What Research is Currently Funded?

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

In the latest Longevity Meme newsletter, I take a look at currently funded medical research likely to have a notable effect on healthy life span, the divide between prevention and cure, and why a better approach is needed.

The bottom line is that most of us reading this newsletter today are not going to greatly benefit from the "one cure at a time" approach to medicine. We won't suffer the horrible effects of Alzheimer's, nor will we die from heart disease. Cancer will most likely be a controllable, chronic condition 20 years from now. Yet we won't be living much longer overall as a result of those advances - they do not address the underlying cause of aging and age-related death.
A real sea change must come about in the way in which aging is addressed by the research community, not to mention the level of funding put into longevity research. We are very close - a matter of decades - from being able to greatly increase the healthy human life span; by decades initially, and far more subsequently. You can find more details on how this could happen at Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence (SENS) website.

Everything else aside, the funding must be there. That $1 billion per year for directly longevity research has to happen. Making it happen is up to all of us - we make the future through our actions and expressing our wishes to those who direct investments. So stand up today and do something for the future of medical research and healthy longevity!

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