Medical advances will make me live to 200 by replacing some of my body's stem cells once every 20 years, followed by additional critical advances during my "borrowed time".
Modeling past behavior is not going to accurately predict future behavior. The model suggests that older people are steadily losing some quantity of a finite resource that acts as a protectant against otherwise fatal conditions. Replenishing that resource would therefore allow some people to move backwards on the age-mortality curve, effectively transforming the super-exponential curve into an exponential curve. That would make your probability of living to 160 years after your treatments begin around 90%, rather than an iota more than 0% (assuming average 1/1500 annual mortality rate).
That gives you a lot more time to find and eliminate the individual risk factors which contribute to various causes of mortality.
Recent research has found very old individuals whose entire red blood supply is likely to be derived from a single hematopoietic stem cell. Other research has demonstrated regular transfusions of whole blood from younger donors into older recipients as improving specific age-related health conditions. (See also [0],[1].)
That old sci-fi trope about people cloning themselves for the spare parts will eventually become reality, except the clones will be harvested at 18 days old from an artificial growth medium instead of after 16 years in a secret island facility. Some nations will ban the practice under political pressure from religions, and it will just move to the black market.
What's really going to close the door on clinical immortality is economics and politics, not medical science.
Modeling past behavior is not going to accurately predict future behavior. The model suggests that older people are steadily losing some quantity of a finite resource that acts as a protectant against otherwise fatal conditions. Replenishing that resource would therefore allow some people to move backwards on the age-mortality curve, effectively transforming the super-exponential curve into an exponential curve. That would make your probability of living to 160 years after your treatments begin around 90%, rather than an iota more than 0% (assuming average 1/1500 annual mortality rate).
That gives you a lot more time to find and eliminate the individual risk factors which contribute to various causes of mortality.
Recent research has found very old individuals whose entire red blood supply is likely to be derived from a single hematopoietic stem cell. Other research has demonstrated regular transfusions of whole blood from younger donors into older recipients as improving specific age-related health conditions. (See also [0],[1].)
That old sci-fi trope about people cloning themselves for the spare parts will eventually become reality, except the clones will be harvested at 18 days old from an artificial growth medium instead of after 16 years in a secret island facility. Some nations will ban the practice under political pressure from religions, and it will just move to the black market.
What's really going to close the door on clinical immortality is economics and politics, not medical science.
[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4021776/
[1] http://www.nature.com/nri/journal/v13/n5/full/nri3433.html