Russian president Vladimir Putin was caught chatting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping — about the light topic of organ transplants, and how they could let “us live younger and younger, and perhaps even achieve immortality.”
As ABC News reports, the comments were overheard on a hot mic attached to Putin’s interpreter, who was translating his words into Mandarin at a parade in Beijing this week commemorating the end of World War II and showing off fearsome new Chinese military might.
“With continuous advances in biotechnology, human organs will be increasingly transplanted — letting us live younger and younger, and perhaps even achieve immortality,” Putin’s interpreter said in Mandarin.
“In this century, it’s anticipated that it may be possible for people to live to 150 years old,” Xi responded.
It remains unclear whether Putin was referring to his own ambitions to extend his own life with the use of cutting-edge technologies. Powerful people have often become obsessed with their own youth, sometimes resorting to outlandish interventions to artificially prolong their own lives.
Putin himself has been known to consult with a Russian gerontologist and “anti-aging guru” — who, ironically, passed away at the age of 77 last year.
Alternatively, Putin could be addressing much broader concerns about plummeting population levels.
China’s population is expected to drop by half within just 30 years due to increasing economic pressure leading to lower birth rates, not to mention the country’s draconian One Child Policy, which was intended to curb overpopulation but wildly overshot that mark. Russia’s population is also shrinking at an alarming rate, with its years-long war with Ukraine exacerbating a growing crisis.
The comments come after Putin told Russia’s National Healthcare Congress last year that “one of the main goals for the coming years is to increase life expectancy,” as quoted by state-run news network TASS.
The president declared that it was his mission to extend the life expectancy of Russians beyond 80 years. According to the World Health Organization, Russia’s life expectancy has trailed much of the rest of the world, and its population is expected to fall by 6.4 percent by 2050.
Whether advancements in organ transplants will lead to longer lives remains hotly debated. While a new donor organ may extend a patient’s life, it’s far from a permanent fix, let alone a way to live far past somebody’s life expectancy.
Life-saving donor organs are also in perpetual short supply for patients who need them. In response to that reality, doctors are now urgently investigating xenotransplantation, or transplanting organs from a different species, such as pigs, into a human.
In short, the jury is definitely still out on whether people will be able to live to 150 years old by the end of this century, as Xi predicts — and any prognostication of the kind should be taken with a big grain of salt, especially when they come from aging and ultra-powerful authoritarian leaders.
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