Can the Top-Down Institutional Approach Promote the Right Sort of Research and Development to Treat Aging?

Most scientists who spend their professional lives within large institutions, such as the big universities, the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and so forth, tend to favor institutional solutions. In practice that means slow engineering of change within the established hierarchy, rather than stepping outside it, or where a new need is identified, meeting it with the creation of a new institutional edifice much like those that already exist. This is the top down approach to development: structure and delegation, provide big-picture guidance and leave the details up to lower levels of the hierarchy. It is advocated in a recent open access position paper authored by a noted Russian researcher, one of those who led the development of plastinquinone based mitochondrially targeted antioxidants as a potential means to slow the progression of aging. It is necessary to establish an International Agency for Research on Aging Extending healthy lifespan is one of the main goals of gerontology and preventive medicine. There are potential interventions which might delay and/or prevent the onsets of many chronic pathologies associated with human aging. The affected pathways have been identiļ¬ed, and the behavioral, dietary, and pharmacologic approaches to preventing and treating age-related disorders have emerged. Interventions that target the aging process in its entirety appear to be more effective in preventing a broad range of age-related pathologies than specific in...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Activism, Advocacy and Education Source Type: blogs