The latest issue of Rejuvenation Research is available online for those of you who like to keep up with the scientific journals. In the opening commentary, Aubrey de Grey points to the recent position paper issued by noteworthy biogerontologists and folk from the Lifestar Institute. In his view, it is a sign of noteworthy progress in the long struggle to turn the institutions of life science research towards a more productive approach to human aging:

Most nonbiologists, and even quite a few biologists, are spectacularly hazy on the topic of how aging relates to the diseases of old age. The prevailing biogerontological approach has long been that aging is not a disease, or at best that it predisposes to disease. Regular readers will know I'm not going to agree with that, and that I view it as axiomatic that aging is the set, progressive early stages of the various age-related diseases, without which they simply could not be age-related. But whatever one's view, it should be clear that maintenance of that traditional rhetoric will continue to limit the amount of public funding that will be spent on productive aging research, and to completely scupper the argument that some of the money spent on those diseases could very profitable be spent on postponing aging by repairing the progressive early stages of disease.

It remains unclear when, and how, the transition to a simple and compelling description of biomedical gerontology - as, for example, "preventative geriatrics" - will finally occur, but it certainly has not occurred yet, and the result is that the potential for intervention in aging to address the diseases and disabilities of old age remains vastly underrecognized in the funding policies of the nations that lead biomedical research.

You might look back at a previous Fight Aging! post on the topic of whether to declare aging a disease, which could be considered a part of the same battle. One the one hand you have to win the debate within the scientific community over strategy for future work, and on the other hand you have to convince the large funding entities to pay for research and development according to that strategy. This sort of change proceeds incrementally as a rule. Looking back over the past five to ten years, progress is certainly being made in bringing the rest of the world around to our point of view on aging and longevity science, but we'd all like this process to be faster.