Resveratrol Doesn't Extend Life, Limited Benefit to Rapamycin
At the SENS Foundation, Michael Rae looks at the NIA Interventions Testing Program examination of resveratrol and rapamycin: "Combined with their positive results with rapamycin, the failure of resveratrol to extend life using resveratrol in normal mice over a very wide range of doses should reasonably be taken to put the resveratrol "story" to test. On the other hand, the ability of rapamycin to extend life in these mice has been confirmed, and expanded to a preliminary extent. Naturally, further studies are underway or proposed to elucidate the full nature of these effects. ... At the same time, whatever these studies may reveal, even the most optimistic reading of these results and an assumption of perfect human translatability is still overshadowed by how limited the results are. Interventions such as rapamycin, which only retard the rate at which aging damage accumulates (or, perhaps, allows the organism to carry on functioning for a longer period of time under its accumulating burden), can only temporarily delay the onset of age-related ill-health, not arrest or reverse it - and in the case of rapamycin, the first pharmacological agent to extend the lives of otherwise-healthy mammals, its ability to do even this has been found to be limited." Drugs that slow aging - slow the rate at which damage occurs - are not a desirable end point for the next twenty years of research, when we could instead be working instead to reverse aging by repairing biochemical damage.