Sizable contingents in the aging research community and longevity industry like to assure us that greater human longevity is not in fact the goal of the growing level of investment in research and development of means to treat aging, or even desirable for that matter. It is a strange phenomenon. Cynically, one might suspect that those working on approaches based on cellular stress response upregulation, mimicking calorie restriction, that cannot in fact do much to extend life in longer-lived species such as our own, and will at best incrementally improve late-life health, are trying to make their work look better to the groups that funded it.
Regardless of motivation, I think that propagating this sort of viewpoint is harmful to the future of the field. While it might be harder of late to make this argument given the existence of Altos Labs, I would say that downplaying longevity as a goal can actively discourage greater public understanding of, and greater investment in, approaches that are not based on cellular stress response upregulation, such as the SENS view of rejuvenation, and which can in principle extend the healthy human life span to a meaningful degree by directly addressing the root causes of aging.
The Buck Institute, Where the Promise of Aging Research Isn't Longevity
The leaders of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging want you to know that they're not going to make you immortal. Even if they could, they wouldn't necessarily want to. Because extending life just to spend a few more years on Earth is not the point. But if their field has something deeper and better to deliver, they have reached the moment when they really have to prove it - which is what they are furiously working to do.
Longevity medicine has already generated several lifetimes' worth of hype and hogwash. There have been opportunistic (or narcissistic) promises of 500-year lifespans that captured the popular press even as reasonable scientists labored for legitimate discoveries in the background. Now, leaders in the field are busy shaking off the shadow of immortality salesmen as they set up for a new stage of growth. Their science, they say, is almost mature enough to deliver real therapies. And the Buck Institute - a small, independent research center in a California suburb almost no one's heard of - wants to lead the field into maturity.
Yet what experts there and elsewhere say the field will deliver may not be what you'd expect - especially if you've been listening to its fanboys. The real promise of longevity science, they argue, is not a longer life - it's a better one. It takes very little spark to start Eric Verdin, the Buck Institute's President and CEO, talking a streak about the possibilities of longevity research - but unlike those who promise imminent miracles, he tempers his predictions with scientific caution. And his predictions are not about finding eternal youth; they're about fighting the diseases that shorten and darken the later years of our regular lifetimes. "I don't think it's a stretch to think we could bring everyone to 95 healthy. The field is not talking about this enough. We're only talking about how we are going to get the tech guys to live to 150, but that's not where the real urgency is."
Verdin predicts that the first approved therapy from geroscience will come within five years, though he won't forecast exactly when a full paradigm shift for healthspan will follow. "Some people have called me conservative or a dream killer, but let's underpromise and overdeliver. I can tell you this field will overdeliver, but I don't know when."
View the full article at FightAging
