Can humans live 150 years or more?

Byline: Paula J. Owen

ASHBURNHAM - When Cushing Academy headmaster James Tracy asked students yesterday if they wanted to live to be 100 years old if they were still healthy and would still be surrounded by all of their friends, 20 percent of the students in the Heslin Gymnasium did not raise their hands.

Andrew R. L. Trexler, 17, a senior from Hollis, N.H., was one of those students.

"We make so many connections in our lives that each individual connection would become unimportant if we lived too long," he explained. "I have met so many people and only around a dozen are important to me. If I lived for too long, their significance would be buried in all the other connections and would be lost."

The poll was taken during a discussion on the aging global population. It was the second in the Oxford-Cushing discussion series.

George Leeson, deputy director of the Oxford Institute on Aging, and Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer at Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or SENS in England, present through videoconferencing, talked about changes in demographics with aging societies and the challenges those changes create. They also discussed how medical advances in their lifetimes will potentially allow people to live to 150 and beyond and what that will mean.

"As fertility has fallen, longevity has increased," Mr. Leeson said, "with older people living to longer and healthier old ages."

People don't understand what living to 100 or 150 would mean, Mr. de Grey said. When people think about defeating aging, they think about being alive when all of their friends are dead and living a life of decrepitude.

"The actual scenario is keeping people healthy and stopping them from getting sick," he said.

Mr. Leeson asked students and staff what a world where more people are older than 50 than younger would be like. Youth of today will see that world by mid-century, he said, in most parts of the world.

For students, that brought up issues of necessary changes to governmental policies, the questioning of religious beliefs and shifts in family roles.

On the lighter side, senior Alec P. Weiss, 19, of Dover, asked if the science were applicable to animals, and, if so, if his dog could live forever.

"The engineering we're talking about in respect to human beings should be applicable to your dog," Mr. Leeson said.

ART: PHOTO

PHOTOG: T&G Staff/CHRISTINE PETERSON

CUTLINE: Cushing Academy faculty, staff and students listen to talk on aging.