People could soon live to 150 years as breakthroughs in biological clocks and rejuvenation research stretch human lifespans to new highs, one expert predicted.
Geneticist Steve Horvath told Time that living to 150 will someday be a reality — though he isn’t sure exactly when.
“I have no doubt it will happen,” Horvath said, pointing to rapid advances in measuring and potentially reversing the biological aging process.
Horvath, a pioneering aging scientist who built the first widely used epigenetic “aging clocks,” said the ability to precisely measure biological age has transformed longevity research, allowing scientists to test whether treatments actually slow — or reverse — the aging process rather than merely treating disease.
Having reliable ways to track aging is essential before any real-life-extending drugs can be proven to work, Horvath said.
He called the technology “a quintessential tool to find interventions for rejuvenation” and argued that exact biological measurements are the foundation for therapies that could actually reverse aging rather than just slow its damage.
The breakthrough came in the early 2010s, when Horvath developed a test based on DNA methylation — chemical modifications that help control how genes are switched on and off — that could estimate a person’s biological age across tissues, giving researchers a way to quantify aging itself rather than relying on years lived.
He later expanded that work into more advanced clocks, including one known as GrimAge, which he describes as the most accurate predictor of mortality risk, designed to estimate “the probability that you will die in the next year” based on biological signals rather than chronological age.
“It’s named after the Grim Reaper,” Horvath told Time.
Despite his confidence about reaching 150, Horvath flatly dismissed the idea that humans are anywhere near living for 1,000 years.
“We’re not close at all,” he said of extreme lifespan extension. “It’s totally science fiction.”
Horvath, principal investigator at Altos Labs’ UK research arm, said even dramatic breakthroughs would still fall far short of the thousand-year lifespans he once imagined as a teenager, stressing that today’s science is focused on realistic gains rather than immortality.
“But my mathematical answer is, I do think at some point there will be drastic extensions of lifespan,” he said, adding that sustained biomedical innovation over decades could meaningfully reshape human longevity — though not to fantastical extremes.
He added that sustained biomedical innovation over long periods could radically reshape how long people live — assuming humanity avoids catastrophe.
“Imagine we have 100 more years of biomedical innovations — what will that do for health?” Horvath said, calling major lifespan gains plausible even if immortality remains out of reach.
“So in an abstract sense, if we don’t wipe each other out in a nuclear holocaust and if we can avoid wars and pandemics, I think our species at some point will find ways to extend lifespan drastically.”
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