist scenario-building. Arrison discusses regenerative medicine, stem cells, tissue and organ replacement, and other technologies, then follows their possible effects through careers, education, relationships, reproduction, family, economics, the environment, religion, and views of mortality. Its central move is to treat longevity as a systems problem: changing lifespan changes nearly every institution organized around age.
Core ideas
Longevity is a technological possibility, not a fixed biological destiny
Arrison presents human lifespan as historically changeable and argues that emerging biomedical tools may extend not only years lived but also the period of health and vitality. Her emphasis is on repairing age-related damage rather than merely prolonging frailty.
A longer life requires a multi-stage career model
The conventional sequence—education, one career, retirement—becomes implausible if people remain capable for many additional decades. Arrison envisions repeated cycles of work, retraining, experimentation, and perhaps several careers instead of a single fixed professional identity.
Marriage and family become less age-scripted
If adulthood lasts far longer, one lifelong marriage may no longer be the assumed social template. Arrison considers serial relationships, renegotiated commitments, later childbearing, much larger age gaps between siblings, and more blended or socially defined families.
Longevity could increase human capital
Keeping experienced, healthy people active may preserve knowledge and give skilled individuals more time to create, teach, invest, and solve problems. Arrison treats longer lives as a potential economic asset rather than simply a demographic burden.
The feared consequences are not automatic
Population growth, resource scarcity, pension strain, and intergenerational conflict are presented as design and governance challenges rather than decisive arguments against life extension. Arrison is notably optimistic that innovation and institutional adaptation can offset many pressures.
Religion may change without disappearing
Longer, healthier lives could alter how people relate to death, the afterlife, meaning, and religious institutions. Arrison’s position, as summarized in available secondary material, is that longevity would more likely transform spirituality than eliminate it.
The future must be actively built
Medical breakthroughs will not arrive simply because they are desirable. Research funding, regulation, public advocacy, and commercial development determine whether promising longevity technologies become safe and broadly available.
Practical takeaways
- Think in terms of healthspan, not just lifespan: additional years matter most if people retain physical and cognitive function.
- Treat education as recurring infrastructure rather than a one-time preparation for work.
- Expect age-based institutions—retirement, pensions, career ladders, family norms—to become less reliable guides to planning.
- When evaluating longevity claims, separate plausible biological mechanisms from the much harder questions of clinical validation, affordability, regulation, and distribution.
- Use the book as a prompt for scenario planning: What would change in your finances, skills, relationships, and commitments if working life extended by several decades?
- Remember that longer lives would amplify both opportunities and existing inequalities unless access to effective treatments becomes broad.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The book’s forecasts are deliberately optimistic and were published in 2011; many proposed interventions remain scientifically, clinically, or commercially uncertain. The book should be read as a futurist argument, not a current medical forecast.
- Arrison often moves quickly from a possible technical advance to large social consequences. A reviewer summarized the weakness as a shortage of connective tissue between the book’s intriguing snapshots.
- The argument tends to emphasize innovation’s ability to solve demographic and resource problems, giving less weight to unequal access, political resistance, ecological limits, and the possibility that benefits arrive unevenly. This is an interpretive limitation inferred from the book’s strongly pro-innovation framing and available reviews.
- Longer lives do not automatically mean healthier or more productive lives. The book’s social scenarios depend on substantial improvements in healthspan, not merely delayed death.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which institutions would need redesign first if healthy working lives commonly reached 100 or more?
- Would extended careers reduce opportunities for younger workers, or create more mentoring, entrepreneurship, and new fields?
- How should pensions, inheritance, family care, and education work when adulthood spans a century?
- Would longer lives make relationships more disposable—or give people more time to develop durable forms of commitment?
- Who would receive life-extension treatments first, and what policies could prevent longevity from becoming a privilege of wealth?
- Which of Arrison’s predictions now look prescient, and which depended on breakthroughs that have not materialized?
Return to this when…
Return to these notes when thinking about retirement, career changes, family planning, bioethics, or the social consequences of emerging longevity technologies. The most useful reminder is that extending healthy life would not merely add years to the existing life course; it would require redesigning the life course itself.
Highlights
Although most diets cannot prove they actually help to fight aging, there is some evidence to suggest that caloric restriction can have an impact on life expectancy, the science of which we will explore in the next chapter. For now, it will suffice to say that caloric restriction is exactly what it sounds like—eating a lot less food.
Even though restricting diet is a difficult proposition for many, perhaps a worse fate was suffered by those who agreed to receive grafts of chimpanzee testicles. In 1920, Serge Voronoff, a Russian doctor based in Paris, started transplanting parts of chimps in an effort to restore youth to men under the theory that the sex glands drove energy.58 We have seen that the linking of sex and youth is not a new idea, but the use of animal transplants in this way was fairly novel. Many of Dr. Voronoff’s patients died, but those who didn’t thought they actually saw results (most likely a placebo effect). And he wasn’t the only one wedded to this theory. In America, doctors in prisons were experimenting with similar techniques.
was finally getting somewhere.”70 Resveratrol affects a set of enzymes
Resveratrol affects a set of enzymes called sirtuins, which are known to be involved in the proven life-span-extension method called caloric restriction (CR). CR is exactly what it sounds like: eating about 30 percent fewer calories than normal but without malnutrition. It is well documented that CR causes an extension in both health and life span in rodents, delaying the onset of age-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. The evidence shows that even in monkeys CR is powerful. In 2009 results from a twenty-year-long study on caloric restriction in rhesus monkeys demonstrated the health effects.71 The monkeys on the low-calorie diet not only were in better health and suffered fewer deaths than the control group but also looked a lot better. The passage of time was tougher on the regular monkeys than on the calorie-restricted ones (see Figure 2.4).
Because advances in computing continue to expand exponentially, it won’t be long before affordable and fast sequencing will be widespread. Consider that whereas the Human Genome Project cost roughly $2.7 billion, in 2007 it cost about $2 million to sequence James Watson’s genome, and by 2009 Complete Genomics said it would be able to sequence an entire human genome for around $5,000, assuming a bulk order of forty or more genomes.82 That’s quite a reduction in costs in only a few years’ time. Some scientists in London have even predicted that they will eventually be able to do it “for a few dollars.”83 Whatever the final price, eventually genome sequencing will be so fast and cheap that everyone will be able to do it, a boon to researchers trying to understand how the body works and, ultimately, how to fight disease. Even with today’s high prices, sequencing has led to some useful information. One of the first successes came in 2005 when researchers discovered that age-related macular degeneration, which causes blindness in older people, was associated with a gene that was seemingly unrelated to vision. “No one had previously suspected that particular gene, which plays a role in inflammation,” wrote Dr. Collins. “This underscores the power of researchers being able to scan the whole genome, and not just limit their searches to their own best hunches.”84 This power also translates into discovering weaknesses in cancer cells, thereby making possible personalized treatment, as well as looking at the genomes of people who live a very long time to see if they possess certain protector genes that regular people do not. There are at least two well-known groups studying centenarians (people who are older than one hundred). One is the Boston University New England Centenarian Study, run by Dr. Thomas Perls, and the other is the Longevity Genes Project at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, run by Dr. Nir Barzilai. According to Dr. Perls’s research, even though lifestyle and habits are important for health, it is clear that “exceptional longevity runs
Tractors have come a long way since manufacturer John Deere started out in 1837 forging his first steel plow. If Deere were alive today, he would certainly be surprised to see tractors help drive themselves. Indeed, farming is not an occupation that springs to mind when one thinks about GPS. Yet in 1993 Michael O’Connor, then a PhD student at Stanford, realized that the GPS he was working with could be used to save farmers money by reducing waste.
Like longevity, eco-action is correlated with wealth. Numerous studies have shown that as people get richer, they turn more of their attention to making their environment cleaner. Peter Huber, a scholar at the New York–based Manhattan Institute, puts it this way: “It is wealth that gives ordinary families the confidence to be generous to the world beyond. It is the rich who can be thin because they know they will always have plenty to eat. It is the rich who can cherish the wilderness because they no longer have to choose between their own survival and nature’s.”
promising. “Algae is the ultimate biological system using sunlight to capture
“Algae is the ultimate biological system using sunlight to capture and convert carbon dioxide into fuel,” Dr. Venter said.53 Using CO2 as a raw material would convert waste into energy and help fight global warming at the same time. ExxonMobil’s money will go toward long-term research and development exploring the most efficient and cost-effective organisms and methods to produce next-generation algal biofuel. Generating fuel this way will certainly help limit CO2 pollution and may be in use sooner than most of us expect.
Despite this disappointment, top scientists continued to investigate cold fusion possibilities because, if perfected, the reward would be a seemingly never-ending clean energy source that would generate more energy than was used to create it. Now, it appears that some scientists have made progress. In April 2009, 60 Minutes televised a story about researchers who are getting closer to figuring out how to turn the idea into a reliable energy source. “The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you’d take it in for service every four years and they’d give you a new power supply,” Dr. Michael McKubre of SRI International labs told the 60 Minutes crew.55 Such statements might sound fantastical, yet representatives from the U.S. Navy have publicly said that cold fusion is possible, and a number of top scientists are currently working on techniques to make it a more stable and reliable energy source.56 The main issue with cold fusion, it seems, is that the elements involved are unstable, resulting in different levels of energy being released in each experiment even though the experiment is apparently being done in the same manner each time. Such quandaries are, of course, what makes science interesting to scientists, and at some point one of them will figure out what is going on so that this energy source can be properly harnessed. In the meantime, nanotechnology looks well poised to help solar energy become more efficient.
Another way to put it is that a fear of risk could lead to irrational delays that would then deprive humanity of great benefits, such as a cleaner environment and increased health spans. Perhaps inventor Ray Kurzweil said it best when he argued, “We need to better balance the risks of new technology against the known harm of delay.”
Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, helps to expose the weakness in Chapman’s emotionally charged argument. He writes, “It is unclear why aging research should be singled out for blame or special concern in this regard. Many factors contribute to global inequality, and spending on gerontological research is such a minute fraction of the financial outlays of wealthy nations that it seems a bizarre place to look for savings to transfer to the poor.”
As inventor Ray Kurzweil points out with extensive graphs and research, “The time gap between [those on the] leading and lagging edge is itself contracting.”47 And the time gap is not just dropping for obvious technological advancements like consumer electronics; it is also dropping in health technology. “AIDS drugs were about $30,000 per patient per year 15 years ago, and they didn’t work very well,” Kurzweil points out. “Now they actually work pretty well, and they’re $100 per patient per year.”
Queen Elizabeth owning some of the first silk stockings, to the rich paying $20 in 1915 for a three-minute phone call from New York to San Francisco. Indeed, when genomics firm 23andMe (founded in 2006) first offered its DNA tests, the price was $1,000 for less information than is now available today at the $199 price. Two hundred dollars may still be too expensive for many Americans looking to understand their DNA, but the prices are only going to get cheaper (for continually better information) in short order. Given these realities, arguments that biotech shouldn’t advance because the wealthy get it first are badly misinformed, if not outright immoral. In reality, it is the up-front investment from the wealthy that enables the masses to participate in whatever new innovations come along. Entrepreneurs are rarely successful by serving only the rich; economic growth happens when markets expand to include large numbers.
WOODY ALLEN ONCE joked, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.” His statement effectively makes light of humanity’s collective anxiety over death, an issue that can be traced back to the very beginning of human culture.
At the FDA they will have to be beaten one at a time or not at all. Which means that nobody is ever going to get ‘antiaging’ drugs through the FDA as it currently operates.”87 Aging is a whole-body issue, but the FDA has been set up to address specific diseases. The longevity coalition agrees that this is an important problem and suggests that the FDA “be charged with developing new guidelines for testing interventions that do not necessarily target a single specific disease but that retard, arrest, or reverse the structural degeneration and loss of functionality associated with aging.”