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Human Enhancement

Enhancing Human Lifespan

Bennett Foddy proposes a strategy for extending our youthfulness.

In England during the 1850s one in six people died before their first birthday, mostly from infectious diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis and diphtheria. The average life lasted only forty-two years – but if you made it to fifty you could reasonably expect to live another twenty years. That’s the nature of infectious disease: it singles out the very young and the very old.

It was also in the 1850s that the germ theory of disease began to gain acceptance, leading to the gradual eradication of pathogens from the human environment. Sterilization, sanitation, pasteurization, vaccination, and antibiotics vastly relieved the burden of infectious disease from the industrialized world.

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