When I was in grad school, over-the-hill professors wasted a lot of NIH funding trying to find evidence and claim that there were no limits to human life expectancy. It obviously did not make a bit of sense and wasn't remotely true. Twenty years later, still no one has come remotely close to Jeanne Calment's Beamonesque lifespan, so much so that Russian demographers have proposed fairly crackpot conspiracy theories to try to explain it. And only four of the 100 oldest women ever (#21, 49, 51, and 100) and two of the men (#57 and 84) are currently living.
Maitland Baldwin, NIH neurosurgeon, branch chief, clinical director, and human and chimp torturer, would have been so proud.
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