# Why did survival rates from 21 to 65 increase so much from 1940-1990 **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 21, 2015, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522 "2015-01-21T22:12:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/21 "2015-01-22T02:41:51Z")
Maternal mortality is surely a factor, no? ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/22 "2015-01-22T03:00:17Z")
Antibiotics helped. Pesticides like DDT that killed disease transmitting lice and mosquitoes helped (although there were later problems with it killing other lifeforms). Improved surgical techniques helped, along with safer anesthesia. Improved infrastructure in regards to water treatment and sewage helped. Improved vaccines helped. And so on, and so forth. The mistake is in looking for _just one_ thing that changed survival rates. ---
**Author:** ![Marion\_Wormer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d07c76/32.png) [@Marion\_Wormer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marion_Wormer)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/23 "2015-01-22T03:08:36Z")
Medicare started in the mid-sixties. The elderly who once would have just died from trivial things are now getting medical treatment. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/24 "2015-01-22T03:13:54Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > … largely a result of eradicating childhood diseases … Ding ding ding! The big gains in life expectancy during those decades were not a reflection of living longer once someone made it being an adult but in the huge number of lefe years added by preventing childhood deaths. Look at figures one and two [here](http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_child_mortality_pub.pdf). (pdf) > [@](#): > > The death rate for children aged 1-4 years showed a consistently downward trend between 1935 and 2007, decreasing at a rapid rate of 3.3% … Mortality among children aged 5-14 years also showed a consistently downward trend during 1935-2007, with the rate decreasing from 150.0 deaths per 100,000 population in 1935 to 15.3 in 2007 (Figure 2). The average rate of decline in mortality among children aged 5-14 was 2.7% per year during this period … These reductions in the overall child mortality rate were due to large declines in mortality from unintentional injuries, pneumonia and influenza, cancer, and birth defects … Improvements in living conditions, better nutrition, advances in medical care, and the introduction of Medicaid in 1965 have been cited as factors responsible for the long-term decline in child mortality, particularly from such medical or “biologic” causes as pneumonia and influenza, cancer, and birth defects (1, 2). Unintentional injury mortality among children includes deaths due to motor vehicle crashes, accidental drowning, and residential fires, and disparities in mortality from such injuries arise mainly due to social and environmental factors, including socioeconomic disadvantage and poor housing or living conditions (1, 2). Motor vehicle safety improvements … ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/25 "2015-01-22T03:35:49Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Ding ding ding! > > The big gains in life expectancy during those decades were not a reflection of living longer once someone made it being an adult but in the huge number of lefe years added by preventing childhood deaths. Look at figures one and two [here](http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_child_mortality_pub.pdf). (pdf) I’m going to defend the OP on this. Using those who already made it to 21 as a baseline factors out improvements in eliminating childhood deaths. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/26 "2015-01-22T03:58:35Z")
Well, to be strictly fair, some childhood diseases might cause lingering effects that could kill you, or render you more vulnerable, after childhood. But yeah, that’ll be a small component, and starting at 21 should _mostly_ rule out the childhood diseases. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/27 "2015-01-22T04:10:11Z")
No, my bad. Skimmed the op too quickly. Still young adult death decrease probably led the decline in the early years of the time period and for the same reasons … fewer deaths due to pneumonia, influenza, and unintentional injuries. Secondary to improved nutrition, improved living conditions, and medical care inclusive of the wide spread use (and over-use) of antibiotics. In more recent years better care for heart disease and decreased tobacco use have pushed the deaths at 40 to 60 out to 70 to 80 sometimes. Medicare giving the poor access to basic care also had a major impact. I’ll see if I can find something on how many died at what age by decade … ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/28 "2015-01-22T04:29:43Z")
[Here’s](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/statab/hist001r.pdf) (pdf) 1979 to 1998 and and [here](https://books.google.com/books?id=WFxqAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=Death+Rates+by+10-Year+Age+Groups:+United+States+1940&source=bl&ots=mIFwSwe5za&sig=Atnb0fE0VT7F4FNtsSlheiUIQFk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=53jAVPWnKcKjNqiRhIgE&ved=0CFkQ6AEwCw#v=onepage&q=Death%20Rates%20by%2010-Year%20Age%20Groups%3A%20United%20States%201940&f=false) is 1940. 1940 162K/1,000,000 in the 25 to 34 range (the highest of any adult decadal cohort). 1998 the same 25 to 34 year old cohort was about 1K/1,000,000 (the lowest of all adult decadal cohorts). ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/29 "2015-01-22T07:34:50Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > Antibiotics helped. > > Pesticides like DDT that killed disease transmitting lice and mosquitoes helped (although there were later problems with it killing other lifeforms). > > Improved surgical techniques helped, along with safer anesthesia. > > Improved infrastructure in regards to water treatment and sewage helped. > > Improved vaccines helped. > > And so on, and so forth. It occurs to me that advances in communications, emergency response, and medevac capabilities over the last fifty years must have also saved an incredible number of lives. Progress never comes to a halt. Life-saving technologies build on one another all the time, in all fields, so it’s hardly surprising that the trend is consistently upward. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/30 "2015-01-22T07:39:23Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I’m going to defend the OP on this. Using those who already made it to 21 as a baseline factors out improvements in eliminating childhood deaths. Perhaps, but the _average_ life _expectancy is by definition average precisely because it reflects mortality throughout the human lifespan_. The latter is genetically determined and seems to be around 100 years, give or take a few. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/31 "2015-01-22T14:56:08Z")
Sorry but your post **terentii** seems a bit confused. Average life expectancy and upper limit lifespan are very different things. Hence the importance of my mistaken read of the op and of my being able find documentation that the big change between the 40s and 1979 (in deaths after age 21) was in fewer deaths among the youngest adults. Since then the drop in rate per unit population has been more evenly distributed with the only cohort increasing being those who die after 85 and the biggest absolute number drops in the 65 to 84 groups. You may be interested in [this read](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6042/549.full?sid=193cbea3-2dac-4b45-bde1-edf718bd6846) from Science (I hope not behind the paywall). Some excerpts - > [@](#): > > Vaupel, an American who works mainly at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and Olshansky of the University of Illinois in Chicago, appear to have sourced their crystal balls from very different manufacturers. For 20 years they’ve been arguing, joined by demographers worldwide, trying to answer a question that is essentially unanswerable: whether the future will resemble the past. Vaupel says it will, with life expectancies at birth rising unabated by about 3 months a year in countries where residents live the longest. … > > … For Olshansky, the debate over limits to the human life span began in 1990, when he published a paper in Science (2 November 1990, p. 634). Called “In Search of Methuselah: Estimating the Upper Limits to Human Longevity,” the paper postulated that “it seems highly unlikely that life expectancy at birth will exceed the age of 85.” … “Most of the past increases in life expectancy occurred because we saved the young,” he says. “That can only happen once.” Even a cure for cancer, he calculated, would add only 4 or 5 years of life across a population. … > > … These days, “I think the Vaupel school is larger than the Olshansky school,” says Steven Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Austad has a friendly wager with Olshansky: He’s betting that as of the year 2000, the first 150-year-old human had already been born. Olshansky doesn’t think so. The two have put $150 each into an investment account, to be accessed in the year 2150, when the winner will become clear. “In the best-case scenario I would get the proceeds,” Austad says. “Or, more likely, my kids or grandkids.” … > > … One reason for disagreement is that although we think of life expectancy as a single number, it’s really not. There are different mortality rates for different ages, sexes, and parts of the world. “Life expectancy is a one-number summary of 100 numbers,” Alho says. “What actually is the most relevant way of looking at these things? It’s not obvious.” > > In 1980, epidemiologist James Fries of Stanford postulated that the percentage of people surviving past age 100 was fixed. In the late 1980s, Vaupel decided to test this. He traveled to Stockholm, which holds some of the world’s best mortality data, and found that since 1860, death rates for centenarians had fallen in half. This meant that centenarians were dying off more slowly than they used to, which ran counter to what Fries had predicted. … Short version - there is no way to know if there is any such 100 year old or any specific genetic limitation and the fact that those who reach 100 are dying less soon than they used to argues strongly against 100 years as such a limit. ---
**Author:** ![Pabitel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/bbce88/32.png) [@Pabitel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pabitel)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/32 "2015-01-22T16:19:22Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Don’t forget that there were two world wars in your first age bracket, but the second bracket only just barely caught the end of one. Not to mention 675,000 dead as a result of the Spanish Flu epidemic. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/33 "2015-01-22T16:48:53Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Sorry but your post **terentii** seems a bit confused. Average life expectancy and upper limit lifespan are very different things. Sorry, I thought I made the difference very clear. I remember an interview with Christiaan Barnard many years ago in which he made precisely that distinction. Life expectancy can be altered by environmental factors and lifestyle. Lifespan cannot be altered except through evolution. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/34 "2015-01-22T16:57:42Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Short version - there is no way to know if there is any such 100 year old or any specific genetic limitation and the fact that those who reach 100 are dying less soon than they used to argues strongly against 100 years as such a limit. I’m on Olshansky’s side of this bet. The curve so far certainly seems to be asymptotic. Since we’re already regularly seeing people live to 115 the limit must be higher than that, but there’s no reason to push it to 150. Doing so would require some unknown breakthrough - not impossible but not predictable either. And the big issue is whether life from 90 to 150 could ever be meaningfully active, mentally and physically. Adding 50 years to be spent in an institution is pure cruelty. > [@Pabitel](#): > > Not to mention 675,000 dead as a result of the Spanish Flu epidemic. Exactly the sort of deaths that antibiotics would lessen. All those flu shots every year alone must save thousands of lives. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 5:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/35 "2015-01-22T17:05:20Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Since we’re already regularly seeing people live to 115 the limit must be higher than that. “Regularly”? Really? :dubious: A bit more often than in the past, perhaps, but I wouldn’t say it’s “regularly.” People who live as long as 115 years have got to be statistical outliers, gene-wise. Nonogenarians and centenarians are more a tribute to improved geriatric care, I should think. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/36 "2015-01-22T17:58:31Z")
Obviously, the oldest people are outliers. What’s interesting is that the standard for the extreme keeps creeping upward. There are five known people alive today who were born in [1898 or 1899](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/09/05/six-people-still-alive-who-were-born-in-the-19th-century/15122367/). Wikipedia’s list of the [100 known oldest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people) only goes down to 114 years, 29 days. [Jeanne Calment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment)lived to be 122. There are hundreds of thousands of known centenarians worldwide, and the number per million population has increased since the end of WWII far faster than the total population. Only 1 in 1000 centenarians are estimated to live to be 110, though, which is why I call the trend asymptotic. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/37 "2015-01-22T18:05:06Z")
So really, in a broad sense, we could say that the difference is probably most attributable to applications of the germ theory of disease, which was still being nailed down at about the time the 1896 cohort was born, and practical applications didn’t come along until later (antibiotics, antiseptics, vaccinations, related public health initiatives, and the like), but were either completely or mostly in place for the 1946 cohort. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/38 "2015-01-22T18:08:09Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I’m on Olshansky’s side of this bet. … I would take that side of the bet too but the fact is that we do not yet know and any statement as to what the biologic limit is is pure speculation. From a practical POV it is _likely_ to be like other aspects of biologic function. Take the fastest mile run. In 1865 it was 4.36.5. Go by roughly 15 year steps and the change was faster by almost 9 seconds the first 15 year step, 7 seconds the next, 12 the next, 8 the next (in 1985), and then only 3 seconds gained by 15 years later and none since (been about another 15 years). No doubt the current record will broken but there is not going to be gains of 7 to 12 seconds every 15 years from here. [Here’s](http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/19/gerona.glu130.full) some evidence that it will behave in that “probabilistic barrier” fashion, looking at two groups - supercenterians and Olympians. > [@](#): > > The approach consists in analyzing life-span density trends of two highly selected populations with a propensity to live longer. Their current maximum life-span trends may figure the general population in the near future. … > > …The superior layer, formed by the greatest life-span values of Olympians, creates a survival convex envelope at approximately 98 years. The convex envelope points out the Olympians life-span upper limit observed. The density layers, below this convex envelope, move upward with birth date leveling off with the upper limit envelope. > > A similar pattern is present among supercentenarians. Their life span creates a survival convex envelope at approximately 115 years. The densities layers above this envelope evolve with time, but the upper limit remains steady and a plateau may be visualized up to now. … > > … We find better support to explain our results in arguments such an “invisible barrier,” as previously suggested (1,21). This scenario seems to be represented here, through the densification phenomenon, alluding to a rectangularization of the survival curves (22,23). The slower pace in the trend of life span maximum observed among Olympians is even more stable among supercentenarians illustrating a “barrier” represented by the survival convex envelope. To support life-span extension forecasts, we would expect to find signs of expansion trends, people living each time longer at advanced ages (2). This scenario is hardly supported by the description of supercentenarians’ and Olympians’ current trends. … Of course these sorts of analysis do not allow for changes in the understanding of the aging process and possible interventions. Cancer and aging both seem to largely functions of accumulated errors and changes over the history of cell divisions (hence tissues that have more divisions tend to be the tissues in which cancers occur). ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/39 "2015-01-22T22:40:16Z")
I don’t think the comparison between highest age and fastest mile is accurate because for running a mile there is a long list of things you cannot do to enhance your performance. If someone took steroids, growth hormone, cocaine, epo and then stuck giant springs in their shoes they could probably beat the current world record. But that would not be considered valid. The same applies with human longevity. In 2010 there were 53,364 centenarians in the US. Only 0.6% of them were 110 or older, and about 84% are women. > **[2010 Census Report Shows More Than 80 Percent of Centenarians are Women -...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census/cb12-239.html)** > > 2010 Census Report Shows More Than 80 Percent of Centenarians are Women Seeing how there were almost 3 million births (2.77 million) a year around 1910, that means only a tiny fraction of those people lived to 100. Also you’d have to look at births from 1895-1910 to get a more accurate picture. Either way, it is less than 1%. > **[Live Births and Birth Rates, by Year](https://www.infoplease.com/us/population/live-births-and-birth-rates-year)** > > The following table shows the number of live births and the birth rate in the United States between 1910 and 2005. Year Births1 Rate2 1910 2,777,000 30.1 1915 2,965,000 29.5 1920 2,950,000 27.7 1925 2,909,000 25.1 1930 2,618,000 21.3 1935 2,377,000... There were about 30k people aged 100-101 in 2010, the only survivors of about 5.5 million people born in 1909 and 1910. So less than 1% of people live to 100. Of those survivors, less than 1% live to 110. Only 1 person has been verified to survive to 120. Maybe you can’t say there is a definite number, but 135 as an example is a reasonable upper limit on human longevity barring massive medical advances based on human track records. Then again, good record keeping didn’t exist pre 20th century either so finding verified births before then was much harder. Will people live longer than that someday? Yes, but only because they are so inundated with medical technology that they aren’t technically ‘human’ anymore. Someone born today will probably live to 150. But when they do they will have (among other things). [ul] [li]Stem cells to replace cells, tissues and organs lost with age[/li][li]A wide cocktail of medical interventions to reactivate all the self repair mechanisms that stop working with age (basically what compounds like resveratrol claim to do, but far more effective)[/li][li]Mechanical muscles and organs[/li][li]Gene therapy[/li][li]Manmade red blood cells[/li][li]Augmented immune system[/li][/ul] You can’t really say because that person lives to 150 that that means 150 is the human upper limit. No unenhanced human is going to live that long. You might as well extrapolate out to 500 years from now when aging is totally cured and people can live to be 5000+ years old in the bodies of 25 year olds. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2015, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522/40 "2015-01-22T23:44:25Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > I don’t think the comparison between highest age and fastest mile is accurate because for running a mile there is a long list of things you cannot do to enhance your performance. > > If someone took steroids, growth hormone, cocaine, epo and then stuck giant springs in their shoes they could probably beat the current world record. … Beat it by 7 seconds or more? Doubtful. Even with enhancers we come near a probablistic limit, not a wall, but smaller gains even with enhancers. But yes, major breakthroughs in the understanding of the basics of the aging process could potentially shift the location of the limit. Barring that I would bet against the 150 side. I won’t be alive to find out though. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-survival-rates-from-21-to-65-increase-so-much-from-1940-1990/710522.md?page=3)