Too right. We live in a world of suicidal barbarians [0] walking in lockstep to suffer and die on the same schedule as their parents, yet so afraid of being old that they will not think of it, even to do something about it. Ask the man in the street if he wants people not to suffer, not to grow old, and he will likely reject the concept. [1]

Scientists are telling the world quite openly, and have been for more than a decade, that we can treat aging. We can work to slow it [2], to reverse it [3], to control it through medicine in just the same way as we have controlled infectious disease in the past. All it takes is support and money. But unlike cancer research, people just don't seem willing to listen. In their minds, aging is set in stone, and altering it is an uncomfortable prospect. Yet the mourn the 90% of their relatives who die of old age, and they watch them suffer - but they don't want to do anything about it when faced with the choice to do something about it.

It gets even worse when you realize that most of the very, very few people who are doing something to tackle aging are going about it in a way that is guaranteed to produce terrible, mediocre results. This is steered by the state of regulation and the the fact that it is way easier to raise money in biotech for things that won't do much for aging in a practical sense, but will do a great deal to illuminate how exactly it progresses.

It is a funny world. Most of the research community agrees that aging is damage accumulation. Yet they near all raise funds for and work on ways to tinker with epigenetic changes, protein levels, and metabolic processes that are way down the chain of events, late stage reactions to reactions to reactions to damage that are right next door to end pathology. The state of regulation means you can only treat end state pathology, the things they call diseases of aging, and so research starts there and traces back. So, oh look, despite the fact that everyone agrees it is all about root cause damage, they're all trying to put band-aids over the very late consequences of damage without actually addressing the underlying damage at all! No wonder it doesn't really work all that well.

Exhibit A is the billions spent on trying to just recapture some of the small effects of calorie restriction on slowing aging: this is the easiest, most obvious, best studied altered state of metabolism, and fifteen years of work by hundreds of researchers yields knowledge about genes and epigenetics and metabolism (perhaps adding 1% of what there is to be known but is not yet known) yet nothing of practical use to extend life. Exercise and eating less are still the most effective strategies, and this in the midst of a revolution in biotechnology.

The researchers who argue that aging is programmed, that all these epigenetic changes are the things you should be treating because they are the primary cause of aging rather than damage, must be laughing. There they are, losing the debate, a minority position, in a terrible position from a point of view of hard evidence, and the other side - who call programmed aging nonsense - are nonetheless doing their research for them. Crazy.

All that money and time flushed, effectively. No such thing as useless knowledge, but there is certainly such a thing as knowledge with little to no practical value insofar as reversing aging goes. The horrible irony of it all is that we just don't need to know much more about the fine details of how exactly aging progresses than we already do. We have programs like SENS [3] that are supported by luminaries in the research community [4]. SENS says repair the known forms of root cause damage that lead to aging. End of story. Here are the forms of damage that the community consensus tells us cause aging [5]. Here are proposed fixes from the community. Let us do it. It bypasses present ignorance and the difficulty of altering metabolism to slow aging, and just moves directly to rejuvenation by damage repair. We are machines, and machines can be repaired, and when you repair them it extends their health life expectancy. Reliability theory works. [6]

Yet SENS is a tiny thing, a seed at present: one small community and distribution of minor labs amidst a field of dozens of much larger ones. It is the future because it has to be: it is the only practical way to make the medical control of aging work. The question is how long it will take to properly disrupt the field, and there is still a way to go there, especially given the enormous enthusiasm for the genetics of aging as typified by the direction taken by the California Life Company and Human Longevity, Inc. They are looking where the light is: greater understanding of metabolism and genetics is not the way to go, but that's where the tens of millions of dollars are going at the moment. It will all come to merely an improvement in present day medicine focused on patching the late stages of aging, and produce little to nothing in the way of extended life - certainly not in comparison to what could be done with actual rejuvenation by repair rather than just slowing things down by tinkering with metabolism.

Aging is simple at root. Baring a few exceptional, rare and horrible mutations, everyone ages in exactly the same way and for exactly the same causes: the damage is the same. The same mass produced repair strategies in the SENS vision will work for near everyone. Genetic variations are meaningless and irrelevant to the damage repair model, and the damage repair model is the only possible way to extend healthy life by decades within our lifetimes. Yet the mainstream forges ahead with trying to understand the minutiae of natural differences between aging in different people, in the hope of grabbing a year here, a year there, by patching and tinkering metabolism into altered states that will hopefully do more good than harm. It is a poverty of vision, a waste, a loss of time. The potential gains can never be as great as simple trying to repair the damage, the types of which we know and are well described.

[0] https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/05/when-did-we-beco...

[1] http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/06/living-to-120-and-beyond-...

[2] http://www.healthspancampaign.org/film/

[3] http://sens.org

[4] http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board

[5] http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory