An Interview with Andrew Steele on the Need for Advocacy for Aging Research

Those of us who have been involved in advocacy for aging research and the development of therapies to treat aging as a medical condition for long enough will remember the early 2000s, a time in which a million dollars of new funding for a specific project or specific non-profit was an amazing, novel, rare event. Given that $3 billion, a sizable fraction of all investment into all forms of medical biotech in 2022, was invested into one entity focused on one approach to the treatment of aging, Altos Labs, we might forgive advocates who think that the job is done, that the argument has been made and heard, that it is time to go home and watch the progress rolling in. Sadly the job is never done. The difference between a few million dollars in a year and a few billion dollars in a year dedicated to aging research and the development of treatments targeting mechanisms of aging is vast. But it is only a step forward in the bigger picture. It remains the case that aging causes so much harm and death, a vast and ongoing toll, that the real goal here is to grow the entire medical research and development investment field a hundredfold, and all of that focused on age-related disease, rather than merely claiming a little more of the existing field. Medical research is dramatically underfunded in comparison to the costs of disease, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the matter of degenerative aging. There must be a great changing of minds, an education of everyone wh...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs