Individuals have at all times been fascinated with the query of human longevity. On this 1954 piece for Know-how Assessment, James A. Tobey, creator of greater than a dozen books on public well being, together with Your Weight-reduction plan for Longer Life (1948), famous that regardless of a couple of frauds claiming to be older than 150, “the consensus of scientific opinion is that there’s a particular restrict to human life, a restrict now and maybe perpetually within the neighborhood of 100 years.”
In 1954, the common life expectancy of an American at beginning had risen to 68 years from 47 in 1900. However many of the advances got here not from outdated individuals dwelling longer however from infants avoiding loss of life earlier than their first birthday. The typical particular person’s possibilities of dwelling to 100 in mid-Twentieth-century America, Tobey noticed, have been “no higher than they have been within the days of the Roman Empire.”
We’ve achieved higher since then: common life expectancy reached almost 79 years within the US earlier than declining in recent times, largely because of the covid-19 pandemic. However as this situation of TR reveals, the search to maintain extending the higher restrict on our years lives on.
