Fight Aging!

I'm a firm believer in brands and names. If you can't say a few short words in response to "what is it you work at?" and be immediately understood, then you have one more hurdle to surmount every time you're out looking for funding, deals, and partnerships. "Cancer research" is a good example. The life sciences are fantastically complex, but everyone knows where you stand with "cancer research" - those words carry a great deal of weight and shared understanding.

Unfortunately, "aging research" doesn't carry the same weight. Cancer research is well-understood to mean searching for the cure, but "aging research" has no such connotation. Something better is needed for those of us in search of a recognizable brand for engineering a cure for aging.

Back a ways, I decided to jettison use of the term "anti-aging science" as a bad deal. It carries a lot of shared understanding, but not the right sort of shared understanding - it's a gateway to communities of magical thinking and glittery cosmetics. If that was going to help serious attempts to engineer the repair of aging, the benefits to the research community would have been clear already. They are not, needless to say, and "anti-aging science" is a poisonous swamp - it is white-coated actors playing cosmetics researchers in TV commercials.

So what do you tell people you support? Once upon a time I had hopes for "healthy life extension," but I think that life extension is on the way out as a name with promise. It suffers from too much contact with the "anti-aging" community, and is at once too vague and too clinical. I'm presently in favor of "longevity science," - or "engineered healthy longevity," or the like - in absence of other good candidates. This seems to have legs, as I've seen "longevity science" used out there in other parts of the online world. It's snappy and to the point, and not yet subverted by the horrible children in the anti-aging marketplace. The only downside that springs to mind is that it does nothing to dispel the Tithonus Error - that many people think engineered longevity means being old for longer rather than young for longer.

But these are just my views. I'd be interested to see what other people think about nomenclature and branding in initiatives aimed at the repair of aging through applied science.