Fight Aging!

CNN Money is running a longer piece on calorie restriction mimetic research and the goal of slowing down aging to extend healthy life: "In early 1934, Depression-weary Americans were beginning to see tendrils of hope poking out of the bleak landscape. ... But one of the new year's most promising developments passed almost unnoticed. ... researcher Clive McCay was nearing the end of a four-year study that showed that rats' life spans were greatly extended when they were put on near-starvation diets. To many of his scientific peers, McCay's data made no sense at all. A glorious new chapter in nutrition science had been opened not long before by the discovery of dietary deficiencies behind scourges such as rickets, pellagra, and beriberi. In the wake of such progress, it seemed almost subversive to suggest that a bunch of rodent Oliver Twists, raised on such short rations that their growth was stunted, could live radically longer than well-fed ones. ... Over the next several decades, his discovery was all but forgotten outside of the back halls of science - a laboratory curiosity that didn't actually spark much curiosity. Most scientists were reluctant to risk wasting time probing an anomaly that seemed as baffling as aging itself. Calorie restriction (CR), as it's now called, eventually was shown to extend many species' life spans by a third or more. Now that anti-aging research is hot, it seems bizarre that CR spent decades on science's back shelf."

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/24/retirement/retire_rich_anti_aging.fortune/