Fight Aging!

At the present time two groups of people well placed to influence progress in rejuvenation biotechnology are, for the most part, acting against their own self-interest. It is generally the case that such situations do not last: self-interest wins out in the long term.

On the one hand we have the world's high net worth individuals, most of whom do very little in the way of funding research into aging or the conditions of aging. It is their inaction that is opposed to their own self-interest: they are all aging to death at the same pace as the rest of us, after all. When it comes to access to medical technology the world is remarkably flat: the poor struggle in this as in everything else, but the wealthy have no more ability to buy a way out of aging (or heart disease, or cancer, or any of the other conditions that attend aging) right this instant than does anyone else. What they do have is a far greater ability to create a near future in which rejuvenation biotechnologies exist and are just as widely available as any present day clinical procedure.

It is in the self-interest of everyone who can significantly speed up the development of ways to reverse aging to set forth and do exactly that - but very few are making the effort. At some point it will become evident to the public and the world at large that aging to death whilst surrounding by wealth is insanity in an age in which those resources could be used for the development of age-reversing medicine: ways to repair mitochondrial DNA, break down accumulated metabolic byproducts that clog up cells, clear out senescent cells, restore declining stem cell activity, and so forth. But as yet this is not obvious enough to those people who matter.

The second group acting against their own self-interest in the matter of rejuvenation biotechnology are those researchers who could be working on relevant scientific projects but are not. Much of the aging research community doesn't in fact do any more than study aging, and the minority who do work on development of therapies are largely investigating the slow and unproductive path of slowing aging via metabolic manipulation. A far better road exists: the pursuit of ways to repair the damage that causes aging, as outlined by the SENS Foundation but by no means limited to their chosen methods of implementation. Work on the repair of aging is far more likely to produce radical advances in medicine worthy of this age of accelerating progress: ways to restore the old to vigor and greatly extend health human life. Researchers who are not working on something that looks a lot like SENS are locking themselves out of the most interesting and most valuable room in the house.

But as I said above, self-interest tends to win out in the long run. As more attention is given to SENS, longevity science, and the repair of aging, it becomes ever more likely it is that self-interest will emerge as a driving force in funding and research.