Up until the 1970s, flu epidemics commonly caused 10,000 to 20,000 direct deaths each year in France, not counting those who died from complications of the disease. The development of an effective vaccine, regularly reformulated in response to new viral mutations, has brought a ten-fold...

In an article published in Science in 2002, James Oeppen and James Vaupel, observing a constant linear progression (at arate of 3 months per year) in maximum life expectancies since 1841, concluded that the trend was set to continue for manyyears to come. A critical re-assessment of the data and...