Interventions to Slow Aging in Humans: Are We Ready?

The more conservative end of the aging research community is not in favor of engineering approaches like SENS, which focus on repair of the known causes of aging as a way to evade very slow and expensive investigations of the details of how aging progresses, where understanding is still minimal and the unexplored spaces on the map remain very large. Engineering is a matter of doing the best you can in advance of full understanding, and can be highly effective. The Romans built great bridges without modern materials science and architectural understanding, for example. The conservative scientific viewpoint is to require something much closer to full understanding before progressing any further, however. In the pure science view the only viable way forward to treat aging is to indeed follow the very slow and expensive process of obtaining full understanding of all the relevant complexity of our metabolism, followed by attempting to manipulate the operation of metabolism so as to slightly slow the aging process. Scientists putting forward this position avoid the claim that adding decades to human life spans is possible within the foreseeable future. Some don't believe it to be the case, others are merely not going to say so in public. The wheels turn slowly enough in the sciences that it has taken the better part of fifteen years to even come to the point of generally agreeing in print that gently slowing down the process of degenerative aging is possible and desirable. All of...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs