Lifespan could very soon start to skyrocket beyond the three-digit numbers.
Second David Agus e Craig Venter we are on the eve of an extraordinary medical revolution: Agus, Professor of Medicine at the University of Southern California, stated very precisely that the average life will be around 100 years. Craig Venter, co-founder and head of Human Longevity inc. relaunches stating that there is no limit to the years we could live, except for the capacity of our planet to support too many human beings.
The miracle? Big Data
A substantial part of this medical revolution is attributed by the two scientists to an important advance on the borderline between medicine and technology: Big Data, the ability to collect and index a huge amount of information with the possibility of evaluating its effects even in real time. Venter sequenced the human genome just 15 years ago, and when it happened there was no comparison: today we also know other data relating to species other than ours, and we know that they are only 3% different from 3,2. billions of base pairs that make up lDNAs.
Just 10 years ago, Venter never predicted that we would be able to predict the maximum age of an individual based on studying his genetic code. Today we know that humans begin to lose Y chromosomes between the ages of 40 and 50.
To help Big Data make medicine take the leap we expect, Venter and his team hired the engineer who developed the Google Translate translation system. “We are trying to build a system that can learn while collecting data. The first application is terrific: we will be able to obtain the photograph of a subject starting from its genetic code".
“We learn new and amazing things at breakneck speed: every six months we have to review many of our systems. We will probably never fully understand the mechanisms of functioning linked to diseases and aging, but we don't need to fully understand them to control them".
