Squaring the Curve

Imagine the trajectory of a human life drawn as a graph. One line represents lifespan — the total number of years we live. Another represents healthspan — the number of those years lived in strength, clarity, and independence.

For most people today, the two lines diverge long before life itself ends. The curve of health bends downward decades before the final years arrive, tracing a slow, uneven decline that medicine has learned to stretch, but not yet to reshape.

Over the past century, we’ve become remarkably skilled at extending lifespan: delaying death through interventions, surgeries, and pharmaceuticals. Yet this progress often prolongs the years of fragility that follow. The next frontier is to bring those lines back together: to extend how long we live and how long we remain fully alive—and then to extend both again.

We already hold many of the tools to reshape that curve. Through what I call the longevity basics—prevention, diagnostics, movement, sleep, nutrition, and stress regulation—we can already extend and square the curve, keeping health and vitality steady for longer.

But longevity, in its truest sense, means not only squaring the curve but also lengthening both the healthspan and the lifespan. A new wave of interventions is beginning to push those limits even further. Biohacking practices, advanced therapies, and gene-based treatments now entering clinical trials may soon raise the entire plateau of health and longevity.

To make that possible for all, however, we need broad institutional support and large-scale clinical testing. Without it, these breakthroughs will remain experimental and accessible only to a few pioneers, rather than transforming health for everyone.

Compression of morbidity

Longevity researchers describe this ideal as the compression of morbidity—a term introduced by Stanford physician James Fries in 1980—and, more broadly, as the rectangularization of the survival curve. The goal is to keep people healthy and functional for as long as possible, then compress the period of decline into a short, steep drop at the very end of life. In other words, to square the curve: to turn that slow downward slope into a plateau that lasts almost until the finish line.

Yet the task before us goes further. Extending healthspan alone is just the foundation. True progress means stretching both dimensions of the curve at once: keeping people healthy for longer and gradually expanding the total span of human life. Lifespan and healthspan are not opposing goals; they are parallel lines that must advance together.

But this transformation won’t happen on its own. The question is whether we – as a society – are willing to make it.

We’re not trying hard enough

For me, that question became personal. It was also at the heart of a journey my son and I took across the planet—a year spent meeting the scientists, thinkers, and pioneers who are reshaping how humanity understands aging. Each of them carried a piece of the future in their words. Among them was Aubrey de Grey, one of the founding fathers of the longevity movement.

“For thousands of years, denial was humanity’s only way to live with aging. But now we know how to bring aging under medical control — and the tragedy is that we’re not trying hard enough.”

What struck me in his words was the weight of responsibility they carried. If aging can be addressed, then we can no longer afford to shrug it off as inevitable. We need a new lens for thinking about it—not one of resignation, but of intention.

That realization was like putting on a new pair of glasses. The question was no longer “How long can I live?” but “How well can I live—and for how long?” The real objective is to stay strong, sharp, and full of energy deep into later years—and to make that possibility available not just to the few, but to everyone.

Don’t forget about prolonging the lifespan

In recent years, scientists have become deeply engaged in the pursuit of longer, healthier lives. Their focus on healthspan has transformed how we think about aging and disease. It’s a welcomed shift, yet I sometimes sense an imbalance. Many voices in the field now treat healthspan as the final destination, as if the ultimate goal were to make our existing lifespan healthier, not longer. But the true endgame is broader. It’s about expanding both dimensions—healthspan and lifespan—perhaps far beyond what we can currently imagine. To care only about staying healthy within fixed limits is to mistake the means for the goal.

If we were only aiming to improve healthspan within the boundaries of today’s lifespan, we already know how to do that. The tools are in our hands: prevention, early diagnostics, movement, sleep, stress regulation, better food, and cleaner environments. None of it requires rocket science. With education, access, and a supportive environment, we could easily extend healthy life for millions by ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty years. That’s a matter of implementation, not invention.

But stopping there would mean accepting the current limits of human life as fixed. And they’re not. The same energy that goes into keeping people healthy within today’s lifespan must also go into pushing that lifespan further—to discover how long vitality itself can be sustained.

My appeal to the scientific community is simple: divide the effort wisely. Spend half of it making what we already know work for everyone—turning prevention into culture, not advice. Spend the other half on moving the needle outward, exploring how far the human curve can stretch before it falls. Both paths matter. One builds the foundation; the other extends the horizon.

True progress also requires courage and the willingness to explore what sounds impossible. Discovery also needs room for boldness. As Brian K. Kennedy, a leading longevity researcher and scientist told me: “If we don’t fund the scientists who are crazy enough to ask the crazy questions, we won’t get answers.”

Vera Gorbunova shares that same conviction. “I like doing crazy things,” she told me. “When you study things no one ever looked at before, it’s always there. We have to find something new, so we have to be bored.” Her research focuses on the mechanisms of longevity and genome stability, and on studying exceptionally long-lived mammals.

The next breakthroughs in longevity won’t come from what we already know — they’ll emerge from the edges of what still sounds impossible.

And then there is us—the players of the ultimate longevity game. The game of longevity doesn’t end with individual wins. If the benefits remain confined to a few, the larger story is lost. What truly matters is scale—transforming private choices into collective change.

That question of scale came up often during our journey. George Church, often called the father of genetics, put it in stark terms when we met him. His point was simple: once we treat aging as a universal challenge, the price of intervention will fall, just as it did with vaccines. Longevity will only become accessible when enough people demand it.

“Aging is not a rare disease. It’s the most common one. It will kill 90% of us.”

Andrea Maier, one of the leading physician-scientists in the field, voiced the same conviction from a different angle: “Aging is a disease because we understand it. So let’s treat it.” Her words stripped the topic of abstraction. The real barrier is not scientific knowledge—it’s collective will.

That’s why many in the field now speak of an “Apollo project” for longevity. The race to the Moon was not won by one nation’s ambition alone but by pooling intellect, imagination, and resources around a shared goal. A similar effort for healthy aging could compress decades of discovery into years. The case for it is not only moral—it’s economic. Longer, healthier lives mean fewer years of disease, lower healthcare costs, and a stronger, more resilient society.

But for that to happen, we must first change the story we tell about longevity. Too often, it’s framed as a luxury for billionaires, a biohacker’s hobby, or a self-optimization race measured in spreadsheets and supplements. That image keeps people at a distance. What we saw on the road was something else entirely: curiosity, openness, and a quiet sense of hope. Longevity was not about escaping mortality—it was about living more fully within it.

That spirit became the seed of Live Beyond: an attempt to give shape to this movement through stories, context, and connection—to build a map that anyone can follow, at their own pace. And to remind the scientific world that the real endgame is expanding the full arc of life—raising the line, lengthening the plateau, and keeping it whole for as long as we can.

Marek Piotrowski, Longevity Advocate ↗

The film and the book are coming in 2026 — the story behind this journey.

The Film · The Book · More articles →