Scientists: “Harness the New Science of Aging to Meet Global Challenges”

A summit meeting of some leading researchers in the science of healthy aging, including the USC Davis School of Gerontology’s Caleb Finch, Ph.D. and the late Dr. Robert Butler, has concluded that the time is now to launch an Apollo-like Project seeking to keep aging generations youthful, productive, and engaged to unprecedented ages.

Dr. Caleb Finch

Most of us have heard about, and seen small glimpses of, the new science of aging. In laboratories all over the world, scientists are now keeping living things alive and healthy for ever longer. Using genome sciences, drastic diets, and the techniques of cell science and regenerative medicine, researchers have given worms, fish, mice, and other animals longer, stronger, fitter lives than once thought possible. And always, the question has been: When will medical science do the same for us?   
 
An answer to this question is urgently needed. Soon, for the first time in human history, the aged will outnumber the young.  This unprecedented global shift will have far-reaching consequences, both positive and negative.   The value of the wealth of experience and wisdom accumulated over years in its application to the problems of the world cannot be overstated but  with age also comes a tremendous human burden of suffering caused by a panoply of disease and disability. Heart disease, cancer, diseases of the bones and joints, Alzheimer’s and other dementias, and weakened resistance to infectious disease all rise locking the valuable experience of mature individuals in failing physiologies

What if the science that lets researchers keep mice and rats fit, healthy, and vigorous could be translated into new preventive and regenerative therapies for our aging citizens? 
 
A panel of researchers and thinkers in the science of aging, brought together by the LifeStar Institute, has produced a bold vision of hope and optimism and a plan on how to begin to make it real. Reviewing the evidence, these experts have concluded that current knowledge of the new science of aging is sufficient to be the foundation of a new kind of medicine. This new medicine would not just alleviate the pains of individual age-related diseases, but zero in on the changes that drive aging bodies into age-related ill health. By slowing, leveling off, and in some cases, perhaps, reversing the degenerative changes of aging,  aggressive investments in aging research might allow medical science to preserve and extend healthy lifespans for future generations and even today’s aging populations.

“The Demographic and Biomedical Case for Late-Life Interventions in Aging,” just published in the journal Science: Translational Medicine, lays out the evidence for optimism about aging.  The scientific panel develops arguments for the United States and nations across the world to create a global collaboration and  launch an Apollo-like  Project, with the goal to transform what is known about the degenerative changes of aging and ways to ameliorate them in the laboratory into new kinds of medicines for humans.

For more information or to download your free copy of the article, please visit the Lifestar Institute.