The statistics are dazzling: In the past 100 years, there’s been a 30-year increase in life expectancy. That’s amazing, and significantly attributable to advances in hygiene and public health, as well as medical advances. But, as University of Illinois epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky writes in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, we’ve likely reached the limit of maximum human lifespan. What we haven’t done, however, is focus sufficiently on the realm of maximum human healthspan, i.e., the number of our healthy years. Olshansky believes it makes no sense for researchers to pursue further life extension, especially if those final years are lived in pain or sickness. What Olshansky and others want us now to pursue is a compression of “the red zone,” that is, years at the end of life which are often characterized by frailty, disease, and disability. By doing so we can then extend the number of our healthy years. Read more about the thinking of Dr. Olshanksy here and check out the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are already busily investing in “healthspan” research here.