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Does the human lifespan have a limit?

Super-centenarians offer clues as demographers and scientists lock horns over one of the world’s oldest research questions.
  1. Michael Eisenstein

    1. Michael Eisenstein a science writer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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In the late eighteenth century, while in hiding from his fellow French revolutionaries, the philosopher and mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet posed a question that continues to occupy scientists to this day. “No doubt man will not become immortal,” he wrote in Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, “but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?”

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Nature 601, S2-S4 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00070-1

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Ageing, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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