[xaa]

To be fair, people have been working on this problem for decades. It is only in the last 1-2 decades, though, that really large datasets (genetic and otherwise) have been available to turn understanding aging from a hard experimental problem into more of a data analysis problem (experiments will obviously still be needed). I think this new availability of biomedical "big data" is what is drawing in a lot of CS-type people recently.

Just like AI, people have been trying for a long time. It's just a damn hard problem.

[JoeAltmaier]

Strange its a hard problem - when so many organisms in nature don't age. Examples should make it easy to figure out.

[xaa]

There's a great diversity in lifespan among organisms, which is a good clue, but the number of organisms that actually show no senescence is quite small, and they are all very distant from humans evolutionarily.

Those few have been studied heavily in aging, but trying to extrapolate differences in these organisms to humans is very challenging because they have totally different anatomies, genomes, and sets of proteins. Plus, lifespan is very multifactorial; for example, you can "extend lifespan" in many species by inhibiting cancer, but that isn't really stopping aging per se.

It's hard for many reasons, but I think the most important one is that we have no good mathematical or experimental tools for understanding and predicting how a given perturbation (drug, diet, etc) will affect a hugely complex network of 25K+ transcripts. Or how those transcripts affect each other causally. In a variety of tissues. And genetic backgrounds. And in the context of longer-term changes like epigenetic changes and DNA mutation.

Another huge problem is that lifespan studies take, well, lifetimes. So we usually do them in organisms like worms and flies, which are very different from humans.

[eli_gottlieb]

Almost everything related to getting "serious" mesospheric effects in biological systems is a hard problem. Animal bodies really are that complex.

On the other hand, it can still tick me off how aging and anti-aging are, in much of the world, simply not considered medical issues worthy of research at all.

[xaa]

It raises a lot of social and religious implications many would rather not think about.

But we have learned to deal with it. Instead of saying you're studying aging, you say you're studying "age-associated disease X" (which works for almost any X) and the effects of age on X. Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."

Transparent ploys, but they work fairly well.

[eli_gottlieb]

>Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."

I honestly hadn't thought that this isn't a genuine good argument in favor of anti-aging research.

[xaa]

It is a good argument -- both are -- but they aren't the best argument, which is "we want to stop death". But we can't say that.