Healthspan, Not Lifespan: Harvard Researchers on Why Staying Healthy Matters More Than Living Longer

What does it mean to flourish as a species? We doubled life expectancy in the 20th century, but we never engineered a corresponding increase in our health span. But what we're proposing here is, for the first time in history, we actually do something about how we age as a species. We doubled life expectancy, but we continue to age almost exactly the same way we did in 300 BC, and that is a problem. We would only add about 2.5 years to life expectancy if we eradicated all cancers off of planet Earth.

How do we cure cancer? How do we cure Alzheimer's disease? I'm not saying we shouldn't do those, but that fundamentally isn't getting at this question, is from a biological perspective, why does an old person get diseases a young person doesn't? That's a question that can be answered and solved with the right investment.

In Boston, we have two neighborhoods two miles apart, Back Bay and Roxbury, where life expectancy differs by 23 years. So in, in Roxbury, life expectancy is 69. In Back Bay, it's 92. Your ZIP code is the biggest predictor of how long you'll live in the US.

Why is it that a naked mole rat doesn't get cancer and a rat does? There's a mechanism for that, and we can study those things. And that's where investment should go to be able to then do something about what's coming in the future.

There was a, a Pew survey in 2013 that asked, "Would you want to slow your biological aging and live past the age of 120?" Only 38% of Americans replied yes, which is pretty stunning. Biological age is the single biggest risk factor for all the diseases of aging. If I could delete one moral bias from our civilization, it would be this idea that what's natural is morally superior to what's unnatural. [dramatic music]

Welcome, Rainee.

Thank you.

And welcome back, Will.

Thank you. Good to be back.

Great to have you, and great trainers-

Thank you very much

... by the way. Noted. Um, we're here today to talk about your project, which I'm excited to unpack. Um, but can we start with this term bioethics and what this actually means? 'Cause I think everyone listening will have heard of that word or that, uh, terminology but probably don't quite understand what that means, and I suspect it's going to impact every one of us.

Yeah, absolutely. So the, the root of the word ethics is actually, um, Latin for custom, habit. So what is ethical is by and large what has been customarily done for millennia often. But I always found that definition to be a little bit underwhelming, right? I think we can do so much better than what has been done. Um, so the, the kind of bioethics I wanna work towards is one that applies a scientific method to quantitatively reason through what is good for us as a species. What, what does it mean to flourish?

Is that the same terminology that you would use?

I mean, I would because I defer to expertise, and I defer to Rainee.

[laughs]

So, I mean, I, honestly, I... well, this is hopefully where this conversation will go. I think there's, like, the ethics of, of what we do a- a- in tech- in technology and aging research is something that doesn't get discussed a lot actually in the academic space because we're so kind of head down trying to do the research