"Fish could be a very big deal"

National Journal's William Powers looks into the face of the 5,000-Year-Old-Baby-Boomer and flinches.

The race for the three-figure obit has already begun. This spring, a high-profile research team called LifeQuest Expedition, partly sponsored by the U.S. government, will travel to "longevity hot spots" around the world—places like Okinawa, Japan, and the Italian island of Sardinia, where unusually large numbers of people live past 100. The LifeQuest team will collect data about how these people become such "successful agers," and will report back to the American public. A Web site about the project promises it will result in a new "Longevity Management Tool designed to increase life expectancy."

But how? One longevity hot spot is Nova Scotia, and Dr. Thomas Perls, the lead LifeQuest scientist, told a Canadian news outlet that it may be the seafood they eat up there. "Fish could be a very big deal," Perls said. "You could have a bunch of people who have the right genes that get them to their 90s, whose fish-heavy diets then increased their life expectancy further."

Whole thing here.

Reason's own resident Boomer-Who-Will-Live-Forever, Ron Bailey, grokked the "new scientific search for immortality" in our August-September 2003 issue. That story is online here.