The scientist assessed the prospect of increasing the life of most people to 120 years

Increasing the life expectancy of most people to 120 years is impossible in the foreseeable future, because modern medicine is not capable of radically slowing down or stopping the aging process of the body. Changing the situation will require breakthrough research in the biology of aging.

Russian virologist, professor at the City University of Hong Kong Petr Lidsky told TASS at the scientific conference “Blastim Day 2026” at Moscow State University: “The biblical 120 years remains the most famous figure in the discussion about human longevity. The reality looks much harsher: people over 110 years old are extremely rare, and every confirmed case of superlongevity becomes the subject of in-depth research. Therefore, today the conversation about the limit of life of supercentenarians does not revolve around mass experience, but around individual records and attempts to understand what exactly they say about the capabilities of the human body. At present, it is difficult to talk about the mass survival of people even to 120 years, while the estimate of the maximum life expectancy at 150 years is more of a bold assumption than a proven fact.”

The scientist noted that the increase in life expectancy observed in the 20th century in some prosperous countries has slowed down significantly in recent decades, and in some cases has completely stagnated:

“From this follows a hard conclusion: classical medicine has already exhausted its capabilities for prolonging life. She has learned to save from infections, to better cope with some cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, but cannot radically change the aging process itself. In order to sharply shift human longevity upward again, we need not yet another improvement in the treatment of individual diseases, but breakthrough research in the biology of aging.”

At the same time, Lidsky believes that in theory there may be no limit to human life, but it may take millions of years of evolution to increase it: “Life expectancy is evolutionarily plastic, it varies by orders of magnitude in different species, and the history of the evolution of primates itself shows that large changes in longevity are possible in a short time. Humans have doubled their lifespan compared to chimpanzees in just 7 million years since our divergence. In this context, the current human lifespan does not appear to be an insurmountable ceiling.”

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