Lifespans could very soon begin to rocket upwards beyond three-digit numbers.
Secondo 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, declared very precisely that the average lifespan will very soon reach around 100 years. Craig Venter, co-founder and head of Human Longevity inc. reiterates that there is no limit to the years we could live, except for the capacity of our planet to support too large a number of human beings.
The miracle? Big Data
A significant part of this medical revolution is attributed by the two scientists to an important advancement on the border between medicine and technology: Big Data, the ability to collect and index an enormous 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 term of comparison: today we also know other data relating to species other than ours, and we know that we are only 3% different compared to 3,2 billions of base pairs that make up DNA.
Just 10 years ago, Venter would never have predicted that we would be able to predict an individual's maximum age based on the study of their genetic code. Today we know that humans begin to lose their 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're trying to build a system that can learn as it collects 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 incredible things at a breakneck speed: every six months we have to review many of our systems. We will probably never fully understand the functioning mechanisms linked to diseases and aging, but we don't need to fully understand them to control them".