Goldman said a calendar with pictures of actress Sophia Loren at the age of 71 wearing only a pair of earrings underlined how perceptions of age had changed.

"If somebody told you 14 years ago that they were going to have a former sex symbol pose in earrings only, you would have been disgusted or you would have closed your eyes," he said. "Today she looks great at the age of 71."

Stem cell therapy will allow people to regain lost hair, remove wrinkles by renewing skins, and grow new nerves for paralyzed patients, Michael Klentze, director of the Klentze Institute of Anti-aging in Munich, Germany, told Reuters.

Stem cells have the ability to act as a repair system for the body, because they can divide and differentiate, replenishing other cells as long as the host organism is alive.

"People who have hair loss they can hope in the next months they've got new hair, not strange hair, but their own hair," he said.

"Life expectancy is going to grow significantly, and current policies are going to be proven totally inadequate," he predicted.

Just how far and fast life expectancy will increase is open to debate, but the direction and the accelerating trend is clear.

Richard Miller of the Michigan University Medical School said tests on mice and rats - genetically very similar to humans - showed life span could be extended by 40 percent, simply by limiting calorie consumption.

Translated into humans, that would mean average life expectancy in rich countries rising from near 80 to 112 years, with many individuals living a lot longer.

Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, goes much further. He believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been born and told the meeting that periodic repairs to the body using stem cells, gene therapy and other techniques could eventually stop the aging process entirely.