ISTOCK, PRAETORIANPHOTOLast October, a paper published in Nature made a big splash with its claim that human longevity was limited to 115 years. Although the study made headlines in most of the major news outlets, it sparked a heated debate among scientists—not everyone was sold on the authors’ conclusions. Five groups of researchers have now published a series of formal rebuttals that were published today (June 28) in Nature Communications Arising.
In the 2016 study, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues analyzed global demographic data over the last century and demonstrated that since the mid-1990s, peak age plateaued at around 115 years. Based on these results, the authors concluded that humans had natural age limit at 115, and that the probability of surviving to over the age of 125 was less than 1 in 10,000.
“It’s an extreme claim that they make that there is a limit to human lifespan, and I think an extreme claim deserves extreme scrutiny,” says Maarten Pieter Rozing, a professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Healthy Aging, who co-authored a rebuttal. “There is an alternative explanation, which is that [maximum age] ...
