A Summary View of Everything in Modern Longevity Science Except the Work that Really Matters

There are three classes of aging research, in order of decreasing size and funding: firstly the work that only investigates and catalogs aging, with no attempt to intervene; secondly work on ways to slow aging through metabolic and genetic alteration, which is doomed to very expensive and very slow progress to a marginal end result; and lastly work on repairing the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging. The latter is the only practical path forward to greatly extending healthy life and defeating age-related disease soon enough to matter for those of use reading this today. After a decade of advocacy to get to the present point of the existence of multiple labs and organizations such as the SENS Research Foundation explicitly funding work on rejuvenation biotechnology, if it has 1% of the funding of work on slowing aging, I'd be surprised. Work on slowing aging might in turn have 1% of the funding directed to merely studying aging. It is a frustrating situation, and must change. The mainstream of modern research is steered by regulation into the inefficient process of examining late-stage mechanisms in disease and then working backwards. Since commercial development is only permitted to treat named diseases, and since putting potential treatments through the regulatory process generally requires demonstration of a comprehensive understanding of the relevant underlying biological mechanisms, the whole pipeline all the way back to funding for fundamental research is g...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs