On September 3, before a military parade in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin — both 72 — were caught speaking on a hot mic discussing how modern technology might extend human life. “Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days, at 70 years, you are still a child,” Xi said through a translator. Putin replied: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.” “Predictions are, this century, there’s a chance of also living to 150,” Xi then added. Meduza looked into what sources the two leaders might have been drawing on for their statements — and why their words prompt skepticism.

The magic number

“According to some predictions, there’s a chance people could live to 150 this century,” Xi Jinping remarked to Vladimir Putin in an exchange caught on a hot mic during Beijing’s military parade last week. Xi’s remark can be read in two ways: either as a nod to the existence of such forecasts or as a claim that a person could truly live to 150. The first is certainly correct — those predictions do exist.

As longevity climbed in the 20th century, forecasts that people would someday live to 100, 150, 200 — and other neat round numbers — began appearing regularly, sometimes even from scientists.

In 2000, for example, the American biologist Steven Austad predicted that many children born at the start of the new millennium would live to see the year 2150. His forecast sparked a sharp debate with demographer Jay Olshansky, who dismissed the idea outright.

The two men formalized their disagreement with a bet. The loser (or, more precisely, his heirs, since neither hopes to survive until 2150) would pay the winner $150. In 2016, they raised the stakes to $600 and invested the money in a fund. Given the stock market’s growth, Nature estimated that the fund’s value could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars by the time the wager is settled. There is, of course, only one way to find out the winner and how much money they’ll actually receive — but that will take more than a century.

That bet epitomized the fierce debates around radical life extension, with its explicit 150-year benchmark. But it was hardly the first or the last of its kind. Today, however, if you look for the origins of such forecasts, you’re more likely to land not on Austad and Olshansky’s quarrel, but on a 2021 study published in Nature Communications. The paper was picked up by hundreds of outlets, including popular science magazines. It now appears in Wikipedia entries and even official documents. It’s reasonable to assume Xi was referring to this research.

Its authors think so too. The study came from a team of Russian-born scientists led by physicist Peter Fedichev, a familiar figure among Russia’s life-extension enthusiasts. Together with colleagues, he co-founded the Singapore-based startup Gero, which describes its mission as “understanding aging as a systems failure and engineering drugs to fix it” and “targeting the underlying physics of aging itself.”

In their Nature Communications paper, the team framed aging precisely that way — as a breakdown in the body’s functioning as a system. That description may sound abstract, but the study did point to a concrete cutoff: 150 years, which the authors designate as the absolute limit of human life. The article actually set the range at 120 to 150 years, but in the media coverage, that detail disappeared, leaving only the upper bound.

The essence of the article is difficult to summarize without losing nuance, but in general, the researchers treated aging as a statistical process — a concept borrowed from thermodynamics, their home field. In this model, the body is constantly buffeted by stressors such as infections, injuries, and internal illnesses. The body counters by self-regulating, restoring itself to its “normal” base state. For a time, it succeeds. But the article asserts that recovery becomes slower over time until eventually the system can no longer stabilize and collapses.

That point of collapse, the authors argue, defines the human lifespan limit — somewhere between 120 and 150 years. Their estimate was based on just two datasets, both from outside sources. One set included blood test results from the U.K. Biobank project; the other, fitness tracker data from about 2,000 people gathered in a separate study. Fedichev and his co-authors didn’t collect the data themselves or examine what caused changes in the participants’ readings. They simply analyzed how, and how quickly, bodies returned — or failed to return — to a baseline state.

The paper didn’t propose ways to extend life or claim that people could, in practice, live to 150. What it did assert was that every organism has a limit to its resilience. And in their conclusions, the authors argued that today’s medical focus on treating specific diseases won’t deliver radical increases in human lifespan. In other words, they contend that resources should go not toward curing individual illnesses but toward understanding and tackling the aging process itself.

how to (maybe) live forever

• Who wants to live forever? Inside the Russian authorities’ plan to develop anti-aging technology — even as they keep sending soldiers to die in droves

Organs and immortality

In the same exchange, Putin raised a specific idea for extending human life: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.”

Organ and tissue transplants do indeed prolong the lives of individual patients — and, in turn, can affect average life expectancy. It’s also undeniable that biotechnology has the potential to radically change access to transplantation. And that doesn’t just mean growing organs in laboratories or inside specially engineered organisms (for example, genetically modified pigs), but also cellular therapies — transplants of cells rather than whole organs, such as cells engineered to fight cancer.

But hopes that transplantation might allow people to live to 150 confront a basic statistical reality: in developed countries, the leading causes of death after age 65 are cardiovascular disease (35 percent) and cancer (21 percent). For any meaningful share of people to reach 150, both cancer and heart disease would have to be completely eliminated.

It’s easy enough to imagine a near future in which a heart, or another organ, becomes a kind of consumable — grown in labs and replaced multiple times over a person’s lifetime. But it’s far harder to imagine replacing an entire vascular system riddled with deadly plaques.

And it’s even harder to see how transplantation could cure cancer. For at least the past three decades, the world (especially the United States and Europe) has poured immense resources into developing cancer therapies. Enormous progress has been made compared with the mid-1980s, but we are still far from “defeating cancer.”

In the end, any otherwise compelling arguments for organ transplants dramatically impacting life expectancy are overshadowed by the reality that neurodegenerative illnesses like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s remain among the leading causes of death in old age. Despite enormous investments in research, neither has yet proven to be treatable. It’s difficult to imagine how organ transplants could help with these or other diseases of the nervous system.

Our only hope is you. Support Meduza before it’s too late.

Meduza’s Razbor (“Explainers”) team