If you hope to live well past the century mark and stay generally healthy in the process, you’re not alone. Recently, Russian and Chinese Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic talking about living to 150 in part through new biotechnologies.

Does that conversation reflect the wildly speculative hopes of two 72-year-old world leaders, or real cutting-edge science?

While I view it as mostly the former, the longevity field has made major progress in the past decade. The problem is that even the bits of real signal are often drowned out by noisy hype. It’s gotten so bad that many legitimate scientists no longer want to be called longevity researchers.

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