“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” - Woody Allen
I don’t want to get old, suffer, and die. I don’t want my loved ones to suffer in this way. Or anyone. Have you experienced a loved one suffer from cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, heart disease or another age-related disease? If so, you probably know how terrible this can be.
Today, we can improve our health in many ways, but absent new technology most of us will suffer from age-related disease and die by 100.
I got interested in aging when I learned that lifespan isn't necessarily fixed. It is possible to extend our healthy lifespans. Other complex organisms live for 100s of years, even 1000s of years. Still, aging is an unbelievably difficult and complex problem. We don't even really know why and how it happens.
Could we make major progress on healthy aging in my lifetime? I'm 38, and will likely live at least to 80, if not 90 or more. The median American is also about 38 years old. To give more than half of Americans a shot at living longer (and more than half of the people in the world, given the median person in the world is about 30 years old), we need health-extending and life-extending therapies by 2063, when I would turn 80. The odds are against us, but I'm willing to try, given the potential benefits to humanity.
So that's my big goal –– for humanity to achieve significant lifespan and healthspan extension by 2063.
Aging is an incredibly complicated problem with much that is still unknown. I'm directing the bulk of my professional energy at this goal. More and more, others are doing the same. I'll use this blog as a place to write about it.