我们能活多久？
How Long Can We Live?
FERRIS JABR
2021年4月30日
In 1990, not long after Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard began conducting a nationwide study of French centenarians, one of their software programs spat out an error message. An individual in the study was marked as 115 years old, a number outside the program’s range of acceptable age values. They called their collaborators in Arles, where the subject lived, and asked them to double-check the information they had provided, recalls Allard, who was then the director of the IPSEN Foundation, a nonprofit research organization. Perhaps they made a mistake when transcribing her birth date? Maybe this Jeanne Calment was actually born in 1885, not 1875? No, the collaborators said. We’ve seen her birth certificate.
1990年，让—马里·罗比内(Jean-Marie Robine)和米歇尔·阿拉尔(Michel Allard)开始进行一项对法国百岁老人的全国性研究不久后，他们计算机程序中之一突然吐出了一条错误信息。一名研究对象的标记年龄是115岁，这个数字超出了该项目设定的年龄值范围。当时是非营利研究机构IPSEN基金会负责人的阿拉尔回忆说，他们给在阿尔勒（该究对象居住的地方）的合作者打了电话，请其对提供的信息进行复查。也许他们输入的出生日期有误？也许这个叫让娜·卡尔芒(Jeanne Calment)的人是1885年出生的，而不是1875年？没出错，合作者说。我们看过她的出生证明。
Calment was already well known in her hometown. Over the next few years, as rumors of her longevity spread, she became a celebrity. Her birthdays, which had been local holidays for a while, inspired national and, eventually, international news stories. Journalists, doctors and scientists began crowding her nursing-home room, eager to meet la doyenne de l’humanité. Everyone wanted to know her story.
卡尔芒在她的家乡已经很出名了。在接下来的几年里，随着有关她长寿的传言扩散，她成了名人。当地人把她的生日在当作节日庆祝已有一段时间了，这个日子后来引发法国乃至国际新闻报道的灵感。记者、医生和科学家们开始聚集在她住的养老院，渴望与这位“人类最长寿的人”见上一面。每个人都想知道她的故事。
Calment lived her entire life in the sunburned clay-and-cobble city of Arles in the South of France, where she married a second cousin and moved into a spacious apartment above the store he owned. She never needed to work, instead filling her days with leisurely pursuits: bicycling, painting, roller skating and hunting. She enjoyed a glass of port, a cigarette and some chocolate nearly every day. In town, she was known for her optimism, good humor and wit. (“I’ve never had but one wrinkle,” she once said, “and I’m sitting on it.”)
卡尔芒一辈子生活在法国南部被太阳晒得黝黑、用粘土和鹅卵石砌出来的城市阿尔勒。她在那里嫁给了一位远房堂表兄，住进了他拥有的商店上面的一套宽敞公寓。她从来都不需要工作，一生都花在悠闲消遣上：骑自行车、画画、滑旱冰、打猎。她喜欢来上一杯波尔图葡萄酒，抽支烟，吃些巧克力，几乎每天都不能少。她在镇子里以乐观、幽默和风趣闻名。（“我只有一条皱纹，”有一次她说，“我现在就坐在它上面。”）
By age 88, Calment had outlived her parents, husband, only child, son-in-law and grandson. As she approached her 110th birthday, she was still living alone in her cherished apartment. One day, during a particularly severe winter, the pipes froze. She tried to thaw them with a flame, accidentally igniting the insulating material. Neighbors noticed the smoke and summoned the fire brigade, which rushed her to a hospital. Following the incident, Calment moved into La Maison du Lac, the nursing home situated on the hospital’s campus, where she would live until her death at age 122 in 1997.
卡尔芒88岁时变成孤身一人，她的父母、丈夫、独生女、女婿和外孙都已先她而去。快到110岁生日时，她仍独自住在自己珍爱的公寓里。在一个特别寒冷的冬季，有一天，水管结了冰。她试图用火焰将管道里的冰融化，却不小心点燃了隔热材料。邻居们看到浓烟后，叫来了消防队，消防队迅速将她送到医院。这件事后，卡尔芒搬进了位于医院园区的La Maison du Lac 养老院，一直住在那里，直到1997年以122岁的高龄去世。
In 1992, as Calment’s fame bloomed, Robine and Allard returned to her file. Clearly, here was someone special — someone who merited a case study. Arles was just an hour’s drive from the village where Robine, a demographer at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, lived at the time. He decided to arrange a visit.
1992年，随着卡尔芒的名声越来越大，罗比内和阿拉尔再次拿起她的卷宗。显然，这个人不同寻常，值得研究。阿尔勒距人口统计学家罗比内曾经住过的村子只有一小时的车程，他当时在法国国家卫生和医学研究所工作。他决定安排一次访问。
The day they met, Calment was sitting by the window in her room, in an armchair that dwarfed her shrunken frame. Her eyes, milky with cataracts, could distinguish light from dark, but did not focus on any place in particular. She could hear quite well at times, but experienced periods of near deafness. Her plain gray clothes appeared to be several decades old.
他们见面的那天，卡尔芒正坐在自己房间的窗前，坐在一个与她枯槁的躯体相比显得特别大的扶手椅里。她的眼睛因患白内障而成乳白色，虽然可以分辨明暗，但并没有聚焦在某个具体东西上。她的听力有时不错，但有时则近乎全聋。她简单的灰色服装似乎已有几十年的历史了。
During that first meeting, Robine and Calment mostly exchanged pleasantries and idle chatter. Over the next few years, however, Robine and Allard, in collaboration with several other researchers and archivists, interviewed Calment dozens of times and thoroughly documented her life history, verifying her age and cementing her reputation as the oldest person who ever lived. Since then, Calment has become something of an emblem of the ongoing quest to answer one of history’s most controversial questions: What exactly is the limit on the human life span?
第一次见面时，罗比内和卡尔芒主要是寒暄和东扯西拉。但在接下来的几年里，罗比内、阿拉尔与其他几名研究人员和档案保管员合作，对卡尔芒进行了数十次采访，完整地记录了她的生平，核实了她的年龄，巩固了她作为世界上最长寿者的名声。从那时起，卡尔芒已成为一个不断探索的某种象征，人们希望通过这一探索来回答历史上最有争议的问题之一：人类寿命的极限到底在哪里？
AS MEDICAL AND social advances mitigate diseases of old age and prolong life, the number of exceptionally long-lived people is increasing sharply. The United Nations estimates that there were about 95,000 centenarians in 1990 and more than 450,000 in 2015. By 2100, there will be 25 million. Although the proportion of people who live beyond their 110th birthday is far smaller, this once-fabled milestone is also increasingly common in many wealthy nations. The first validated cases of such “supercentenarians” emerged in the 1960s. Since then, their global numbers have multiplied by a factor of at least 10, though no one knows precisely how many there are. In Japan alone, the population of supercentenarians grew to 146 from 22 between 2005 and 2015, a nearly sevenfold increase.
随着医疗和社会进步让老年疾病得到缓解，延长了人类的寿命，特别长寿者的数量出现了大幅增长。据联合国估计，1990年时，世界上大约有9.5万名百岁老人，到2015年时，百岁老人已超过45万。这个数字到2100年时将达到2500万。尽管活过110岁的人要少得多，但在许多富裕国家，这个曾经只是传说中的里程碑也越来越普遍了。第一批得到确认的“超百岁老人”是20世纪60年代出现的。那之后，全球超百岁老人的数量至少增加了十倍，尽管没人知道到底有多少。仅在日本，超百岁老人的数量就已从2005年的22人增加到了2015年的146人，增加了近七倍。
Given these statistics, you might expect that the record for longest life span would be increasing, too. Yet nearly a quarter-century after Calment’s death, no one is known to have matched, let alone surpassed, her 122 years. The closest was an American named Sarah Knauss, who died at age 119, two years after Calment. The oldest living person is Kane Tanaka, 118, who resides in Fukuoka, Japan. Very few people make it past 115.
鉴于这些统计数据，你可能会预期世界上最长寿命的纪录也在不断增长。然而，在卡尔芒去世近25年后，还没有人能与她相提并论，更不用说超过她的122岁了。与其最接近的是美国人莎拉·克瑙斯(Sarah Knauss)，她在卡尔芒去世两年后去世，享年119岁。在世的最长寿老人是居住在日本福冈的118岁的田中力子。很少有人活过115岁。
As the global population approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human longevity’s potential limits is more urgent than ever. Longevity scientists hold a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity. Historically — and somewhat flippantly, according to many researchers — their outlooks have been divided into two broad camps, which some journalists and researchers call the pessimists and the optimists. The pessimists view life span as a candle wick that can burn for only so long; the optimists see life span as a supremely, maybe even infinitely, elastic band.
随着全球人口接近80亿，实验室的科学研究找到了越来越有希望减缓或逆转衰老的方法，人类寿命的潜在极限问题比以往任何时候都更加紧迫。研究长寿的科学家对人类的未来持有差别细微的各式观点。从历史上看，他们的观点可分为被一些记者和研究人员称为悲观主义和乐观主义的两大类，但许多研究人员认为这样划分有些轻率。悲观主义者把生命比作烛芯，只能燃烧那么长的时间；乐观主义者把生命比作极长的，甚至也许是无限的橡皮筋。
THE THEORETICAL LIMITS on the length of a human life have vexed scientists and philosophers for thousands of years, but for most of history their discussions were largely based on musings and personal observations. In 1825, however, the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz published a new mathematical model of mortality, which demonstrated that the risk of death increased exponentially with age. Were that risk to continue accelerating throughout life, people would eventually reach a point at which they had essentially no chance of surviving to the next year. Instead, Gompertz observed that as people entered old age, the risk of death plateaued. Since then, using new data and more sophisticated mathematics, other scientists around the world have uncovered further evidence of accelerating death rates followed by mortality plateaus not only in humans but also in numerous other species.
人类寿命的理论极限问题已困扰科学家和哲学家几千年了，但在历史上的大部分时间里，他们的讨论主要建立在冥想和个体观察的基础上。但英国精算师本杰明·冈珀茨(Benjamin Gompertz) 1825年发表了死亡率的一个新数学模型，模型显示，死亡风险以指数关系随年龄增长。如果死亡风险在一生中持续加速的话，人最终会达到基本上不可能活到下一年的寿命点。但冈珀茨的观察反而是，随着人进入老年，死亡风险却保持在稳定水平。他之后，世界各地的其他科学家使用新的数据和更复杂的数学模型，找到了死亡率先是加速上升、然后保持稳定的进一步证据，不仅在人类中如此，在许多其他物种中也是如此。
In 2016, an especially provocative study in the prestigious research journal Nature strongly implied that the authors had found the limit to the human life span. Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and two colleagues analyzed decades’ worth of mortality data from several countries and concluded that although the highest reported age at death in these countries increased rapidly between the 1970s and 1990s, it had failed to rise since then, stagnating at an average of 114.9 years. Although some individuals, like Jeanne Calment, might reach staggering ages, they were outliers, not indicators of a continual lengthening of life. While a few scientists from the more pessimistic tradition applauded the study, many researchers sternly critiqued its methods. Nearly a dozen rebuttals appeared in Nature and other journals.
2016年，享有盛誉的学术刊物《自然》(Nature)发表的一项尤其具有煽动性的研究，该研究强烈暗示文章作者已发现了人类寿命的极限。阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦医学院的遗传学家扬·费赫(Jan Vijg)和两位同事分析了几个国家几十年来的死亡率数据，得出结论说，尽管这些国家报告的最高死亡年龄在20世纪70年代至90年代间迅速增长，但在那之后没有继续增长，而是停滞在平均114.9岁上。尽管有些个体，如让娜·卡尔芒，可能会活到惊人的年龄，但这些是异常值，而不是寿命持续延长的标志。虽然一些来自更悲观传统的科学家对这项研究表示赞扬，但许多研究人员猛烈批评了其研究方法。十几篇反驳文章出现在《自然》和其他期刊上。
Two years later, in 2018, the equally prestigious journal Science published a study that completely contradicted the one in Nature. The demographers Elisabetta Barbi of the University of Rome and Kenneth Wachter of the University of California, Berkeley, along with several colleagues, examined the survival trajectories of nearly 4,000 Italians and concluded that, while the risk of death increased exponentially up to age 80, it then slowed and eventually plateaued. Someone alive at 105 had about a 50 percent chance of living to the next year. The same was true at 106, 107, 108 and 109. Their findings, the authors wrote, “strongly suggest that longevity is continuing to increase over time, and that a limit, if any, has not been reached.”
在两年后的2018年，同样享有盛誉的《科学》(Science)杂志发表了一项与《自然》发表的研究完全矛盾的研究。人口统计学家、罗马大学的伊丽莎贝塔·巴尔比(Elisabetta Barbi)和加州大学伯克利分校的肯尼斯·瓦赫特(Kenneth Wachter)以及几位同事，对近4000名意大利人的生存记录进行了研究，得出结论，尽管死亡风险在80岁之前呈指数增长，但之后的增长速度会放缓，并最终趋于稳定。活到105岁的人有50%的可能活到下一年。活到106、107、108和109岁的人也同样。文章作者写道，他们的研究结果“强烈暗示，人类寿命随着时间继续增长，如果有极限的话，还没有达到。”
MANY SCIENTISTS WHO study aging think that biomedical breakthroughs are the only way to substantially increase the human life span, but some doubt that anyone alive today will witness such radical interventions; a few doubt they are even possible. In any case, longevity scientists agree, significantly elongating life without sustaining well-being is pointless, and enhancing vitality in old age is valuable regardless of gains in maximum life span.
许多研究衰老的科学家认为，生物医学的突破是大幅延长人类寿命的唯一途径，但有些人怀疑，今天活着的人能否见证此类激进干预手段的出现；一些人甚至怀疑这根本不可能。无论如何，研究长寿的科学家都认同的是，在无法保持健康的情况下，大幅延长寿命是毫无意义的，无论增加多少最长寿命，增强老年活力都是有价值的。
One of the many obstacles to these goals is the overwhelming complexity of aging in mammals and other vertebrates. Researchers have achieved astonishing results by tweaking the genome of the roundworm C. elegans, extending its life span nearly 10 times — the equivalent of a person’s living 1,000 years. Although scientists have used caloric restriction, genetic engineering and various drugs to stretch life span in more complex species, including fish, rodents and monkeys, the gains have never been as sharp as in roundworms, and the precise mechanisms underlying these changes remain unclear.
实现这些目标的诸多障碍之一，是哺乳动物和其他脊椎动物衰老过程的极度复杂性。通过调整秀丽隐杆线虫的基因组，研究者取得了惊人成果，将其寿命延长了近十倍——相当于让一个人活了1000年。尽管科学家们已经用上了热量限制、基因工程和各种药物来延长更复杂物种的寿命，包括鱼类、啮齿动物和猴子，但效果从未像蛔虫那样明显，而这些变化背后的确切机制仍不为人知。
More recently, however, researchers have tested particularly innovative techniques for reversing and postponing some aspects of aging, with tentative but promising results. James Kirkland, an expert on aging at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has demonstrated with colleagues that certain drug cocktails purge old mice of senescent cells, granting them more than a month of additional healthy living. Their research has already inspired numerous human clinical trials. At the University of California, Berkeley, the married bioengineers Irina and Michael Conboy are investigating ways to filter or dilute aged blood in rodents to remove molecules that inhibit healing, which in turn stimulates cellular regeneration and the production of revitalizing compounds.
然而在最近，研究者测试了一些格外新颖的技术，以逆转和推延衰老的某些方面，取得了初步但有希望的成果。明尼苏达州罗彻斯特市梅奥诊所(Mayo Clinic)研究衰老的专家詹姆斯·柯克兰(James Kirkland)已经和同事们证明，特定的药物混合可以清除老年鼠的衰老细胞，让它们多得到一个多月的健康生活。他们的研究已经启发了许多人体临床试验。在加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)，生物工程师夫妇伊琳娜(Irina)和迈克尔·康博伊(Michael Conboy)正在研究如何过滤或稀释啮齿动物的老化血液，以去除抑制愈合的分子，从而反过来刺激细胞再生以及再生化合物的形成。
In a study published in Nature in December 2020, David Sinclair, a director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School, along with colleagues, partly restored vision in middle-aged and ailing mice by reprogramming their gene expression. The researchers injected the mice’s eyes with a benign virus carrying genes that revert mature cells to a more supple, stem-cell-like state, which allowed their neurons to regenerate — an ability that mammals usually lose after infancy. “Aging is far more reversible than we thought,” Sinclair told me. “Cells can clean themselves up, they can get rid of old proteins, they can rejuvenate, if you turn on the youthful genes through this reset process.”
在2020年12月发表于《自然》的一项研究中，哈佛医学院(Harvard Medical School)保罗·F·格伦衰老生物学研究中心(Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research)主任戴维·辛克莱尔(David Sinclair)与其同事通过重新编写基因表达，部分恢复了中年和患病鼠的视力。研究者为老鼠眼睛注射了一种良性病毒，这种病毒携带的基因可以将成熟细胞恢复到更柔软的干细胞样状态，从而使它们的神经元能够再生——哺乳动物通常在婴儿期后就失去了这种能力。“衰老的可逆远超我们想象，”辛克莱尔告诉我。“只要你通过这个重置过程打开年轻的基因，细胞就可以自我清理，可以清除陈旧蛋白质，可以恢复活力。”
Known for his boyish features and sanguine predictions, Sinclair, 51, has also founded at least 12 biotech companies and serves on the boards of several more, one of which is already pursuing human clinical trials of a gene therapy based on his recent Nature study. In a talk at Google, he envisioned a future in which people receive similar treatments every decade or so to undo the effects of aging throughout the body. “We don’t know how many times you can reset,” he said. “It might be three, it might be 3,000. And if you can reset your body 3,000 times, then things get really interesting.”
51岁的辛克莱尔以他孩子气的外表和乐观的预测闻名业界，他还创立了至少12家生物技术公司，并在多家公司的董事会任职，其中一家公司已经根据他最近在《自然》发表的研究进行了基因疗法的人体临床试验。在谷歌(Google)的一次演讲中，他设想在未来，人们每十年左右就可以接受类似治疗，以消除全身衰老的影响。“我们并不知道你能重置多少次，”他说。“可能是三次，也可能是3000次。如果你能把身体重置3000次，那事情就变得很有趣了。”
Longevity scientists who favor the idea of living for centuries or longer tend to speak effusively of prosperity and possibility. Biomedically extended longevity would not only revolutionize general well-being by minimizing or preventing diseases of aging, they say, it would also vastly enrich human experience. It would mean the chance for several fulfilling and diverse careers; the freedom to explore much more of the world; the joy of playing with your great-great-great-grandchildren. Imagine, some say, how wise our future elders could be. Imagine what the world’s most brilliant minds could accomplish with all that time.
倾向于人能活几个世纪或更久的长寿研究的科学家往往会热情地讨论人的幸福和可能性。他们说，通过生物医学的方法延长寿命，不仅能靠减少或预防衰老疾病来彻底改变大众健康，还能极大丰富人类的体验。这意味着人有机会从事多种多样的职业；有探索更多世界的自由；还能与曾曾曾孙辈共享天伦之乐。有人说，想象一下我们未来的长辈会多有智慧。想象一下世界上最聪明的人能用这些寿命成就什么。
In sharp contrast, other experts argue that extending life span, even in the name of health, is a doomed pursuit. Perhaps the most common concern is the potential for overpopulation, especially considering humanity’s long history of hoarding and squandering resources and the tremendous socioeconomic inequalities that already divide a world of nearly eight billion. There are still dozens of countries where life expectancy is below 65, primarily because of problems like poverty, famine, limited education, disempowerment of women, poor public health and diseases like malaria and H.I.V./AIDS, which novel and expensive life-extending treatments will do nothing to solve.
与此形成鲜明对比的是，其他专家认为，即使以健康的名义延长寿命，也是注定会失败的努力。最普遍的担忧也许就是潜在的人口过剩，尤其是考虑到人类囤积和浪费资源的漫长历史，还有巨大的社会经济不平等已经将世界的近80亿人口分割开来。仍有数十个国家的人均寿命低于65岁，主要是由于贫困、饥荒、教育局限、妇女失权、公共卫生状况差以及疟疾、艾滋病等疾病，这些问题是新奇又昂贵生命延长疗法所无法解决的。
Lingering multitudes of superseniors, some experts add, would stifle new generations and impede social progress. “There is a wisdom to the evolutionary process of letting the older generation disappear,” said Paul Root Wolpe, the director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, during one public debate on life extension. “If the World War I generation and World War II generation and perhaps, you know, the Civil War generation were still alive, do you really think that we would have civil rights in this country? Gay marriage?”
一些专家还说，大量留在人世的超级老年人还将扼杀新生代的成长，阻碍社会进步。“让老一代人消失的进化过程是有其智慧的，”埃默里大学(Emory University)伦理中心主任保罗·鲁特·沃尔普(Paul Root Wolpe)在一次关于延长寿命的公开辩论中表示。“如果经历一战和二战的一代人，或者是经历内战的一代人还活着，你真的认为这个国家会有民权吗？会有同性婚姻吗？”
IN HER FINAL years at La Maison du Lac, the once-athletic Jeanne Calment was essentially immobile, confined to her bed and wheelchair. Her hearing continued to decline, she was virtually blind and she had trouble speaking. At times, it was not clear that she was fully aware of her surroundings.
在湖畔屋生活的最后几年，曾经充满活力的让娜·卡尔芒基本无法动弹，只能囿于床铺和轮椅。她的听力持续下降，几乎失明，说话也有困难。有时，也不知她是否能完全辨认周遭的环境。
By some accounts, those in charge of Calment’s care failed to shield her from undue commotion and questionable interactions as journalists, tourists and spectators bustled in and out of her room. Following the release of an investigative documentary, the hospital director barred all visitors. The last time Robine saw her was shortly after her 120th birthday. About two years later, during an especially hot summer, Calment died alone in her nursing-home room from unknown causes.
据一些人说，当记者、游客和旁观者不断进出她的房间时，负责照顾卡尔芒的人没能保护她免于不必要的骚扰和可疑的互动。在一部调查纪录片发行后，医院负责人禁止了一切来访者。罗比内最后一次见她，是在她120岁生日后不久。大约两年后，在一个特别炎热的夏天，卡尔芒在疗养院的房间里孤独地去世了，死因不明。
“Today, more people are surviving the major diseases of old age and entering a new phase of their life in which they become very weak,” Robine said. “We still don’t know how to avoid frailty.”
“如今，越来越多的人能从老年重大疾病中幸存下来，进入生命的一个新阶段，此后他们会变得非常虚弱，”罗比内说。“我们仍不知道如何避免脆弱。”
Perhaps the most unpredictable consequence of uncoupling life span from our inherited biology is how it would alter our future psychology. All of human culture evolved with the understanding that earthly life is finite and, in the grand scheme, relatively brief. If we are one day born knowing that we can reasonably expect to live 200 years or longer, will our minds easily accommodate this unparalleled scope of life? Or is our neural architecture, which evolved amid the perils of the Pleistocene, inherently unsuited for such vast horizons?
或许，我们的遗传生物学所分离出的寿命带来的最不可预测的后果，就是它将如何改变我们的未来心理。所有的人类文明都是在这样一种认知基础上发展起来的，即地球上的生命是有限的，从广义上说是相对短暂的。如果有一天我们在出生时就知道自己可以合理地预期活到200岁甚至更久，我们的大脑能轻松适应这种前所未有的生命跨度吗？亦或者，我们在更新世(Pleistocene)的危险中进化出的神经结构，天生就不适合如此广阔的视野？
Scientists, philosophers and writers have long feared that a surfeit of time would exhaust all meaningful experience, culminating in debilitating levels of melancholy and listlessness. Maybe the desire for all those extra years masks a deeper longing for something unattainable: not for a life that is simply longer, but for one that is long enough to feel utterly perfect and complete.
长期以来，科学家、哲学家和作家一直担心，过多的时间会耗尽所有有意义的体验，最终导致忧郁和倦怠达到使人衰弱的水平。也许，对多活几年的渴望掩盖了某种难以企及的东西的更深层渴求：不是简单地追求更长的生命，而是追求长到让一个人感觉完美和完整的生命。
