That's what some experts believe. And a new book by a top professor reveals there's good news for the rest of us Professor Rudi Westendorp has predicted the first person to live to 135 has been born, but other scientists have gone further and declared that we have already seen the birth of the first person who will live to 1,000
Some years ago, I had a heated telephone conversation with my mother. After I had argued her into a corner, she played what she obviously thought was her trump card.
‘I’m 74 years old!’ she snapped, implying that this somehow made her wiser than me and that I should just shut up.
I replied with a trump card of my own, telling her that reaching 74 was nothing special.
That didn’t go down well, but she could hardly question my expertise on this subject. As a professor of geriatrics, I have devoted my career to a study of ageing and the extraordinary growth in human life expectancy over the past century or so.
Never before have so many people in the developed world lived for so long — thanks to the enormous changes we have made to our environment, including sufficient food for everyone, clean drinking water and the eradication of many infectious diseases.
The result is that average life expectancy has doubled from 40 to 80 years since 1900, and the proportion of people who reach the age of 65 has increased three-fold, from 30 pc to 90 pc.
In 1997, the world marvelled when a Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122, making her the longest-surviving person in recorded history.
But there is little doubt that some babies born today can expect to live even longer. Five years after Madame Calment’s death, the academic journal Science showed that the average life expectancy at birth in developed countries is rising by two to three years every 10 calendar years."
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