Living longer is a political battle

This is probably true. The biggest obstacle to longer life is not technological, but political. If the political will was there, then the funding would appear for a program that would eventually give us longer life. (The funding doesn’t have to be public, as private funding would probably appear if the government simply promised not to punish those who experiment in this area, dangerous though it is.)

We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition called aging-or so the joke goes. It’s a dark joke, but there’s truth to be found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state of affairs: given that our time is limited and ticking away, the tasks upon the table should always include some consideration of aging. What can we do about it? How can we engineer a research community, funding and support to make real progress within our lifetimes? If you don’t spend at least some of your time on this issue, then you’re fiddling while Rome burns. Time is the most precious thing we have, and we live on the cusp of technologies that will allow us to gain more of it-but those advances in medicine won’t happen soon enough unless we work at it.

Working on progress in longevity science doesn’t have to mean working in a laboratory. Much of what I have done to help matters along takes the form of written advocacy at Fight Aging! and elsewhere: sharing events, passing on news, putting scientific publications in context, explaining where we stand in research and development, encouraging fundraising, and so on. In effect this is a sort of loose documentation of the existence of the community of people interested in engineered longevity, and a way to provide direction and grounding to newcomers: how to become involved, how to benefit from becoming involved, and how to help advance the science of human longevity.