Looking Back at the Growth and Maturation of the Field of Aging Research

A great deal has changed in these last few decades in the field of aging research. From the 60s onward to the 90s, aging research was increasingly characterized by a philosophy of "look but don't touch", an effort to distance academia from the growing anti-aging industry and its hype. It made itself a backwater science in which talk of intervention was aggressively discouraged by leaders in the field. Starting in the 90s, with studies showing significant life extension in lower animals following single gene mutations, it became impossible to ignore the potential to treat aging as a medical condition in humans. Nonetheless, change comes only slowly in the scientific community. It was still a battle following the turn of the century to dismantle the old scientific culture and replace it with one in which researchers and funding institutions were enthusiastic about intervention in aging. That required a great deal of advocacy and philanthropic funding, accompanied by incremental advances in the science, a matter of bootstrapping progress. Ultimately it worked, of course, and now the research community is openly focused on producing therapies to slow and reverse aging, targeting the underlying mechanisms of aging. An industry has arisen, applying a great deal more funding to the challenge than is available to academia, and a wave of clinical trials will take place over the next five years. Aging research: A field grows up When I joined the longevity field, ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs