Freezing time in your best years, not your end years | Dr. Morgan Levine

• People have been really consumed with the idea of immortality and aging for a very long time. But the question is: Is a longer life truly a better life? And in some cases, perhaps yes, but not always. Really, what matters to most people is quality of life.

We know that there is sometimes a disconnect between this concept of what we call 'lifespan' and 'healthspan.' Lifespan is just the time you've been alive between birth and death. And what scientists think healthspan is, is the time you're alive in a more healthy, functioning state—and that's what we're trying to optimize. But sometimes we see a discordance between these two features.

One example is this idea of the health-survival paradox that we see between men and women. On average, women across the world tend to live longer—by a few years—than men. But women are also more prone to some of the diseases we see with aging. Women tend to spend more time in age-related disability than men do.

And some might argue: Is that a better life because they've lived longer, or would you actually want, maybe, a shorter life, but more free from these diseases of aging? What aging science is about is not just prolonging life at all costs, but actually prolonging healthy life.

So we think if we intervene in the aging process itself, that we can delay all of the things that people are scared about when they think of aging. And that's really the goal. We want to increase quality of life and maintain that over time. And if that produces a longer life, that's an extra bonus, but that's not the ultimate goal.

In thinking about how we actually want to intervene in aging and what we want to be the outcome of our science, this really comes down to this concept that we call 'compression of morbidity.' So the idea is: Can we push the onset of disease and disability far away so that right before you die, you're really compressing the timing of disease into this really short window?

As opposed to having it earlier in life and surviving 20, 30, or 40 years with these diseases of aging. We think this is possible, 'cause you can actually look at centenarian populations and see that they tend to compress the timing of disease into the short window right before death—so they're spending the majority of their life in a much more healthy state.

And really what we want to do is figure out how can we have this possible for everyone so that we can remain healthy, functioning, and happy with good quality of life for as long as possible. Another really important thing to keep in mind in terms of longevity science is that we actually don't want to increase what we call 'health disparities.'

So right now, even though the average life expectancy in the population is just under about 80 years, we wanna make sure that we can get everyone to a longer and healthier life, and not just have interventions or therapeutics that help more affluent people get there. How do we make sure that everyone can have as healthy and long a life as possible?

• Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. To learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.