The age of retirement should be raised to 85 by 2050 because of trends in life expectancy, a US biologist has said. Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University says anti-ageing advances could raise life expectancy by a year each year over the next two decades.

That will put a strain on economies around the world if current retirement ages are maintained, he warned. He also told a science meeting in St Louis that 50-year or 75-year mortgages may not be unusual in the future. Dr Tuljapurkar was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in the Missouri city. "People are going to do things they didn't get round to in their working lives. Current institutions are really not equipped at the moment to deal with such long lives," Dr Tuljapurkar said. "We are going to have to plan a lot more carefully, which people are not very good at."