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Thanks for sharing! Can I please request the following:
'An outback Australian landscape with T-rex dinosaurs being chased by ducklings'
'The Buddha attaining enlightenment with galaxies entering his mind'
'An AI using a laptop computer to watch YouTube'
'The Tesseract from the movie Interstellar, with inverted colours'
'The aftermath of Global nuclear war'
I'm so curious! Thanks a lot!
So much one could critique in this article, but one simple question: should we also stop doing cancer/CVD/dementia research? These are also intended to extend the period of healthy lifespan. The only difference with anti-aging is that it's targeting the root cause (i.e. biological hallmarks of aging) rather than the symptoms of aging i.e. diseases of aging. And if you believe we should pursue only the less effective means of extending healthy lifespan, you would need to find some compelling reason to justify spending $billions on extending lifespan by a few months, rather than potentially several years/decades.
Copied from the response to another, similar, comment:
There are a number of publicly-traded longevity biotechnology companies. You could invest in Unity Biotechnology (NASDAQ:UBX) or Proteostasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ:PTI), for example.
I also recommend the Longevity Market Cap newsletter.
Here are some links that may be useful:
https://investoraccess.masterinvestor.co.uk/events/investing-in-the-age-of-longevity/
https://transhumanplus.com/investments-on-antiaging/
https://investingnews.com/daily/life-science-investing/longevity-investing/longevity-research-companies/
https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/08/top-10-companies-longevity/
If you're referring to median lifespan, we already know that many factors increase lifespan by up to 10-15 years in humans cumulatively: exercise, fasting, diet and so on. So it is highly likely that therapies (e.g. mTOR inhibitors) that potentially act through similar pathways will extend median lifespan.
In terms of maximal lifespan, I'm not sure of the strength of those theoretical reasons in light of mechanisms of aging such as cellular senescence, which is known to strongly contribute to the aging phenotype in mice and humans and which can be removed in humans now (2020 study).
Evolution is not optimizing for lifespan...only on gene transmission. So in general, I think arguments along the lines of 'as humans we are hitting our natural limit of lifespan' are poorly substantiated.
Some have calculated lifespan would be 2800-8900 years on average without aging.
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortality-riskhttps://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3044194/whats-the-average-life-expectancy-if-only-dying-from-accidents
Great - have you seen the existing Metaculus questions on anti-aging by Matthew Barnett and others?
Hi bardstale,
'Deregulated nutrient sensing' is one of the 9 hallmarks of aging covered in the article, and includes insulin signaling (IGF-1, etc) - that is, insulin signaling pathways.
Dietary protocols such as the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) and ketogenic diets attenuate IGF-1 which is potentially beneficial for longevity. However, lifestyle protocols were not the focus of this article, since ultimately, lifestyle interventions alone are not likely sufficient to extend maximal lifespan beyond 125 years. Another way to phrase this, is that these diets are 'anti-aging' insofar as they slow the rate of aging, but not reverse it to a level that could potentially be achieved with therapies.
The goal of anti-aging research is to provide new therapies that can allow us to live much longer than is available with the best approaches today (diet/exercise/meditation/low stress etc.).
Hi icemtel,
There are a number of publicly-traded longevity biotechnology companies. You could invest in Unity Biotechnology (NASDAQ:UBX) or Proteostasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ:PTI), for example.
I also recommend the Longevity Market Cap newsletter.
For larger investments, you could also look into longevity biotech VC's such as Apollo Health Ventures.
Here are some links that may be useful:
https://investoraccess.masterinvestor.co.uk/events/investing-in-the-age-of-longevity/
https://transhumanplus.com/investments-on-antiaging/
https://investingnews.com/daily/life-science-investing/longevity-investing/longevity-research-companies/
https://www.nanalyze.com/2019/08/top-10-companies-longevity/
I did not include the Tel Aviv/HBOT study since it is not considered a promising approach to anti-aging by most researchers in the field. The conclusions of the study are potentially misleading, due to the highly improbable senolytic effect of oxygen therapy.
In my recent interview with Dr Aubrey de Grey, I asked him about this same study (timestamp: 40:30), and he said that it was enormously over-hyped.
I encourage you to read this article, which explains the media circus around the study, and critiques the science:
https://www.lifespan.io/news/media-circus-surrounds-hyperbaric-oxygen-study/
Thank you very much, I appreciate it. This is only a short introduction to the field, and I plan to write several follow-up articles in the near future to create a larger sequence (covering: aging and COVID-19, the ethical arguments for/against anti-aging, aging and cancer, and more anti-aging therapy approaches).
Thanks for the tip - just added 'become a researcher' and 'work for a longevity biotech company' as additional ways to help the field.
Thank-you for the kind words! Stay tuned for more articles like this one coming soon.
Here's some of the important stuff (not medical advice, obviously):
Daily multivitamin
Omega 3 fatty acids (EPA/DHA)
Magnesium citrate
Turmeric (curcumin)
Resveratrol / pterostilbene
Metformin / berberine
Apigenin
Quercetin
NR (nicotinamide riboside)
EGCG (green or white tea)
Ocimum sanctum (Tulsi)
Bacopa monnieri (standardized 20% bacosides)
Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica)
Gingko biloba
B12 – many people are deficient
Vitamin D (get blood tested to optimize, ideally 30 min/day full sun, 2000 IU)
Vitamin C (megadose, 5 g / day +, spread throughout the day)
Piracetam + Choline
Uridine
Acetylcarnitine + N-acetyl cysteine
Glycine
Supergreen/superfruit blend*: “Blender Culture” .
Just looked it up - looks promising. Thanks for sharing.
You're welcome!
I mentioned 'tortoises' rather than 'turtles' in the OP and was referring to species such as the Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5743229/
I think it's worth putting such a critique into it's own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
Will do.
It's relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that's valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
If it works (slows aging) then it will be profitable.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
If by 'tooling improvements' you mean, biomarkers of aging then I completely agree with you. This is also research within the aging field that requires more funding. Besides that, I'm not sure what kind of tools you think we need. The bottom line is that we have a bunch of drugs, and we need a measuring stick (accurate biological age test) to tell us whether the drugs slow aging or not. What other platform technologies would be needed to expedite this process?
Youtube allows you to link to specific timestamps when you click on the share button.
Thanks for the tip.
I think you have the wrong link. In any case Aubrey de Grey basically here that hiring credentialed people is not enough to get results but that if he would organize the research it would produce better results. While that might be true it's hard to assess.
Sorry, here is the link. It's not that hard to assess, given he has many informal chats with people affiliated with Calico. His point is that Calico has a huge budget but terrible internal structure that has essentially created an internal valley of death - many good aging researchers on good salaries, and many good pharma guys, but no-one who is actually developing and translating the technologies to solve aging (i.e. by repairing the hallmarks of aging).
That sounds like the people in the 1970s that they thought they could cure cancer by the end of the decade if they declare war on it.
It's not an apt comparison for at two reasons:
- Scientists were nowhere near understanding cancer in mice let alone curing it in 1970. By contrast, with anti-aging technologies such as senolytics we can already delay cancer (which kills 80% of mice typically) and extend healthy lifespan 30%.
- Solving cancer is a potentially harder than slowing aging, since it involves intervening in the process further downstream i.e. when more damage has accumulated, rather than nipping it in the bud.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their 'medium-depth' inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I'll add a couple of points:
I completely agree with you that technology from other areas (AI, platform technologies etc.) will benefit aging research. But that's not the point - 100,000 people per day are dying of aging and we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test (AKG, Gemfibrozil, rapamycin, spermidine, etc.) but we don't have the funding to do it. So, donating to SENS is important to pick the lowest hanging fruit i.e. testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging. To give an analogy - you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same - although today's platform technologies are not perfect (just like today's material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized. Remember that anti-aging almost certainly will happen eventually if society doesn't collapse, and what the field is fighting for is for this to happen sooner rather than later, so that many more people alive today will benefit.
The above is actually an additional criticism I had of the OpenPhil. It's not that Aubrey de Grey and and others in the field don't think advances in other areas will help (AI, etc.), it's that there are so many feasible projects that should be funded that could potentially have a huge impact on populations today, that are not being funded. The neglectedness of the field is the primary reason SENS needs more funding, - think of SENS as funding a locus of research that has among the highest probability of progressing the field in the near future, given this research is working directly on the problem.
So yes, I agree that increasing SENS' budget by 10-20X would probably be sufficient and that once this point has been reached, the marginal ROI would fall. However, it's also worth considering that the type of research funded by SENS could also drastically change as the field grows, which may still make SENS donations above the 20X point remain cost-effective. Either way, SENS needs more money today.
Your comment alludes to 3 exceedingly common objections to anti-aging:
(1) 'Death and aging bring meaning to life'
(2) Distributional justice (i.e. 'only for the rich')
(3) Overpopulation (resource overconsumption, environmental impact etc.)
All of these objections have been responded to at length by David Wood in his book The Abolition of Aging, Aubrey de Grey in his book, Ending Aging and David Sinclair in his book, Lifespan and on blogs such as FightAging.org and Lifespan.io.
Anyway, I plan to write a Part 2 post covering the main ethical arguments including the three you reference, but will provide a short summary here:
(1) 'Death or aging brings meaning (or happiness) to life'
My point is this: Age and suffering give meaning to our lives. Technology slowly but surely eliminates both. Without any struggle - and as close to paradise as ever - where will we find meaning? In continuous progress? In "higher" quality of life?*
While chronological aging gives meaning to our lives, as existing over time allows to experience reality for longer (allowing for self-actualisation, building friendships and relationships, pursuing passions and so on) biological aging - that is, our slow and fatal physiological decline by the 9 hallmarks of aging that are slowly killing us, that currently accompanies chronological aging - doesn't. If you think people get happier as they get more frail, weak, lose their sight, hearing, and have higher chances of cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes just take a closer look at depression statistics - the highest rates of depression are among the elderly, who account for the most DALYs of any age demographic, from depression.
Honestly, ask yourself - do you think there is any meaning associated with neurodegeneration, and Alzheimer's disease? Because as a neuroscientist I can tell you that it is impossible to age without neurodegeneration, which leads to extremely high rates of Alzheimer's disease in the elderly. Neurodegeneration involves losing one's memories, cognition and other mental faculties, which also predisposes to depression, so it's unclear how this process would be valuable for improving wellbeing, as you suggest.
The attempt to ascribe 'meaning' to the suffering that accompanies biological age-related decline and the diseases it is associated with (cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes etc.) is just a manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy coupled with lazy conservatism inherent in human nature.
The reality is: biological aging f*cking sucks, and no person who is experiencing the decline associated with aging (frailty, heart problems, signs of cancer etc.) would give up the opportunity to take therapy to bring them to a more youthful state of being biologically 20-30 years old with complete physical and cognitive function, given the opportunity. If you have compelling evidence on the contrary, please provide it.
For more about deathism, the pro-aging trance and 'death brings meaning to life' arguments, read articles, here, here and here. Also consider reading Aubrey de Grey's book, Ending Aging David Sinclair's book, Lifespan and David Wood's book, The Abolition of Aging.
(2) Distributional justice (i.e. 'only for the rich')
Will the "anti-aging cure" (considering aging as a disease still rings a bit weird to me) be available to all strata of society? Or will it only enlarge the cleft between haves and have nots?
I covered this in another comment in this thread, but will copy and paste the response for your convenience:
- Anti-aging therapies are in principle no different from existing medical treatments such as anti-viral or anti-cancer therapies. For example, there is little philosophically difference between a cancer therapy (e.g. molecules that kill cancer cells) to extend healthy lifespan and a senolytic drug (e.g. molecules that kill senescent cells) to extend healthy lifespan. In the same way that few would object to the development of better cancer therapies today (e.g. CAR T-cell therapies) that only the rich can afford (and are not, for example, currently available to people in Africa), few should object to anti-aging drugs that extend healthy lifespan, even if only the rich can initially afford them too. Basically, many lifesaving medical interventions are initially expensive, and therefore only available to the rich, but this isn't a reason to inhibit research. An additional point: if you support current medical research - which functions essentially to extend healthy lifespan, you should also support anti-aging, which also aims to extend healthy lifespan, though through prevention rather than cures. The only difference between the two is the approach, and the likely effectiveness - anti-aging is likely to be more effective at accomplishing the goal. Hence, we should be more enthusiastic about this approach, if anything.
- Therapies are unlikely to stay expensive for long. When patents expire after 10-20 years, drugs usually become ridiculously cheap, and so any distributional inequality is unlikely to last long. Metformin, a life-saving diabetes drug (that is also being studied for its anti-aging properties) is a good example - it was initially expensive but the price has now plummeted to 31 cents per tablet in 2013. There are numerous economic forces that will drive low prices - governments are incentivised to subsidise these therapies, to populations healthy and stave off the diseases of old age that cost healthcare systems trillions of dollars worldwide annually (e.g. dementia alone costs over $1 trillion), which is otherwise set to grow due to an aging population. Insurance companies will similarly be incentivized to subside these therapies, to keep their clients healthier and able to avoid the chronic diseases of old age for longer. A good analogy is car sales - cars used to be too expensive for most people but are now ubiquitous and largely affordable. Since the market size for anti-aging therapies (i.e. all humans on Earth) is huge, as it is for cars, we would expect the huge demand to result in lower prices. Food technology is another, more recent example. In 2013 the first lab-grown burger was $325,000, and two years later the cost fell to $12.
- Not developing anti-aging technology doesn't help the poor. Anti-aging technologies only available for the rich would not help the poor, but not having these technologies available to the rich - that is, allowing the rich to age and die like the rest of us - also wouldn't help the poor. What matters is not only that the gap between rich and poor is closed, but also how it is closed. For example, those in Western countries could give up all their comforts and wealth to be economically equal to the lowest African countries. But this is not the goal - the goal is to bring the African countries up in wealth, not bring economically prosperous nations down. The same applies to anti-aging: the goal is to bring everyone's healthspans up (even if it means there will exist some inequality, initially), not keep everyone's healthspans down for the sake of equality.
(3) Overpopulation and resource constraints
The initial question is purely pragmatic: more people on Earth living longer lives would mean more energy expenditure, more space needed to accommodate them. Even if this could be technologically solved with higher efficiencies (which themselves would not be offset by behavior adaptation), what will it do to the fabric of society?
- Demographics The Earth's population today is not expanding in an uncontrollable, exponential way and in fact in many parts of the world population is either now or soon will be declining (e.g. European countries, Japan, China etc.). The only regions of population growth are south-east Asia and Africa, both of are predicted to at around 11 billion in 2100 in line with the demographic transition model and then fall. In many parts of the world, underpopulation is likely to be a bigger problem than overpopulation in the near future due to dangerously low birth rates.
- Aging population A much bigger problem than overpopulation is the 'aging population' and carrying capacity (i.e. the proportion of individuals over 65+ and frail etc. due to age-related decline) which is increasing globally and will immensely burden the healthcare system, and the younger workforce, in the absence of anti-aging technologies. However, anti-aging technologies allow those in their 60s and beyond to remain in a healthy, functional state and able to work and remain free of chronic diseases for much longer.
- Neo-Malthusian collapse: The notion of overpopulation is common misconception that is completely unsubstantiated by empirical literature. Neo-Malthusian concerns have been touted since the 18th century but have not held up since as populations expand, so too does the technology to support larger populations. The whole notion of 'carrying capacity' assumed there was no possible way to (for instance) increase crop yields, fortify foods, significantly increase population density via taller buildings and so on.
- Won't a larger population exacerbate climate change? Climate change is a huge problem and while population size is a multiplicative factor in environmental impact, developing technology to decrease carbon intensity and increase and recycling effectiveness, as described by MIT economist Andrew McAffee in his book, More from Less, is feasible and the rational solution. As David Wood says in my recent interview with him: 'if we are serious about solving aging, we should not fetishize population size (as a factor), we should be working elsewhere'. Interestingly, many of the technologies that will make rejuvenation biotechnology possible can also assist with transforming agriculture to claim back land that is currently being used inefficiently, such as synthetic biology (lab grown meat) and nanotechnology (repair and recycling). Additionally, geoengineering solutions (green energy - solar/wind), space tech, and policy changes may help to reduce emissions. So although the world is already transitioning to renewables, (for example, the UK recently passed the benchmark of 50% renewables) and the rate is not necessarily fast enough, restricting population size by allowing the widespread suffering and death from aging is not the most ethical nor effective way to manage climate impact. In the same way that allowing COVID-19 to kill millions of people is not an ethical solution to climate change (which, by the way, is primarily an age-related disease that would benefit greatly from anti-aging, as I will discuss in a future post).
- We won't run out of space? In 2012, the team of the project “Per Square Mile” led by Tim de Chant produced an infographic to show how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people. If populated as densely as New York, the entire world's population could fit into an area the size of Texas. So there is more than enough space on Earth to accommodate a vastly greater population of many trillions.
- Won't we run out of food? If we compare the food supply in 1965 and in 2013, we can clearly see that overeating is more of a global issue than undernourishment, as in most countries, the calorie intake has increased significantly. If we compare the food supply in 1965 and in 2007, we can clearly see that overeating is more of a global issue than undernourishment, as in most countries, the calorie intake has grown significantly. This means that a population explosion during this time of over 4 billion people
has passed relatively unnoticed – all thanks to the “Green Revolution” (rapid development of new agriculture techniques, such as fertilizers, irrigation and selection). The concern that there will be a food shortage in the future neglects further technological advances such as aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, vertical farming, 3D-printed housing, algae farms, and many other technologies that could provide enough food for all. - Negligible senescence: Now, eventually if we completely abolish death (i.e. achieve 'negligible senescence'), then yes population size will continue to grow, assuming populations continue to reproduce. But this population growth is 1) not as rapid as people imagine 2) not a concern that is unlikely to be solved by technological advances and 2) not a reason to deny those alive today access to life-saving anti-aging therapies.
For a more detailed response to this objection, I recommend this long-form article.
Final comment: Anti-aging is basically just today's medicine, but better (and preventative)
It's worth noting that all of the above objections also apply to current medicine too (which similarly aims to extend healthy lifespan) albeit to a lesser degree due to the ineffectiveness of this approach. The philosophical difference is that anti-aging is potentially more effective at accomplishing medicine's goal - to extend healthy lifespan - by targeting the root cause of the problem (hallmarks of aging) rather than allowing the damage of aging to accumulate and then only targeting the 'symptoms' (i.e. diseases of aging - cancer, heart disease etc.). It seems strange to me that you would support (I assume) the less effective approach to healthspan extension of today's medicine, but not support the more effective approach of anti-aging. Ultimately, the two approaches service the same goal, but one intervenes earlier, when the damage has accrued but before symptoms emerge rather than when damage has accrued to an even greater level that causes symptoms to emerge. 'Prevention is better than a cure' as they say, and this certainly looks to be the case with anti-aging.
Note: if you found some of these arguments more/less compelling than others, please let me know as it will help to inform my second post :) thanks.
Yes, and there are some signs that more billionaires (at least, the progressive-minded ones) are taking this seriously. For example, Elon Musk in an interview 3 weeks ago (timestamp: 24:03) mentioned the feasibility of 'stop[ping] aging' when asked about the biggest threats to the future of humanity, for the first time on the public record.
Two scientific advisors from OpenPhil conducted a 'medium' depth investigation into anti-aging in 2017 and seemed to understand the problem, though were less optimistic about anti-aging timelines, and funding this research area. They made the following forecast:
Our program officer Nick Beckstead offers the following forecast to make the above more precise/accountable: By January 1, 2067, there will be no collection of medical interventions for adults that are healthy apart from normal aging, which, according to conventional wisdom in the medical community, have been shown to increase the average lifespan of such adults by at least 25 years (compared with not taking the interventions). (Subjective probability: ≥93%)
However, I would strongly disagree with this timeline, based on my knowledge of the field, today. I would go so far as to say that some combination of therapies available today - including metformin, senolytics, blood plasma exchange and epigenetic reprogramming - could already extend lifespan 25 years (compared to not taking the therapies) if personalised and multi-omics-biomarker-optimised. It's just that we need more research to know how, when, where and how much of these therapies are required for each individual. With another 46 years of research in a field that is already expanding, I have no doubt that 25-year lifespan extension will be available by 2067.
They also summarised what a few of the anti-aging approaches (senolytics, stem cell therapies) but neglected many of the most promising approaches such as plasma exchange, partial epigenetic reprogramming, and mTOR inhibition.
They also made a big mistake, in my opinion, by overevaluating the amount of funding that geroscience (i.e. research that is relevant to the development of anti-aging therapies) receives:
The NIH reports spending $2.7 billion per year on aging research in 2015.16 In the 2015 budget request, $510 million per year is tagged as “neuroscience” and $177 million per year is tagged as “aging biology.”17 We have heard in various conversations that this research is mainly relevant to addressing particular symptoms associated with widely-recognized diseases (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease), rather than on understanding the basic mechanisms that cause aging. This is plausible to us, but we haven’t seen any convincing evidence for it and we do not take it for granted.
It is clear to almost everyone working in the field that the amount of funding going towards geroscience - i.e. targeting aging therapeutically - is drastically lower than that of age-related diseases - which employ completely different research methods and experimental protocols (i.e. do not perform lifespan studies with geroprotective interventions prior to disease onset). A list of most of the researchers working in the field is here (last updated April 2020) though I don't think OpenPhil cared to look deeply enough into the field to recognise the lack of researchers and funding for geoscience in particular.
There are other flaws in their analysis. For example, they mentioned the large funding that Google-backed Calico receives, here:
Some aging-focused companies working in this area that we became aware of in the course of this investigation include Calico ($500 million in disclosed investment and agreed upon potential for $1B more);24
However, as Aubrey de Grey explains in this interview, Calico - despite having a huge budget - have a poor organisational structure that has so far precluded any meaningful research advances in the field.
As Aubrey de Grey puts it in the interview (from ~1:14:00 onwards):
They [Calico] have created a vast valley of death internally....they've got this paradise of research where they've hired fanastically good researchers in large numbers paid large salaries to find stuff out; to increase our understanding of what aging is. And on the other end they've got these people who know all these people who know all about how to turn proof of concept into a product - and they've got zero in the middle. They've got nothing that turns knowledge into proof of concept.
So overall, I believe OpenPhil are inaccurate in their assessment of the geroscience field based on their 'medium' depth investigation into it. There are numerous other examples of statements in their write-up that demonstrate a poor or incomplete knowledge of the state of the field - both scientifically and economically. I can go into these if you like, and I'll probably write up a post about this in the future.
That seems like it could be a good idea. A few more questions though:
How would writing the question help to convince people? Would it not only be convincing in 5-10 years' time if some of the predictions turn out to be accurate? Or, do you think if consensus on a Metaculus question that prediction X will occur is in and of itself convincing for rationalists?
I'm still a little uncertain about the practical benefit of writing questions, in helping to advance the technologies.
It seems to me that unlike say, GAI research very little attention has been paid to the consequences of such work.
This is true, and indeed there has been very little social sciences research on longevity that I am aware of, besides public attitudes towards longevity. Given the highly probable rise of anti-aging technologies in the near future, social science should focus its attention on modeling the impacts of longevity on social systems, political systems, and so on.
I do not see how this would not result in a tiered society where at least at first those with access to longevity will be the wealthy and resourceful and thus able to tyrannise those that dont.
Distributional justice is a very common objection to life extension that has been addressed at length by many in the field. This article and this site do a good job at laying out the arguments, and David Wood who I recently interviewed discusses this point, as he does in great depth in his book, The Abolition of Aging.
I'll summarise some of the responses to distributional justice (i.e. 'only for the rich') arguments below:
- Anti-aging therapies are in principle no different from existing medical treatments such as anti-viral or anti-cancer therapies. For example, there is little philosophically difference between a cancer therapy (e.g. molecules that kill cancer cells) to extend healthy lifespan and a senolytic drug (e.g. molecules that kill senescent cells) to extend healthy lifespan. In the same way that few would object to the development of better cancer therapies today (e.g. CAR T-cell therapies) that only the rich can afford (and are not, for example, currently available to people in Africa), few should object to anti-aging drugs that extend healthy lifespan, even if only the rich can initially afford them too. Basically, many lifesaving medical interventions are initially expensive, and therefore only available to the rich, but this isn't a reason to inhibit research. An additional point: if you support current medical research - which functions essentially to extend healthy lifespan, you should also support anti-aging, which also aims to extend healthy lifespan, though through prevention rather than cures. The only difference between the two is the approach, and the likely effectiveness - anti-aging is likely to be more effective at accomplishing the goal. Hence, we should be more enthusiastic about this approach, if anything.
- Therapies are unlikely to stay expensive for long. When patents expire after 10-20 years, drugs usually become ridiculously cheap, and so any distributional inequality is unlikely to last long. Metformin, a life-saving diabetes drug (that is also being studied for its anti-aging properties) is a good example - it was initially expensive but the price has now plummeted to 31 cents per tablet in 2013. There are numerous economic forces that will drive low prices - governments are incentivised to subsidise these therapies, to populations healthy and stave off the diseases of old age that cost healthcare systems trillions of dollars worldwide annually (e.g. dementia alone costs over $1 trillion), which is otherwise set to grow due to an aging population. Insurance companies will similarly be incentivized to subside these therapies, to keep their clients healthier and able to avoid the chronic diseases of old age for longer. A good analogy is car sales - cars used to be too expensive for most people but are now ubiquitous and largely affordable. Since the market size for anti-aging therapies (i.e. all humans on Earth) is huge, as it is for cars, we would expect the huge demand to result in lower prices. Food technology is another, more recent example. In 2013 the first lab-grown burger was $325,000, and two years later the cost fell to $12.
- Not developing anti-aging technology doesn't help the poor. Anti-aging technologies only available for the rich would not help the poor, but not having these technologies available to the rich - that is, allowing the rich to age and die like the rest of us - also wouldn't help the poor. What matters is not only that the gap between rich and poor is closed, but also how it is closed. For example, those in Western countries could give up all their comforts and wealth to be economically equal to the lowest African countries. But this is not the goal - the goal is to bring the African countries up in wealth, not bring economically prosperous nations down. The same applies to anti-aging: the goal is to bring everyone's healthspans up (even if it means there will exist some inequality, initially), not keep everyone's healthspans down.
There are then of course a myriad of psychological/existential implications which someone like Scott Alexander would have a field day with. How can we give our time meaning if we have an unlimited amount of it? What about personal relationships? Or vocational callings not to speak of parenthood or the environmental costs. Finally the arc of human life has been argued to have evolutionary purpose, our time is limited for good reason it is in a way the ultimate motivator to do good and build. Why would anyone want to take that away?
This alludes to the 'death brings meaning to life' and 'boredom' arguments - i.e. that we need death in order to achieve some kind of meaning and psychological stability in our lives.
But the argument, upon closer inspection, is utterly absurd, as this article explains. Life gives meaning to life, not death. The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be, and is determined while you are alive to think, reflect, and plan - not when you are dead. When lifespans were extended from 40 years to 80 years, did people psychologically and existentially cripple at the newfound time on their hands? No, they found new ways to use the time. Humans are incredibly adaptable and will find new ways to spend the time. We have no reason to think this will change if lifespans are extended by 1 year, or 1000 years. Half of workers over 50 engage in 3 or more careers, and a longer lifespan simply allows more time to start new careers, pursue passions, spend time with loved ones and anything else that the person wants to do.
'Death brings meaning to life' is a nonsensical argument for death is really just another facet of the naturalistic fallacy coupled with the lazy conservatism inherent in human nature.
That's a reasonable challenge. However, the definition you cited (from Wikipedia) is the classical definition of a pandemic, and according to the WHO, does not take into account disease severity and transmissability, and would imply relatively harmless influenza outbreaks would also classified as pandemics - which is somewhat controversial in terms of definition. So depending on how you define a 'pandemic' (i.e. with or without disease severity and transmissibility taken into consideration) my original claim may be true.
On the contrary, I very much expect that more funding would help with these factors. The success of cryonics is limited by sociopolitical factors, and the more people who have buy-in, the more likely people are to be protected when in long-term cryopreservation.
Yeah, that seems likely. Certainly 'the social problem' (which combines several of the parameters) in general will reduce in likelihood the more funding cryonics receives.
Thank-you, fixed.
Completely agree - we have this planned on our Oxford Society of Ageing and Longevity website (ageingandlongevity.com). I also plan to write a sequence on LessWrong of perhaps 10-15 posts similar to this one.
Feel free to comment if you think there are specific angles you'd like me to focus on (e.g. explaining the science in more detail, discussing common philosophical objections, describing the financing of longevity biotech, etc.).
I think it would be worth rebuilding if you have time. If you do, make sure to share it on Longevity Subreddit. You will get a lot of interest in it there.
The estimates of Harris and Perry that cryonics doesn't work range from 23% to 99.8% - which are potentially quite high (as I phrased it in the OP). Cryonics might work, but there's a potentially very good chance that it doesn't.
I agree that cryonics is underfunded even more than aging research. It seems likely that an increase in funding to cryonics could increase the probability that cryonics works, by improving the chance of success of the following variables:
- Favorable conditions for suspension
- Suspension preserves enough information
- Mishap-free storage
- Nanotechnology is perfected
- Cryonic revival is "cheap enough"
At the very least, it would help to reduce the uncertainty regarding some of the parameters, providing as a clearer picture of the feasibility of cryonics.
However, several of the parameters would be likely to be unaffected by increased funding:
- Materialism is correct
- Identity encoded in structure
- Sufficient social stability
- Cryonics is continuously legal
- Nanotechnology is physically possible
- Cryonic revival is permitted
Ideally, both cryonics and anti-aging would receive more funding.
The intention of my post was not to encourage reductions in funding into cryonics; rather, to increase awareness among LessWrongers readers about anti-aging.
Really love the app, great work!
Just a bug I found (I think it's a bug?) - if I untick all the boxes, the median age of death goes to 0.
It's a good idea.
There is already one on essentially this topic:
Will there be a culturally significant development in aging research by 2030?
The median is 65% so it seems most people (at least, out of those who have responded here) seem to agree with my 10-year timeline for important discoveries.
And this is another one anti-aging-related:
The median is 58% for this one.
I haven't used Metaculus before and I don't know what value I could bring by signing up for Metaculus and adding new questions. I intuit that my time would be better spent progressing the research forward so the optimistic predictions actually occur, rather than endless forecasting.
That said, I don't know much about how Metaculus works. If you think it's a good platform for outreach and educating people about the field then I would consider it. Or, if you think there are certain kinds of questions I should ask (e.g. regarding the success of individual anti-aging approaches, maybe?). Let me know.
Yes, the Conboy lab are doing some of the best research in the field. The Brunet 2019 review I linked in the OP cites work from Conboy's lab on plasma dilution / parabiosis. I know that the company affiliated with Wyss-Coray's company Alkahest have plasma trials for Alzheimer's.
Sure - I've just added that at the bottom. Thanks for the tip.
There are two ways you can react to DeepMind making progress on protein folding. The one is to say: "Great there's progress". The other is to look at the inability of the existing companies to innovate.
When Illumina started having their monopol on sequencing technology, the cost effectiveness of the technology suddenly stopped going down like is was before.
After Theranos went bust we don't have new companies that go after cheaper blood tests even through that would be important to reduce the costs of understanding what happens.
Sorry, I don't quite follow - what's the point here? That funding SENS alone is unwise? If so, I don't think that's the major concern, as SENS has a tiny budget (~$5 million) and have a good track record funding some of the best work in the field.
If we live in a world where we have a bunch of promising approaching for anti-aging drug development and our problem is that not enough capital goes towards persuing them, research that provides additional perspectives doesn't seem to be most important.
By 'approaches' I meant, 'therapeutic approaches', not 'perspectives on aging'.
What I tried to emphasize in the OP is we have a good-enough model (or, 'perspective') on aging which is the hallmarks of aging, and that the limiting factor now is funding to (1) develop new approaches to therapeutically addressing these hallmarks and (2) translate these findings into humans through the financing of longevity biotech startups, though (1) is the more important than (2).
Definitely. There are over 50 therapies in clinical trials for aging today, addressing various components of cellular aging (i.e. all 9 hallmarks), and many have shown life extension effects in mice, and amelioration of the decline associated with age-related conditions in humans. I'm convinced some of these therapies, when administered from mid-life onwards, would extend human lifespan by 5 years or more. Especially if their delivery is personalised and biomarker-optimised. I expect some combination of these therapies, in tandem, to extend healthy human lifespan by 10 years or more.
The challenge lies in proving this within the next 10 years, since it would take up to 50 years to run a full-length human lifespan study. So it comes down to how we define robust evidence that aging can be slowed therapeutically. For this, we need accurate biomarkers of aging, and unfortunately, we don't have the best aging biomarkers yet.
On the other hand, one could argue we already have robust evidence that aging can be slowed from thymic rejuvenation (using GH+DHEA+Metformin) demonstrated in 2019 to reverse biological age by 2.5 years with 1 year of treatment. However, the extent to which this can be considered robust evidence that aging can be slowed depends on who you are talking to in the field, and their familiarity with aging clocks.
If we are using epigenetic aging as the measurement, I'd bet all the money in my bank that at least one additional pharmacological compound will be shown to slow or reverse epigenetic aging in the next 10 years. That said, this measurement is likely to become redundant very soon, due to the development of multi-omics biomarkers of aging that will be more accurate in measuring aging.
So overall, I'm very confident that some of the 50 compounds being trialed today, and certainly some of those that will be discovered in the next 10 years, will slow aging - which is a less controversial claim than many people realize since some of these therapies (such as mTOR inhibitors like metformin) replicate the beneficial effects of lifestyle factors we know already increase healthy lifespan and slow aging as measured by epigenetic markers, like intermittent fasting.
Yes - it's hard to perform the calculations and end up with a high probability that cryonics works.
I think cryonics overall is much less feasible than many Less Wrongers tend to assume. Overall, I think anti-aging has a much higher chance of working to keep us alive much longer than cryonics does.
I'm just wondering about the problems with funding and researchers. One would think that plenty of money is actual around but it's more about both awareness and some belief that a tangible return to the investors would be likely. That seems like it might be more a problem of asymmetric information as it were -- or perhaps a bit of "language" between the groups. What's your sense there?
You're 100% spot on here. 'Curing aging' and 'longevity' aren't common ideas in biomedical research, but 'curing cancer', 'curing Alzheimer's' and 'curing heart disease' are. This is unfortunate given aging is driving all of these conditions.
It can sometimes be frustrating being in the longevity field, because researchers in other fields are incentivised to remain in their silos in which the core premises (e.g. curing cancer is good and effective) are treated as dogma, rather than see the bigger picture and work on solving the problem in more efficient ways.
Once you suggest that slowing aging might be a more effective approach to extending healthy human lifespan, many researchers find it difficult to engage in the conversation. This is especially the case since education into the biology of aging is extremely poor in most biomedical and medical programs. Even in my case, I went through 5 years of tertiary education without learning the information in the OP. This information I gathered through speaking to experts in the field, reading books such as Lifespan, reading blogs like Lifespan.io and FightAging.org, reading thousands of papers on this topic and attending aging conferences. Still to this day, there are unfortunately very few channels educating people on the hallmarks of aging and the connection between these and the diseases of aging.
Most cancer researchers I spoke to know very little about the hallmarks of aging, for example, and the connection between the hallmarks and disease. This is because their work focuses on solving the problem of cancer once it arises, rather than solving it in advance by curing aging. All of their incentives (grant funding, publication opportunities) are towards trying to cure cancer, rather than trying to extend healthy human lifespan (and delay the onset of cancer, potentially for hundreds of years) by slowing or reversing aging. This is unfortunate since, as I outlined in my post, aging is by far the biggest driver of cancer (and all other age-related diseases) and rates of cancer in biologically young people are very low.
For the above reasons reason, most biomedical researchers don't speak the language of the 'hallmarks of aging', and aren't familiar with terms like 'senolytics', for example.
For research is there any structure that might work a bit like various gig-econcomy sites. Basically forums that work as an infrastructure to allow a wide audience of those capable of research/analysis to form quick teams to tackle a problem. Or perhaps just do some of the initial leg work to see if some line of thinking is actually going somewhere? I have the suspicion that perhaps a lot of the effort here might be less about lab work and more about digging though the results (but that may well be completely wrong).
This is a great idea, and similar to what groups such as Deep Science Ventures are doing. They are essentially headhunting top biomedical researchers and funding them to work on important problems such as aging. There definitely needs to be more innovation like this to provide ways of funding anti-aging research so the field isn't entirely dependent upon the small pennies it receives from government research councils.
Charities such as SENS research foundation fulfil a similar role too, though as a charity rather than a for-profit. They collaborate with research groups and fund what they deem the most high-impact research, and get the best research teams they can get to do it.
I encourage you to read the full article, not just the first paragraph. Specifically:
A new breed of biotechnology firms, unencumbered by the accumulated practices and systems of large traditional ones, are pioneering impressive new digital capabilities. In the process, they are nudging the industry as a whole in this direction. This could significantly boost R&D productivity, benefiting both pharmaceutical companies and the patients they serve.
In recent years, a number of biotechnology companies have applied genetic-information-driven technologies to form “biomolecular platforms” (exhibit). These platforms intervene at different points in the information chain (often referred to as “the central dogma of biology”) to modify biomolecular processes at the source of various diseases. In that respect, they have a software-like nature, that allows for the ready design of multiple new therapies by a single platform, that provides the instructions to modify the hardware of molecular biology, that in turn addresses disease.
It's my impression that SENS focuses on doing basic research and not testing anti-aging drug candidates.
SENS fund basic research that leads to new approaches to anti-aging drug development. Here is a good example of this. They sponsor both intramural and extramural research.
Several longevity biotech companies such as Underdog Pharmaceuticals has been spun out of research funded by SENS. The longevity biotech companies then take the technology through clinical trials.
I encourage you to have a browse of the research they have funded, here.
LRI and SENS fulfil essentially the same role - to fund important research in this field, to increase the probability that effective anti-aging therapies will be discovered. I think LRI is also a good place to donate, though I am less familiar with their work.
Thanks for the compliment!
Although it only took two days to write, it was the product of several months of thinking about the topic, and putting the pieces together.
That said, if you'd like to sponsor me to complete this sequence and/or create more content like this, I would be more than happy to. You can have a look at other content I've created for MindsetHealth.com.
Please feel free to drop me a line at jtt.harley@gmail.com
I completely agree that it is absurd that the kind of content in the OP is not more widely publicized. This was my precise motivation for writing this post.
Unfortunately, there is no good 'where to start' guide for anti-aging. This is insane, given this is the field looking for solutions to the biggest killer on Earth today.
The closest approximations to a 'where to start' guide for anti-aging would be:
- Is Human Life Extension Possible? - LongevityAdvice.com
- Longevity FAQ - Laura Deming (who is a longevity biotech VC)
- Lifespan by David Sinclair
- Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey
That said, none of the above communicated all of the ideas that I wished to communicate in the OP in a succinct way. Again, this is precisely why I wrote it.
It seems to be one of the better introductions out there, as those in touch with field on the longevity subreddit seem to have appreciated my introductory guide, as it's one of the top-rated posts in the past week and has been given 5 awards. As an aside, I'm planning on turning this into a sequence, so if you have ideas for future topics please let me know.
I totally agree regarding funding for 80k equivalent sites. If someone wants to provide financing for an anti-aging outreach and careers platform, count me in. I suppose the closest site would be Lifespan.io, which is a non-for-profit that provides high-quality content about the field, and crowdfunds research.
I also recommend emailing 80k and asking them to provide information on anti-aging career paths. I think it would be valuable for EA in general. If they are open to it, I would be more than happy to write something.
About me:
I'm not a geroscience researcher, but I am conducting neuroscience research at Oxford University after finishing my studies here and have a reasonable grasp of the geroscience field. I am vice president of the Oxford Society of Ageing and Longevity and in this role have had the privilege of interviewing influential figures in the field such as Aubrey de Grey, and researchers in the field such as Joao Pedro de Magalhaes. I've also had meetings with many other key figures in the field including David Sinclair. I also attended most of the major conferences in the field (ARDD2020, EARD2020, CSL Mechanisms of Aging 2020 etc.) last year. I've read probably in the order of 2000 academic papers in this field, and have been invited to give lectures on this topic at Oxford University and Monash University, Australia. I've also been a content writer at Mindset Health for 2 years so I have some background in science communication. The above reasons are why I felt qualified to write the OP.
If you have a 50-hour time budget to learn about anti-aging I would recommend the following:
- Watch 5 hours-worth of interviews with David Sinclair on YouTube.
- Read Lifespan by David Sinclair and Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey
- Read the Hallmarks of aging paper and this great 2019 review of the field, and this 2014 paper introducing Geroscience
- Become familiar with the major philosophical objections to anti-aging, and their responses, here.
- Spend the rest of the time watching as many talks from the 2020 ARDD conference, available free, here. Start with talks by Brian Kennedy, Nir Barzilai, Judith Campisi, Eric Verdin, David Sinclair, and Joao Pedro de Magalhaes as they are the biggest names in the field.
If you can get through all that, I can email you a huge list of over 50 papers to read that covers all aspects of the hallmarks of aging and the current state of the field.
In terms of contributing to the field, you might want to join the Longevity Subreddit and Lifespan discord server for advice about how best to leverage your specific skillsets, as there are many aging researchers in these communities. They can help advise you on career paths.
I like your idea about meta-sites and networking platforms. My advice would be - if you think it should be done, why not give it try and do it yourself? At the end of the day, someone has to do it, and it might as well be you! The worst that might happen is you might learn something. Or, pursue the idea a bit and realise that others have already attempted it and failed or abandoned the project for reasons X, Y or Z.
You are correct that interventions in mice do not always translate well to humans. Fortunately, several human trials have already shown that aging can be reversed. Time will tell how many of the current anti-aging approaches that have worked in mice will translate to humans.
The basic problem is that there's a good reason mice don't live long. Even if they didn't age, the environment in which they live means they are very likely to die in a few years from starvation or predation. So genes that keep them from aging won't be selected for because of either or both of two reasons: (1) The selective advantage of not aging, when you're likely to die young anyway, isn't enough to overcome random mutation that undoes the anti-aging genes. (2) The advantage of not aging comes at some (possibly rather small) cost in terms of increased likelihood of death from predation or starvation, or decreased fecundity early in life. (For instance, it might have an energy/food cost, or might come with decreased physical performance, such as in running speed.)
Humans live in a different environment, in which slower aging is more advantageous. And indeed humans age much slower than mice, presumably because we have genes that enable various anti-aging strategies that mice lack.
This comment doesn't make a lot of sense to me since mice used in the lab for lifespan studies are not subject to evolution today - rather, specific strains used for different kinds of experiments are purchased from specialized laboratories, where they are selectively bred.
So, when a drug is found to slow aging in mice, the first question in my mind would be, "is this drug enabling a mechanism that is already present in humans?".
And the default answer to this question would seem to be "yes". If there's some simple biochemical way of slowing aging, why don't humans already have this, given that slower aging in humans would give a significant selective advantage? (Even (especially?) in pre-civilizational societies, significant numbers of people die of old age rather than from violence or starvation.)
I don't agree with this. Senescent cells (one of the 9 hallmarks of aging) for example accumulate both in humans and mice with older age, and contribute to age-related tissue and organ dysfunction in both.
Senescent cells by definition are apoptosis-resistant, meaning they are resisting the mechanisms (found in both mice and humans) to remove them. Hence, senolytic drugs extend lifespan in mice and probably humans by removing these cells, since the machinery in the body is unable to.
On this reasoning, one would expect that a successful anti-aging program would have to involve something complicated, not easily produced by evolution. Something like, for example, nanobots inspecting cells for damaged DNA (comparing against a consensus sequence derived from a large number of the person's cells), and killing cells that are too damaged. Or at least, if there is some relatively simple intervention that helps, one would expect it to be sufficiently subtle that it doesn't show up in mice (but only after decades of life, when selective pressure for it in humans is comparatively small).
Following on from my previous comment, your comment here is not true. The most promising strategy to slowing aging is not overly complicated in principle, even though it is a technical challenge - it simply involves routinely repairing the damage associated with the hallmarks of aging as they emerge. This can be done even if the precise causes of that damage (from normal metabolism) are not known.
I suggest you learn more about the field by watching some talks on YouTube by David Sinclair, Brian Kennedy, Judith Campisi, Aubrey de Grey, Nir Barzilai, Joao Pedro de Magalhaes or any other of the speakers here to give you a better idea of the field of research.
Hi Thomas,
Great to hear you are interested in contributing to the field!
You can have a look at LongevityList.com and see if there's anything on there. It's a new project so I'm not sure how regularly it's updated.
Alternatively, you could join the Longevity Subreddit and the Lifespan Discord server and ask there, as there are many people involved in the field there willing to help. Often, people like yourself will ask about job opportunities and get connected with opportunities.
Hope that helps!
That seems plausible! The only thing I'll say is that from what I've heard, epigenetic reprogramming in vivo may be particularly challenging in many tissues in the body. Therefore, I suspect mTOR inhibitors and senolytics may be lower hanging fruit for anti-aging therapies approved first.
SENS Research Foundation aren't the only source of funding for research into the hallmarks of aging. The research into the hallmarks of aging labs at NUS, the Buck Institute, Oxford, Harvard and many other institutions is largely funded through the traditional route of national medical research councils. SENS Research Foundation funds some of the research, but by no means most of it. That said, they have a good track record of selecting some of the most important projects to fund despite a small budget of $5-10 million. For a point of comparison, the National Institute of Aging which as a $3 billion budget allocates around $100 million to geroscience.
Developing platform technologies is important in pharma and biotech, and that's happening. But the limiting factor seems to be testing anti-aging drugs, and developing better biomarkers. There is no shortage of potential anti-aging therapies - there are hundreds waiting to be tested. The limiting factors are funding and researchers. We need more laboratories working on testing new therapies for anti-aging.
Dave Asprey's book, Superhuman is pretty good - it explains the hallmarks of aging in simple terms and provides generally good advice for limiting the damage associated with the hallmarks. He draws upon a lot of scientific literature, and has over 400 academic references.
Asprey does a good job synthesising the research into practical steps a person can take to lower their rate of biological aging - something that most of the researchers in the field don't have the time to do. A few things are a bit wacky, but in general I'd say 95% of the advice he says is pretty good, and the other 5% won't do any harm.
Dave Asprey is a pioneer of the longevity biohacking community, and runs a supplement company called bulletproof.
But, if you don't like his advice, then you can look towards Rhonda and Attia.
Dr Rhonda Patrick has a PhD in cell biology and is extremely knowledgeable about aging and longevity - just watch her interviews with David Sinclair, Valter Longo or Steve Horvath - all big names in the field. She talks to them on the same level since she knows the literature very well.
Dr Peter Attia is an MD who is also very clued up on the aging field too, and on his podcast has also interviewed many big names such as David Sinclair and Nir Barzilai. I recommend this talk of his as an introduction to some important concepts in aging.
David Sinclair's book Lifespan is also the gold standard for personal anti-aging strategies, which are summarised here.
Yes, I hope regulators will give older individuals who are soon to die of aging the option to have access to more radical life-extension therapies.
Evidence in mice studies does indicate that earlier therapies (for example of senolytics) do facilitate greater life extension. However, with better anti-aging technologies the 'switch' (from the paper you refer to) could theoretically be reversed, as there's no biological law that would prevent restoring a phenotypically older individual back to a more youthful state.
Great to hear you are interested in contributing!
I wasn't precisely sure about the anti-aging applications of tissue engineering, so I asked a colleague and this is what he said:
The first application of tissue engineering is preclinical drug testing. Drug development starts with preclinical animal testing, but the vast majority of drugs that work in animals do not work in people. Estimates vary, but about 97% of preclinical leads that enter clinical trials do not exit them. Human organoids are a potential alternative that could allow at least some of this preclinical data to be obtained from humans, not animals, and hopefully be more accurate.
The second application of tissue engineering is testing cell therapies. Many future rejuvenative aging therapies will probably involve permanently engrafting engineered cells into people. If you can, say, engineer dermis in the lab, you can assess whether therapeutic fibroblasts can engraft in that dermis and whether they evenutally become cancerous.
The third application of tissue engineering is clinically putting engineered tissue into people. For example, some aging researchers are interested in thymic regeneration, but a potentially easier alternative would be adding engineered thymus-like tissues to a person instead of regenerating the involuted thymus.
So, it definitely seems important!
I don't see a lot of evidence for the information aging theory in the literature, and most geroscientists don't seem to think that epigenetics is the master regulator of the other hallmarks. This isn't to say it's not true, just that there's insufficient evidence at this point.
Sinclair discusses all of the hallmarks, but focuses on epigenetics as the most important - which is incidentally the one he studies. Bear in mind as an academic this is something are incetivised to do - to tell a narrative that fits their research agenda, to attract funding.
Looking at the field as a whole, there is consensus about the hallmarks but not so much consensus about the information aging theory, and in fact I don't know of any other major geroscience researchers who have endorsed the information theory of aging. It's too early to say that he's incorrect, but the theory seems unlikely from my reading.
Fixed, thanks!