The human yearning for longevity and eternal youth dates back to the dawn of civilisation. Yet research into healthy ageing, as opposed to the diseases of old age, only became a well-funded scientific endeavour in the 1990s.
Ageing research is now one of the hottest fields in biology, and scientists have accumulated a vast amount of information about the genes and proteins that influence how long we live. But how it all fits together into an overall theory of ageing remains uncertain – as does the more practical question of how much the healthy human lifespan can be extended by science and medicine.
