In My Lifetime? The Verified State of Longevity Research

Version 1.0 · data cutoff 27 July 2026 · 108-page PDF · 25,779 words · 113 claims, each with its evidence level and its source.

Ask whether radical life extension will happen while you are alive and you generally get one of two answers: a protocol to buy, or a forecast to believe. This is neither. It is a report on what the experiments have actually shown, with the strength of the evidence printed beside every claim, so that a result in yeast cannot be read as a result in you.

The book answers four questions in the order a person actually asks them.

Where does the research stand? Eleven chapters organised by the thing being tested rather than by the theory behind it: the one programme that runs the same mouse experiment in three laboratories, the compound with the largest replicated mammalian lifespan effect and the smallest human trial, the drug where observation and randomisation point in opposite directions, two monkey colonies fed the same diet that reached opposite answers, the therapy that restored sight in mice and also produced tumours, and the ageing clocks now being used as finish lines before anyone has shown they measure the finish. Two of the eleven chapters are about failure, including a catalogue of claims from this field that did not survive replication.

Why is nobody racing? The usual answers do not survive contact with the documents. The one that does has to do with the fact that ageing has no administrative existence: it is not a disease in the classification that regulators, insurers and trial designers work from, and almost everything downstream follows from that single missing entry.

Who would get it? This has been rehearsed twice already, with real machines and real drugs and real people who were refused, and both rehearsals ended in ways that should inform the guess.

And what would a life be worth if it could last indefinitely but could not be restored once lost? That part is argument rather than evidence. It says so on its first line, and it is written to be attacked.

How you can check it without trusting the author. Every checkable sentence carries a bracketed identifier that resolves to a first-hand source, and each source is stored with an exact string that has to still be present in it. Before this edition was assembled a program re-fetched all 113 sources and tested all 113 strings; a claim whose source had moved or changed would have stopped the build. The complete index is public and free at https://minty-modesty.github.io/longevity-research-status/ — read it first, and buy the book if you want the argument that index supports.

What this is not. Not medical advice, and it contains none: no dose, no protocol, no supplement list, no ranking of interventions, no sentence beginning with the words you should. When a study gave animals a compound at a stated concentration, the book reports the experiment as the source describes it and stops there. If you want a regimen, this will disappoint you, and it is better that it disappoints you here than after you have paid.

Written with an AI model, which is stated on the cover, on page one, and here. The question worth asking about such a book is not who typed it but whether it is correct — hence the 113 identifiers and the program that checks them.