Reasonable positions on ageing
You might not guess it from the title, but Philip Ball's article on "The tech lords’ quest for eternal life" is a balanced take on the science of ageing.
There are interesting experiments in the field, but there's also quackery:
What tends to happen instead [of clinical trials], however, is that, at the slightest hint of positive results for an experimental procedure in lab animals, clinics that are free to do so start to offer it as a rejuvenation treatment
In other words, what works in rodents and worms is taken as a potential gold rush.
I do see the appeal: reaching for something, anything, to keep frailty and all the other conditions of ageing away. But what is interesting (really interesting) is a theory of how we age. If that existed, there could be a principled approach to all of this.
With that in mind, there are a couple of texts I'm looking forward to.
The first is Aging: Why Does Evolution Kill? by Peter Lidsky. It's published and on my reading pile. I know nothing about it, but it has theory as a goal. He explains:
The microbial theory of disease has enabled the development of vaccines and antibiotics that have mitigated many epidemics and significantly increased human life expectancy. [Before that] scientists believed that infectious diseases were caused by bad air, or "miasmas".
Ageing science is drowning in ideas and animal experiments, but nothing solid to ground it.
I have even greater interest in David Gems' book, On Aging: What Causes it and How it Leads to the Maladies of Old Age. Hopefully, it'll appear this summer for fun beach reading. I'm looking forward to this because it might well talk about evolutionary constraints on biology and how it shows as ageing.
In the meantime, we have "Are we getting closer to understanding why we age?" (Nature Aging, 11 September 2025):
[...] the ultimate cause of why we age is the need for a compromise between the forces of physics (thermodynamics) and the needs imposed by natural selection and evolutionary pressures.
And: "An overview of contemporary theories of ageing" (Nature Cell Biology, 1 July 2025). It does what it says (given the constraints of a nine page PDF), and clarifies that a theory is possible:
Despite the complexity and multifactorial nature of ageing, the principles underpinning the mechanisms of human ageing can be understood, which would represent a massive breakthrough in biology.
That is a reasonable position on ageing.
* * *
This post was partly triggered by the Financial Times three-part "Tech Tonic" podcast series "Defying death: The origins of ageing" (26 November 2025). It contains science and a taste of the hype that has reached a clinic near you. Recommended.