Fight Aging!

From a recent article on the film To Age or Not to Age:

It's easier to change lifespan than previously thought, notes Dr. Austad. "We already know how to make animals live 25-40% longer." But no one really know what all this means for humans... yet.

Gerontology expert Aubrey de Grey, long dismissed as a fringe thinker in the field because he doesn't think we should have to age at all, believes it will be a short leap from a 150-year lifespan to 1000. He notes that, with the speed of the current research, "If you're only 50, ... there's a chance you could pull out of the dive." He is beginning to be considered more mainstream.

The current rift between de Grey's philosophy and the other scientists, records Pappas, is that de Grey wants to get rid of aging altogether, while they just want to extend a healthy lifespan.

I'm with de Grey on that point: if the opportunity is there to do the job properly, then do the job properly. No half measures in the face of the greatest destructive force suffered by humanity: more than a hundred thousand lives extinguished every day, and hundreds of millions of others suffering in their declining years.

By all reasonable arguments, it shouldn't actually be any harder or more costly to repair and reverse aging than to safely slow it down by a significant fraction. An additional and important point is that reversal of aging through damage repair will be beneficial to old people, unlike a slowing of aging, which only lowers the ongoing rate at which new damage occurs. The path ahead is quite clear from a technical perspective, but people who favor the repair of aging are still a minority in the scientific community. More is the pity - and this one of the many things that advocacy and education must change if we ourselves, rather than our descendants, are to live far longer healthy lives.