Variations on this article are popping up all over today. As far as aging is concerned, I'm just an interested layperson, but there are two things that strike me about the ideas in this article.

First, the trope of 115 years, or 120 years or 122 or 125 years, or whatever, as some kind of limit probably survives for a constellation of reasons. It's fun to be able to tell optimists that they're fundamentally wrong. And it's cheap and easy to do so. It's also comforting to not have to wonder if you're missing out on extreme longevity by--I don't know--not exercising enough or not eating your vegetables, or whatever. It also sounds like "a discovery" or a new way of understanding things. So, mimetically, this thing has power. You want to tell people about it, and they want to tell others. They cycle of news continues. But this has no bearing on the claim's predictive value or theoretical foundation.

Second, what kind of "natural limit" could this be? We're describing, essentially, a statistical phenomenon, by the author's own admission. Things break over time, and the accumulated damage accelerates further breakage, and then everything gets too broke to continue. That seems to be the idea, to me. But, there isn't anything fundamental about that, to me. It seems like we don't know how to repair things, yet. (This makes the mention of Aubrey de Grey in another one of the articles I saw today especially appalling; de Grey is spurring and funding research in figuring out how to repair the damage of aging.) Every time it is explained that the authors "did research" or "analyzed a database," their sample was drawn from a time when aging was poorly understood, and therapies to target aging were nonexistent. (For example: history up until at least 2016.) This is like pointing to a graph of falling temperature as nightfall approaches and concluding that it is impossible to build a campfire!

It's just maddening. <takes deep breath> I have a couple of related observations. 3 scientists just won the Nobel prize for demonstrating synthetic molecular machines. I'm not claiming that this is obviously the answer to aging or will bring it about Real Soon Now, but aren't we, at long last, at least operating at the scale at which the damage from aging occurs? Can't we even imagine new techniques arising from that? Another observation is the work that Aubrey de Grey has been up to, and has been sponsoring and advocating. I would recommend to anyone that they at least look into that. He's at least addressing aging directly, and talking about its biochemical machinery in a focused way. And what about CRISPR/CAS9? Or the more recent CRISPR/Cpf1?

Finally, I can't believe that I feel like I need to say this, but "aging" isn't magic. It gets talked about in a very folk-wisdom kind of way, as a bunch of received wisdom about some mystical process. But, some aspects of it have to succumb to some kind of analysis or observation, and the--not entirely unreasonable, I think--hope is that restoring a cell, or an organ, or a person to some approximation of a less time-ravaged state might eventually be within our grasp. To just declare otherwise seems to me to be just rank superstition, an unjustified hypothesis about a field that is beyond one's ken, even if it is not beyond the ken of researchers, present or future, in the field.