Making your money last if you live to 100

We are living longer but not creating financial plans to keep pace. Advisers give tips on how to make sure you don’t outlive your money.

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Google Wants You to Live 170 Years

Along the lines of self-driving cars and smart glasses, Google's newest venture promises to wow the tech scene. Only, it's not quite tech, at least in the traditional sense. The venture is called California Life Company, or Calico for short, and its goal is to extend human life by 20 to 100 years.

It sounds surreal, until consider that we already extended human life by 20 years over the past century. The average girl born today will live to be 100, a once outlying achievement.

Other research outlets have made relevant discoveries over the years, including worms that divide stem cells without aging and that resveratrol, found in red wine, seems to defend against diseases related to aging and could be manufactured as a more potent synthetic drug.

Meanwhile, companies such as Elixir Pharmaceuticals, Sirtris Pharma and Halcyon Molecular set out to extend human life, only to shut down (or be acquired, then shuttered by the buyer), many times running out of money before bringing a product to market.

Don't be quick to assume Google's involvement is strictly to benefit the common good, however. CEO Larry Page is pushing to spend on long term rather than incremental R&D. There's money to be made here. The regenerative medicine industry is valued at $1.6 billion, and anti-aging products are virtually resistant to economic cycles. Therapies available today may be expensive, untrustworthy and could produce horrific results.

But one thing is true: The quest to live just a bit longer is in demand.

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If the Body Is a Machine, Can It Be Maintained Indefinitely?

Excerpt from article

Metabolic processes drive the day-to-day business of living, but they also inevitably cause cellular damage. The body’s range of self-repair mechanisms don’t take care of everything. Eventually, a lifetime of accumulated damage causes the familiar signs of aging like “thinning skin, cloudy eyes, muscles sapped of strength, heart disease, and cognitive decline.”

De Grey is known for his research into engineered negligible senescence. Negligible senescence is a term used to describe certain animals that don’t display symptoms of aging. De Grey believes we can use biotechnology to engineer negligible senescence in humans, and he cofounded the SENS Research Foundation to lead the way.

SENS focuses on seven categories of universal damage that contribute to aging.

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Genetics Startup Wants To Prolong Life, 'Make 100 Years Old The Next 60'

J. Craig Venter, the scientist and entrepreneur involved in the first sequencing of the human genome and the first synthetic cell, today announced a typically ambitious project: tack another few decades onto everyone's lives through the largest human genome-sequencing project ever conceived. (Y'know, relatively typical.)

Venter is launching a new company, Human Longevity, through $70 million of venture funding, with the goal of sequencing 40,000 human genomes yearly. Eventually, a bank of biodata will be amassed that could provide insight into age-related illnesses--and maybe even the process of aging itself. The company wants to use new, $10-million machines to drive the cost of a sequence down to about $1,000, and everyone--healthy, sick, young, old--will have their genomes added to the bank.

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A Genetic Entrepreneur Sets His Sights on Aging and Death

J. Craig Venter is the latest wealthy entrepreneur to think he can cheat aging and death. And he hopes to do so by resorting to his first love: sequencing genomes.

On Tuesday, Dr. Venter announced that he was starting a new company, Human Longevity, which will focus on figuring out how people can live longer and healthier lives.

To do that, the company will build what Dr. Venter says will be the largest human DNA sequencing operation in the world, capable of processing 40,000 human genomes a year.

The huge amount of DNA data will be combined with huge amounts of other data on the health and body composition of the people whose DNA is sequenced, in the hope of gleaning insights into the molecular causes of aging and age-related illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Slowing aging, if it can be done, could be a way to prevent many diseases, an alternative to treating one disease a time.

“Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it’s not a disease itself,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. Still, his company will also work on treating individual diseases of aging.

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Google’s plans to radically extend the human lifespan

Radical life extension went mainstream

Back in September, Google announced Calico, a company that will focus on health and well-being. But its ultimate purpose is to radically extend the human lifespan. As TIME put it, "That would be crazy — if it weren't Google." By launching Calico, Google CEO Larry Page hopes to tackle some of health care's most pressing problems. And by virtue of doing so, the company hopes to be a major player — if not the major player — in the burgeoning efforts to slow down, or even halt, the aging process in humans.

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