The longevity industry is stronger than ever and continues to grow

The longevity industry is perhaps going through its best historical moment. Life expectancy has increased by about three decades since 1900, reaching around 78 years in 2023, according to U.S. statistics. But for many people, 78 years are not enough.
The Methuselah Foundation, a charitable biomedical organization, for instance, wants to “make 90 the new 50,” and scientists from a biotechnology company have argued that, free of disease, the human body could reach up to 150 years.
Even more optimistic estimates put the figure around 1,000 years. Whatever the maximum duration of human life may be, people seem increasingly determined to find it.

Last year, nearly 6,000 studies on longevity appeared in PubMed, a database of biomedical and life sciences articles—almost five times more than two decades ago.
Along with the creation of dozens of popular podcasts and a substantial supplement industry, that zeal has led to efforts to preserve organs, find life-extending diets, and even attempt to reverse aging itself.
Cosmetics, with their anti-aging products, help maintain a youthful appearance.

It is the same blend of solid science, quixotic experimentation, and questionable advice that has defined this pursuit throughout much of history.
Humanity’s oldest epic is a doomed quest for immortality: about four thousand years ago, the Sumerians told of a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who sought eternal life and found a plant that restored youth—but lost it on his way home.

Two millennia later, a Chinese magician named Xu Fu convinced the emperor that there was an elixir guaranteeing eternal life beyond the Yellow Sea. The emperor provided Xu Fu with ships and the 3,000 virgins that, according to the magician, were essential for the quest. When the emperor realized little progress had been made, Xu Fu said he also needed an army—which the emperor granted him. Xu Fu set sail, and the emperor never saw him again.

The desire to live forever also fueled the stories of Macedonian king Alexander the Great and Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. They too failed. It’s a lesson lost on the alchemists, who for centuries tried to create a drink that would grant immortality. Among them was Isaac Newton, who went to his grave in the early 18th century believing his alchemical research would one day prove more important than his laws of motion.

But even before Newton’s death, Enlightenment thinkers had traded the dream of immortality for the less ambitious goal of living a bit longer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word longevity first appeared in the 16th century—around the same time as the first longevity diet book, written after an Italian nobleman named Luigi Cornaro began to suspect that his fondness for alcohol, lavish banquets, and late nights was harming his health.
He then adopted a restricted daily diet of eggs, milk, broth, and vegetables. He lived to be 80 and wrote about his eating habits in Discourses on a Sober Life. His advice may have been better than that of his successors’ Meat for Every Occasion and Calories Don’t Count.

Cornaro had stumbled upon the modern notion of caloric restriction—a practice that researchers have since shown increases lifespan in dogs, mice, monkeys, worms, and, according to a large-scale study, possibly even humans. Cornaro also endorsed other, less scientific restrictions, such as sexual abstinence, which he believed would preserve vitality.

The Substance, the film starring Demi Moore, revisits the theme of aging.

He was wrong, but not alone. This line of thinking remained fashionable for centuries after his death. In Chicago, a urologist began replacing men’s testicles—including his own—with those of younger individuals. Nine years later, in 1923, he died at 65.
That same year, Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach promoted a new genital surgery to treat the diseases of aging. Among the first to undergo the operation was Sigmund Freud, who died of cancer at 83. But the operation—vasectomy—still exists today, though for a very different purpose.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-aging gurus and charlatans regularly promoted lifestyle changes: avoiding “excessive sleep,” giving up water, marrying, and even moving to Nantucket (“where no one dies young”). They also proposed banning novels that “poison the mind.”

Often, their goal was to make money. But many of the worst strategies came from elderly people themselves, who told reporters they drank a bottle of “old, good wine” every day, avoided medicine, ate sweets, hunted whales, and smoked “at least one cigar a day,” even while walking.
Associations emerged with names like Jolly Young Men’s Club and The Hundred Years Club, the latter an organization whose members met at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel to “maintain a library” of “theories from India, Egypt, and ancient Hebrews.” Among the guest speakers was physician Cyrus Edson, who told attendees that “men of good temperament live remarkably long lives.” (He died three years later, in his early forties.)

Nevertheless, the popularity of the “art of longevity,” as the club called it, continued to grow. Yet, as the president of London’s Centenarian Club noted in the late 1920s, “it is mainly men, not women, who are most interested in living long.”
By the mid-20th century, according to one tracker, mentions of “longevity” had surpassed “immortality” in published books.

Life expectancy increased largely thanks to water filtration and chlorination, the discovery of antibiotics like penicillin, and the advent of vaccines against deadly diseases such as polio.
What had once been the realm of magicians had—with the help of advances such as the identification of DNA—become a more legitimate pursuit. Still, even among the most respected scientists of the era, eccentric proposals persisted.

Alexander Bogomolets, former director of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, developed a serum based on horse blood and cadaver marrow that he claimed would allow people “to live up to 150 years.”
And Nobel Prize-winning biologist Alexis Carrel claimed to have kept chicken heart tissue alive for years.

There was also Linus Pauling, one of the founders of molecular biology and a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, who throughout much of his career promoted megadoses of vitamin C as a way to prevent 75% of cancers and extend life up to 150 years. When Pauling died of cancer in 1994 at age 93, his longevity research was, in many eyes, discredited.

Immortality, as the old stories warned, may be a doomed endeavor. But it is unlikely that the search for a longer life will stop anytime soon. As a Catholic priest in New York observed in 1927, noting his followers’ relentless desire to escape death:
“Men have always been interested in prolonging their lives, no matter how miserable and unfortunate they may have been.”

Researchers at Harvard and Oxford universities recently tried to measure that interest in today’s market. They estimated that the total value of any scientific breakthrough that added just one extra decade to global life expectancy would amount to $367 billion.
But even here, the ancients advised caution. Roman writer Pliny the Elder spoke of an era when men had lived for 800 years—and said they had grown so tired of life that they threw themselves into the sea.

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The newspaper Clarín of Buenos Aires is one of the most influential and widely circulated newspapers in Argentina. Founded in 1945 by Roberto Noble, it is part of the Clarín Group and stands out for its mission to reach the general public with a broad informational approach, covering politics, economics, culture, sports, entertainment, and opinion. (Wikipedia) In its digital version, it has become a benchmark for online journalism in Spanish, leading in both digital subscriptions and web traffic. (LatAm Journalism Review) Its editorial line combines current news with analysis, aiming to position itself as a modern media outlet that adapts its content across multiple platforms.