A gloomy prognosis for the next 25 years from the World Healthy Organization (WHO) can be found at PLoS Medicine. Apparently, dawning expectations of significant healthy life extension in the decades ahead have not yet migrated from the actuaries to the health bureaucrats. "Life expectancy for women in the high-income countries may reach 85.0 y by 2030, compared with 79.7 y for men. The highest projected life expectancy in 2030 is for Japanese women at 88.5 y (with a range of 87.7 to 89.2 across the pessimistic and optimistic scenarios)." Recall that mainstream systems biologists and gerontologists believe we can boost healthy life spans by 10-20 years in the developed world over the next two decades through the advance of medicine and biotechnology, and the WHO projections start to look somewhat out of touch. This is to say nothing of more aggressive approaches, such as the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). I think we can do far better than this WHO projection - and we owe it to ourselves to make that happen.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030442
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