Lifespan: Why We Age - and Why We Don't Have To

There’s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive—decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility—is no virtue.

These theories fit with observations and are generally accepted. Individuals don’t live forever because natural selection doesn’t select for immortality in a world where an existing body plan works perfectly well to pass along a body’s selfish genes. And because all species are resource limited, they have evolved to allocate the available energy ei... See more

"the nine hallmarks described in this Review: genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication"

What is novel about therapies that target aging is that they tend to produce improvements across the board. Normally, drugs tend to treat a single condition, leaving everything else untouched. But as aging is the breakdown of our body’s capability for self-maintenance in general, addressing that one root cause ameliorates all the conditions downstr... See more