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Average lifespan may reach 120 years, says minister

The minister compared human life to a sinewave

GORKI, July 10. /TASS/. The average lifespan may reach 120 years, said Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova after a session of the presidium of the Russian Presidential Council for Strategic Development and Priority Projects.

"The world will be changing. The human life potential is generally high. The most conservative estimates suggest that a person may live for at least 120 years if neither he nor any circumstances shorten his life," the minister said.

Skvortsova compared human life to a sinewave. "Life as a biological phenomenon is like a sinewave: there is the period of childhood, which is followed by active maturity - the adult stage - then the biological aging and passing away of a person. None of the periods can be artificially prolonged to increase life expectancy. The growth of life expectancy is not the prolongation of the aging process, it is the extension of the entire sinewave in a biological sense," the minister said.

She reiterated that in the 19th century childhood ended at the age of nine, in the early 20th century, at the age of 11, while ahead of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) a 14-year-old teenager was not considered to be a child anymore. In the 1960s the adult age was 16; it is now 18 in our country, but in most European country it is 21.

The need for each individual to reach the level of a modern person sets the trend for longer childhood and active working age, she said.