In the Matter of Human Longevity There Will Be Opportunists and Alchemists

I suspect that a sizable, earnest community of opportunists and alchemists focused on anti-aging and longevity will continue to exist even as we transition from an era in which the only approaches to aging (beyond exercise and calorie restriction) were snake oil, the only service providers frauds, to an era in which therapies to slow aging and produce rejuvenation actually exist and are robustly proven to do what they say on the label. Will reliable, low-cost ways to measure biological age drive out the true believers who try whatever intervention is hyped, fail to gain scientific understanding, and fail to use adequate measures of success, living on a diet of hope? Will reliable, low-cost ways to measure biological age drive out the opportunists who sell that hope, in the form of whatever trendy, unproven strategy is claimed to slow aging today? Maybe, given time. Sadly, the advent of epigenetic clocks hasn't yet helped that much. Since no-one knows what exactly an epigenetic clock measures in terms of the progression of aspects of aging, such as underlying molecular damage, or specific loss of function to organs and systems, we now have would-be demagogues claiming justification via low epigenetic ages allegedly resulting from their own personal strategies. This sort of data cannot yet be trusted in the absence of accompanying biomarkers of aging in which one can see meaningful differences following interventions. Those biomarkers are in short supply for basically he...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs