The New Mainstream Scientific View of Longevity Research
Matters have certainly moved along in the past decade. The conservative view in gerontology is now that greater human longevity is desirable and can be engineered through metabolic manipulation - a great improvement over the previous state of affairs, but still a way to go yet towards the SENS model of repair and radical life extension. This In the Pipeline post typifies the mainstream view, I think, including a knee-jerk labeling of ongoing SENS longevity research as "fringe": "first, it's increasingly clear that there are deep connections between metabolism and lifespan. All sorts of genes related to food intake and insulin signaling affect how long model organisms live, and there's every reason to expect that the same is true of us. Second, the settings for our lifespans may not be optimal - or what we'd now consider optimal. ... there's no reason that we necessarily have to accept whatever tradeoffs were made during the development of our species. ... ever since our brains became large and complex enough for language and culture, and ever since we started growing our own food, we've been altering the evolutionary bargains that all other species have had to make - predator/prey relationships, availability of food, and so on. We may yet be able to draw a black line through another paragraph of the contract, and make it stick."
Link: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/01/21/breaking_the_contract_of_aging.php