The unpopular view that aging needs a foundational theory

Reading: Inflated expectations: the strange craze for translational research on aging, Gems, Okholm & Lemoine (2024), EMBO Reports, 1–5.

Brief and highly readable insight into where aging research is at, and where it should be.

In short: 

• The current mainstream is to translate observations into therapies, to hell with the basic theory. That has sometimes worked in other fields  but there are plenty of examples where it has not.
• The (better) alternative is to be working on understanding aging, finding the equivalent of a “germ theory for aging”, so to speak.

How did we get here?

Advances in research on the biology of aging that culminated in the 1990s yielded startling implications […]

These promising prospects led to the aging field becoming bigger and better, thanks to increased funding and the influx of many good scientists. […]

Such careful research over the past two decades has, regrettably, undermined a number of the reasons for earlier optimism. 

There’s now an XPRIZE for aging, just as there was one for reusable space vehicles. The paper makes a great point that for space vehicles we had the physics and engineering already. Where’s that for aging?