Should we build rejuvenation therapies? Hell yes. Are we? Barely, as nowhere near enough of an effort is being made. This is an opinion piece by Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation:
Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there's no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream - to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.But hang on - is the buzz around aging really reflective of what's being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly - as if they were infections - rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes. The latter approach is the focus of biomedical gerontology. Researchers in this field recognize that any direct attack on late-life disease is doomed to become progressively less effective as the causes of those diseases continue to accumulate, so they focus instead on those causes - the "damage" that the body inflicts on itself throughout life in the course of its everyday operation. But they comprise a tiny coterie of scientists - far too few, and with access to far too little funding, to allow progress to occur at anywhere near the maximum rate that the simple technical difficulty of the problem would allow.
I believe that the main reason for this tragic myopia is a phobia about aging so ancient and deep-seated that it overpowers the rationality of nearly all of us, even the most intelligent and educated. Aging holds us in a psychological stranglehold, preventing us from even contemplating the idea of its medical conquest. Thus it is that grown adults find it possible to argue that we should forever continue to let everyone endure the number one cause of human suffering. Unfortunately for us - by which I mean, for the whole of humanity - those adults include the overwhelming majority of the people who control enough money (whether their own, their company's or the taxpayer's) to make a difference. Even without getting into the debate about what approaches to this challenge are the most promising, one can no longer escape the fact that most biomedical gerontologists now agree that we are approaching a time of sharply accelerated progress in extending healthy lifespan. Except, of course, by letting that expert opinion go in one ear and out the other. And that, I'm afraid to say, is what most decision-makers are still doing. The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.
Link: http://www.gereports...e-youth-oh-yes/
View the full article at FightAging
