The Huntington Beach-based Foundation held a Longevity Summit earlier this month, where biologists and geneticists shared their research into how humans might live longer — much longer. Futurist author Ray Kurzweil, speaking at the conference, put it thusly:

We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity... we are about fifteen years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.

Among those in the business, this threshold is known as "longevity escape velocity," and many of the Summit speakers seemed to think we'll get there in the next twenty years.

The speakers came from different backgrounds and specialized in widely different fields, according to press coverage; they appear to have had little in common except a commitment to defeating the aging process. Some of the techniques up for review: organ cryopreservation; tissue replication via stem-cell therapy; chemical supplements to encourage telomere lengthening; and tinkering with cell structures in order to situate our mitochondria more favorably.

There was a lot of talk at the Longevity Summit, and around the website of the Maximum Life Foundation generally, about the fantastic advances we'll one day see. Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, spoke about his work breeding fruit flies to live four times as long as usual, and suggested that a similar degree of hyper-longevity will be available to humans soon.

Yet a lot of what was said at the Summit had a certain best-case-scenario, pie-in-the-sky quality. The entrepreneur Peter Voss gave a presentation on artificial intelligence, which he said can be harnessed to figure out the secrets of human longevity — just as soon as it exists. "Imagine hundreds of thousands of Ph.D.-level machines chipping away at the aging problem," Voss is quoted as saying. Okay — check. It's imagined.

The Maximum Life Foundation itself sometimes uses language that suggests it hasn't thought everything all the way through. From the FAQ page of the Foundation website:

[Q.] Shouldn't we spend our resources feeding the hungry, rather than keeping people alive longer?

[A.] Our best resource is knowledge. The elderly own most of it. By making them productive for extra years, many of those resources can be channeled to solving problems such as hunger. Besides, our planet can accommodate over 6 billion more people before resources are taxed. This doesn't account for future technologies such as new clean energy sources, enhanced food production, efficient water desalinization, and nanotechnology."

Ray Kurzweil's association with the Foundation may itself be cause for skepticism. Kurzweil, though a respected inventor, is known for predicting breakthroughs and utopias that never materialize.

All in all, the Maximum Life Foundation probably bears watching, but anyone hoping to attend the 2200 Olympics may not want to book tickets just yet.

According to the authors of the study, diabetes and lung disease were the biggest life-shorteners. In an introductory note to their study, PLoS editors write:

The researchers looked at differences in death rates between all counties in US states plus the District of Columbia over four decades, from 1961 to 1999. They obtained the data on number of deaths from the National Center for Health Statistics, and they obtained data on the number of people living in each county from the US Census. The NCHS did not provide death data after 2001. They broke the death rates down by sex and by disease to assess trends over time for women and men, and for different causes of death.

Over these four decades, the researchers found that the overall US life expectancy increased from 67 to 74 years of age for men and from 74 to 80 years for women. Between 1961 and 1983 the death rate fell in both men and women, largely due to reductions in deaths from cardiovascular disease (heart disease and stroke). During this same period, 1961-1983, the differences in death rates among/across different counties fell. However, beginning in the early 1980s the differences in death rates among/across different counties began to increase. The worst-off counties no longer experienced a fall in death rates, and in a substantial number of counties, mortality actually increased, especially for women, a shift that the researchers call "the reversal of fortunes." This stagnation in the worst-off counties was primarily caused by a slowdown or halt in the reduction of deaths from cardiovascular disease coupled with a moderate rise in a number of other diseases, such as lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and diabetes, in both men and women, and a rise in HIV/AIDS and homicide in men. The researchers' key finding, therefore, was that the differences in life expectancy across different counties initially narrowed and then widened.