Support Real Progress in Life Extension

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

When it comes to a motto and a goal in life, you could do far worse than "support real progress in life extension." I may be biased on this topic, of course:

As we start the new year, it is helpful to draw attention to the sobering fact that no credible human rejuvenation therapies are available today, and it is doubtful that such therapies will see the light of day in the short term.
...

There is a broad consensus in the life extension community that more resources need to be allocated to combating aging as such, as opposed to increasingly futile efforts to extend life by treating aging-associated diseases. Unfortunately, the objective to launch a serious rejuvenation research program has limited mass appeal so far. As a consequence, we will have to get involved ourselves. Hopefully we can shift the focus from extensive hypothetical discussion about the consequences of human enhancement technologies to supporting and engaging in real experimental research to make these technologies facts of life.

We are all of us dying slowly, cut down by the progressive biological mechanisms of degenerative aging that bring frailty and disease. What can we do about this? I offer some suggestions here at Fight Aging!, which essentially boil down to specific recommendations for the following:

Help to fund ongoing meaningful research in rejuvenation biotechnology.
Persuade increasing numbers of other people to do the same.
Work on improving your ability to do well with the first two items above.

As the biotechnology revolution continues, a further option becomes open: to do some of the work ourselves, as amateur life scientists and technicians. Just as many smart people learned to write code and build sophisticated software applications once computers became cheap, so too will many smart people participate in biotechnology research and development:

This coming sea change in the life sciences is something to look forward to and prepare for - there are a great many important tasks in longevity science that might progress effectively in distributed communities outside the established research institutions. That list of tasks will only grow larger as the cost of required tools and knowledge falls ever faster.