Is science ready to slow down aging?
The television show Twilight Zone ran from 1958 to 1964, in one episode aliens from another planet were helping humans in the development of society. In gratitude, the aliens offered to let the earthlings visit their planet, while they were being loaded into the spaceship, a mad man carrying the aliens’ book, How to Prepare Humans, ran shouting to the masses entering the ships, “it’s a cookbook.” The scene then switches to earthlings packed in like cattle inside one of the traveling ships.
What does this have to do with aging?
The truth is nothing, it is the analogy of propaganda and deception, which has duped society into a belief that there is insignificant scientific interventions with respect to aging.
The facts are that scientists have discovered the techniques that can, in a laboratory animal, diminish to near zero the incidence of cancer, heart disease, and diabetic changes.
The muscles of older men and women who have exercised for decades are indistinguishable in many ways from those of healthy 25-year-olds, according to an uplifting new study of a group of active septuagenarians. Together, these findings about muscular and cardiovascular health in active older people suggest that what we now consider to be normal physical deterioration with aging “may not be normal or inevitable,” says Dr. Trappe the author of the research article.
You would think that these discoveries would prompt a substantial public commitment to working out the mechanism of these interventions and the parallels that work well in humans.
Reasonable but wrong, such an intervention has been clearly established for decades, and yet its investigation receives such a small proportion of governmental research funding that it cannot be seen in a pie chart.
Those of us who are still enjoying life in our forties and fifties and even beyond and still making contributions to the public bulge should be grateful to our predecessors who invented plumbing, X-rays, disinfectants, antibiotics, and insulin. However, the same contributions that could extend the future lives of the next generations are being disregarded.
There is an irrational public predisposition to regard research on specific late-life diseases as marvellous but to regard research on aging, and thus on all late-life diseases together, as a public menace bound to produce a world filled with non-productive, chronically disabled, unhappy senior citizens consuming more resources than they produce.
The pursuit of extended healthy life through slowing aging has the potential to yield dramatic simultaneous gains against many if not all of the diseases and disorders expressed in later life. The most efficient approach to combating disease and disability is to pursue the means to modify the key risk factor that underlies them all—aging itself.
One of the biggest limitations to aging research was knowing how to measure aging. This is no longer a limitation, there are now well-validated methods to measure biological age.
What do you think? Would reducing your risk of late-life disease and better health outcomes improve your outlook on getting older?
Science is ready when you are.
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