[peaigr]

I wouldn't say "almost entirely." A couple more minutes of Googling brought up this:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db88.pdf

which says that yes, the greatest reductions in death rates were for infants and children, but for every group under 85, mortality dropped by at least 50% from 1935 to 2010.

Also there are some tables at

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/as120/LifeTables_Tbl_6.html

which seem to say that those who are 18 today expect about 15 more years than they would have in 1900.

Not to mention nutrition, hygiene, and antibiotics are probably reasonably important in reducing infant mortality. I do agree that for an article specifically about aging they might have been more careful about those numbers, though.

[saalweachter]

Yeah, the only thing I would add is that "people living longer" historically hasn't been about prolonging life so much as preventing early death. Some people have always lived to be 80, 90, 100. What we've really accomplished is that more people live to be 80, 90, 100 than ever before. For me to live to be 80 or 90 probably just takes reasonably good luck and staying in the upper-middle-class, instead of a one-in-a-million kind of luck.

I am hopefully about the future, but I won't really be confident until I start seeing people live to be 120, 130, 140. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time. The most optimistic test I can think of for an anti-aging drug is to take a large number of 80-year-olds, who are common enough you should be able to find a number of good, healthy, but old test subjects, and give them anti-aging treatments. If a large number of them live to be 120, I feel comfortable saying we're on track to beat death.

This experiment takes 40 years to run. Granted, you can do a lot of other work before it finishes, like examine tissue samples and various health metrics to show the treated 80-year-olds aren't aging like the control group. But for even a young'un like me to actually see 120-year-olds before I myself am 80, this experiment has to begin in the next 10 years, which I find terribly unlikely.

So while I'm going to cling to life as bitterly as I can as long as I can -- my own goal is to see the tricentennial, the dawn of the 22nd century, and maybe the transit of Venus, which I missed this year -- my personal immortality likely depends on not just discovering a safe way to halt aging and prolong life, but a way to reverse senescence and restore youth. I think it's possible, but forecasting it as happening before I die is a bit cliche in this domain.