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Every day over 100,000 humans die due to age-related disease. The lack of research in aging and life extension is one of the biggest resource misallocation of our times, and it is leading to massive welfare losses. There are so many entrenched beliefs that curb research in this field: 'Aging is "natural"', 'Who would want to live until they are xxx years old, anyway?', 'Aging keeps population levels down', 'Aging removes bad people (dictators etc.)', 'Death makes life scarce and therefore valuable', ...
No, aging is fixable and all other problems, real or imagined, have more direct solutions.
We have to realize this, as a society, immediately and stop all the nonsense prevarications.
Parents should not have to outlive their children, and neither should children have to outlive their parents. Mathematical models that claim to “prove” that aging is inevitable are trivial to construct by introducing assumptions that fit your narrative. The assumptions are biologically plausible in isolation but fail to account for the full complexity of biological life and, indeed, reality [1]. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-018-0562-z |
This class of models is a simple extrapolation of historical aggregate lifespan time-series, and thus cannot model non-trivial pharmacological and genetic manipulations even in principle, unless these are a part of a large smooth sub-trend that has already begun.
One wouldn't be able to predict that some random flavonoid molecule extends lifespan of lab mice by 10-15%[1], and if we took the [overstated] paper's title claim uncritically, this research wouldn't happen. And yet it happened, and more than a dozen clinical trials in humans are underway.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6197652/