An elixir of life is probably beyond our reach — but how much further can we extend our lives? Modern advances in healthcare, sanitation and personal hygiene have significantly extended the life expectancy of the average person living in 2022. Over the last 120 years alone, the global average expectancy has more than doubled to above 70 years.

But how much longer can a person live? That’s the objective of research into aging, which has taken off in recent years as researchers strive to make meds that can delay, halt, or even reverse the aging process in people using the life-prolonging discoveries made in animal trials, the Wall Street Journal reports. Other self-proclaimed biohackers have taken the matter into their own hands following strict eating, sleeping, exercise, and supplement regimens that they claim will extend their life expectancy and could even reverse aging, according to the Guardian.

Do people even want to live to 100? It depends on who you ask. A recent Ipsos survey in the UK found that younger respondents were more likely to want to live to 100 than older people, who were more likely to have had more exposure to the effects of old age. Men also were more enthusiastic about the prospect of being alive for a century than women, with 43% of men wanting to live to 100, compared to only 28% of women. Although the poll doesn’t indicate why, one theory is perhaps since men have lower life expectancies, they are less likely to take long lifespans for granted. One specific cohort seems especially determined to live past 100: Wealthy men.

Silicon Valley tech bros, obsessed with extending their lifespans, have adopted rigorous lifestyles: Twitter founder and long-time biohacker Jack Dorsey eats just one meal a day and a morning concoction of water, lemon, and Himalayan salt. Entrepreneur and VC founder Bryan Johnson blends together lentils broccoli and mushrooms for breakfast, and consistently monitors his organs with hospital-grade medical equipment and adheres to a strict exercise regime. Johnson’s VC firm OS fund, which invests in early-stage science and technology companies, is one of the several VCs that have collectively invested USD bns into biotech companies. Most of USD 4.4 bn invested in the last five years has gone to Altos Labs, which focuses on cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health to reverse disease.

Biohackers unite at a posh longevity Swiss conference: The first in-person Longevity Investors Conference took place a few months ago in Gstaad, an upmarket resort in the Swiss Alps, according to the MIT Technology Review. The highly exclusive event had just 150 people in attendance, 120 of whom were investors prepared to invest mns or even bns in the longevity project. Several prospective attendees that were willing to pay the USD 4.5k ticket were turned down for not meeting this criteria. Over the course of the conference, researchers, scientists and founders of biotech companies all vying for investments presented their methods of elongating the amount of years people live in good health.

One common practice among conference attendees and people interested in living long healthy lives at large is taking supplements. One of the conference’s co-organizers takes NMN, a supplement intended to increase levels of NAD+, which helps provide cells with energy, a “booster” supplement that contains resveratrol, a chemical found in berries and red wine praised for its anti-aging properties, every day. While both are marketed and sold as longevity-boosting supplements,there are no studies suggesting that they elongate lifespans. Supplements, unlike medicine, are less regulated and do not need FDA approval to be sold in the US so long as they do not claim to treat or cure diseases.

These supplements can ironically end up causing harm: Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, used to just think that they were useless but harmless, but has grown more concerned about what new supplements created to target functions associated with aging are doing. Barzilai is also concerned about how the multitudes of supplements people are taking are interacting with each other, given the lack of research on the matter. Evelyne Bischof of the Shanghai University of Medicine, a medical doctor that changed her focus from oncology and internal medicine to longevity medicine has been treating patients that have gotten sick from taking supplements. “They came to me almost in kidney failure in their 30s, because they jumped on a very high dose of supplements and it was just not good for them,” she says.

Don’t hold out for a miracle drug that “makes life expectancy jump from 80 years to 150” being developed anytime soon, despite biotech companies and academic research centers being backed by an influx of funding from VCs and the US National Institute of Aging’s USD 3bn annual budget, the WSJ reports. Increasing life expectancies by 10-20% past the current US 80-year average for men and women however “is quite conceivable,” according to Steven Austad, chair of the biology department at University of Alabama at Birmingham. There is a misconception among biohackers and the longevity obsessed that scientists are closer to achieving the jump, but in reality there are several financial, regulatory and technical obstacles impeding progress. The FDA does not classify aging as a disease, which makes obtaining approval for drugs targeting aging more complicated, instead, trials have to target specific age-related illnesses. A drug that could be taken by a sizable healthy population would have to pass a strict safety standard.