Prolongevity research took a stunning leap forward in April, 2000, when Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technologies announced that "Cloning Reverses Aging In Cow Cells, Science Authors Say". What's so stunning about this achievement is that it shows that Nature appears to have a way of cleaning up all the age-inflicted damage in an old, old somatic cell, allowing it to generate brand, spanking new infants. This at least suggests the possibility of complete rejuvenation of somatic cells, thereby (partially or wholly) reversing aging! Whether and when that can be done is certainly an open question, but it would also seem to offer the most exciting research opportunities! These announcements may be the year's most significant.
    Another promising lead during the year has been the unearthing of the genetic basis for slowing aging through caloric restriction.
   I believe these discoveries may warrant the longevity-research equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
    Humankind is the only animal that is born knowing that it's going to die. Changing this awareness from the fey to the open-ended would seem to be a stunning shift in perspective for us all. It would bring problems as well as potentialities. There would have to be some sort of birth control, with a lifetime limitation of one child per person, perhaps as a prerequisite for youth extension. Changes in retirement plans would become de rigueur. Greater emphasis upon safety and accident avoidance might surface. Today, tyrants die of old age, but in an ageless future, that might not happen.
    It's been observed that fatal illnesses such as cancer would still terminate our lives. However, it's worth noting that, even without improved treatments, infants are born with a very low probability of developing these fatal illnesses early on.
    John Campbell, the editor of "Analog Science Fiction and Fact" noted perhaps 40 years ago that someone had probably already been born who wouldn't be condemned to die of old age. Once, a development came along that would retard aging by ten years or so, that would buy enough time for further improvements that would continue to stretch the lifespan. I don't know whether that's true of those born around 1960, but I would expect that most of you who are reading this right now may never have to grow very old.
1-5-2001:
    Something is getting ready to happen that, I believe, ranks with the invention of the wheel and the taming of fire. Night before last, I looked at my new February issue of Worth magazine  On the front cover is the title of one of its articles: "Get Rich, Stay Rich Forever, The Radical Business of Eternal Youth", by Gwen Kincaid, pg. 63. A company by the name of Eukarion has developed a product that, for the first time, is extending lthe maximum lifespan in animals (rats, mice, pigs, and later, nematodes). Results of formal testing should be available by the end of this year, including an answer to the question of whether or not this agent could be employed to reverse aging. Human trials using this drug as a prophylactic against strokes may begin as early as this June. If they are satisfactory and no untoward side effects are observed, they could be available for people at risk for a stroke as early as 2006. Another company mentioned in the article is working on a life extension pill. The article also discusses several other research programs that are trudging in this direction.
    It's hard to imagine the changes that such discoveries would/will make. They would/will change everything. Some birth control becomes mandatory. And who's going to enforce birth control? It needs to be enforced today, but it isn't. The right to have as many children as you please is considered to be inviolable. Those who received anti-senescence elixirs might/may have to sign legally binding contracts that guarantee that they won't have more than the one child per person (two per couple) to which they would/will be legally entitled. We would be restricted to having children only once, but our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, etc., and our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, etc., would be a part of our family, not to mention the uncle or aunt, great-uncles and/or great-aunts, niece(s), and/or nephew(s), and great-nieces and great-nephews, etc. What we'd lose in breadth we'd more than recover in depth.
    There would be some long-term changes to our retirement arrangements. But I would hope that no one would lie awake tonight worrying about his or her retirement income. Whatever happens will happen gradually over a period of decades. At first, I thought these would have to happen in a hurry, but after thinking about it, I've realized that it will probably be a gradual thing, and at least at first, will probably fall under the existing heading of "greater life expectancies for retirees". In the first place, it will probably be no earlier than the 2006 mentioned above before prolongevity drugs could be approved for public use. At that point, they will be available only for prescription use against specific ailments. Second, to the extent to which they merely prolong life by a certain percentage, they won't improve the capacities of seniors to re-enter the workplace. Third, some employers aren't eager to hire senior citizens, laying them off or retiring them to open up jobs for new-hires. Fourth, retirees have paid into retirement plans, and expect to receive a return on their retirement savings. I could envision a situation in which federal programs like Social Security would gradually reduce their benefits in order to stay solvent. Senior citizens would have to either replace lost income through investment income from their savings, or would have to work part-time or full-time until they could save enough money to adequately supplement their declining retirement incomes. If I'm still around in two decades, I'll take my chances on reduced Social Security income. If I'm physiologically younger then than I am now, I'll be glad to work a while longer. In the meantime, our IRA money should continue to grow tax-free, and may be able to replace shortfalls in retirement income. And that would leave us 10 or 20 years to save additional money.
    Private retirement plans, with their own investment portfolios, might not face such problems, although small changes might be necessary to set them up on a permanent basis. But they might provide income in perpetuity. (Most of them are designed to automatically reduce income, anyway, through a lack of cost-of-living adjustments.) The new generation of defined contribution plans will be set for permanent operation from the get-go, and people investing in them now can probably look for retirement that isn't dependent upon the whims of governments or corporations.
There are innumerable ramifications to this

Eternal Youth Wouldn't Mean Immortality
    It should be noted that even the limiting case of eternal youth doesn't mean immortality. In a world of the forever-young, people would continue to die at the mortality rate of, perhaps, twenty-somethings. Of course, improvements in health care, and reductions in the accident rate could increase life expectancy. I read a Nation Institute on Aging estimate of 400 years for the life expectancy of a population that didn't age. And of course, what's being discussed for the near future is, initially, a modest reduction in the aging rate, leading to health improvements. This would allow someone who were 30 at the time they began treatment to reach 70 looking and feeling like a 60-year-old. It would allow someone who is 45 to reach 85 looking and feeling like a 75-year-old--not terribly dramatic. That can presumably be done now through caloric restriction. But I think that's only the beginning. For the first time, doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of the animal life spans is occurring. And the calf-cloning incident suggests that aging can be reversed, and that aging might possibly be reversible in adults. I now believe that perpetual youth might possibly be in the cards.

Not Talking About More Time in Failing Health
    It should be emphasized that we're not talking about gaining more time at the wrong end of life. We're talking about extending the youthspan. And we're not talking about a static state of prolongevity technology, but about a dynamic one. However things stand at the start, they'll rapidly improve.

Problems That Chronic Youth Might Not Correct
    There are aging problems that may not be corrected by perpetual youth. For example, one's teeth would eventually wear down. Teeth implants might be necessary. Bone deformities, such as bunions and bone spurs (e. g., from tight shoes), might develop over time. These can probably be corrected, but might require medical intervention.

Financial Implications
    The financial changes would/will be mind-boggling. If life extension pharmaceuticals cost an average of $10 a year for everyone on the planet, that would amount to $60,000,000,000 a year in annual income. If it cost a more-reasonable $100 a year (perhaps) $100 a month in first-world countries), that would amount to $600,000,000,000 a year in annual pharmaceutical income. That's a lot of lucre.
Today, if a couple saves and conservatively invests (at 4% a year, after taxes and inflation) 15% of their salaries over a period of 40 years, at the end of that time, they will have saved about 15 years of salary at the end of the 40 years. (Between Social Security, that extracts 7.5% of your after-tax money, and retirement plans that probably extract a minimum of another 7.5% of after-tax money, prudent workers are probably setting aside at least 15% of their after-tax money today.) 15% is probably a lower limit on what what people should be setting aside. Assuming a conservatively-invested rate of return of 4% on their joint savings account, they could expect an income of about 60% of their combined salaries. Considering that they had been saving about 15% of their after-tax money or 20% of their gross income, that would mean that they had only been receiving 80% of their gross salary when they were working. 60% of their working-years gross salary would be 75% of their after-saving-for-retirement salary. In my own case, I was setting aside, out of gross salary, $9,500 a year for our 403B plan, 6% of my gross salary for the Georgia Tech retirement plan, about $7,500 in after-tax money, or $10,000 of gross salary for Social Security, and about $3,000 in gross salary for our two IRA's. That all added up to about $22,500 plus 6% of my gross salary diverted to retirement systems. At a guess, that would have amounted to 30-some % of my total salary diverted to retirement plans. So we were living on, perhaps, 60+% of my income before I retired. However, for two people with no house payments, that was quite enough, thank you.

How Retirement Plans Might Handle These Changes
    Initially, Medicare costs might drop somewhat as people enjoyed better health. Changes have to be made to render the Social Security system solvent, anyway, so I could imagine some of these greater-life-expectency concepts being factored into that already-necessary legislation.
    One of the first changes might involve the income test. Today, if your retirement income exceeds a certain (fairly high) threshold, you're taxed upon half of your Social Security income. That could be raised to full tax on your Social Security income, or a reduction in your Social Security income, and the thresholds could be reduced without visiting terrible hardships upon most retirees.
    One way to handle this would be to base the annual payouts to retirees upon the time-averaged total investment income received by the retirement fund. That way, as the retirement rolls swelled over a period of decades, the retirees' individual pensions might shrink over time. In that case, they would have to replace more and more of their income with either income from their own investments, or with earned income.
    Another change would probably be further hikes in the retirement age for programs such as Social Security, with the result that a larger fraction of workers might try to fund their own retirements through savings and investments without depending upon Social Security. (The fly in the ointment here is medical insurance.)
    In principal one might restrict these changes only to retirees who have signed up for longevity aids. However, longevity aids are already with us in the form of improved medical technology, and it might be hard to distinguish between medical enhancements and youth-extending pharmaceuticals. Also, you might see elders who supposedly hadn't received longevity intervention who began looking younger and aging slower because they had found ways to get longevity treatments on the sly.

   (On the other hand, with their children grown and gone, with houses paid off, and with savings and investments, senior citizens could, perhaps, afford to work part-time, or could go back to school to equip themselves for jobs that they would enjoy.) There are innumerable ramifications to this  Today, most of us spend the best years of our lives having and rearing our children. We don't really have time for ourselves until we're fifty-ish, and by then, we're middle-aged, looking into old age. Once our children are on their own and the house is paid off, we could live on less. Imagine how it would be if we were physically thirty or twenty-five, with decades of good living stretching out before us! Also, the likelihood of disease even without improvements in medical technology would be far lower than it is in old age. We would be restricted to having children only once, but our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, etc., and our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, etc., would be a part of our family, not to mention the uncle or aunt, great-uncles and/or great-aunts,  niece(s), and/or nephew(s), and great-nieces and great-nephews, etc. What we'd lose in breadth we'd more than recover in depth.