The Slow Creep of Ideas
For all the progress that has been made in healthy life extension advocacy, it's still taking a good long time to move ideas, knowledge and expectations into the mainstream. Take this half doom-and-gloom piece, for example, from the LA Times: "And it's not just an extension of working years that individuals will have to accept. We can also expect health problems to multiply, at least temporarily, as people live longer in bodies that didn't have the benefit of the latest in nutritional knowledge, new treatments or better working conditions. The good news is that science is going to be offering better cures faster than most expect. ... Pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs to fight the crisis of obesity, which leads to diabetes, heart disease and premature death. British bio-gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and others are pursuing a goal of 'engineered negligible senescence' - which would in theory eliminate most of the physical damage of aging and lead to indefinite life spans." The most basic of basics regarding modern longevity science - that extended healthy lives are possible, plausible, and closer than you think, provided the work is funded - are still to be communicated to the majority of people. Only when the man in the street responds to aging in the same way as cancer will we be fully underway on the road to defeat aging.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-arrison13mar13,0,3383835.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail