What a difference two days at the BioVision World Life Sciences Forum in Lyon can make to all our lives. Speaking in the opening plenary session on February 8, Francis Collins, director of the NIH Human Genome Research Institute (Bethesda, MD), hesitantly predicted that the average human life expectancy at birth in the developed countries could be as high as 90 years by 2030. By the closing plenary of the forum on February 10, Laurent Fabius, the French Minister of Finance, had revised that estimate upwards to 120 years. No wonder France has a budget surplus.