A review of our recent article https://www.lifespan.io/news/combining-treatments-against-multiple-hallmarks-of-aging/

Age Reversal Unity filed a citizen petition to FDA demanding to classify “aging” as a “disease” ?.
FDA posted the citizen petition here for public comments:
https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2024-P-2482-0001

I hope you go there and submit a comment supporting that aging should be classified as a disease by FDA.
So far, the citizen petition got 48 comments. If the citizen petition gets 1,000 comments, FDA would most likely classify aging as a disease.
We need 5 comments today:)
Thank you

Martin Borch Jensen (CSO at Gordian Bio) is looking for Scientific Chief if Staff:

“Work directly with me as our Scientific Chief of Staff & be part of everything it takes to run a growing biotech.

You'll have wide responsibilities, owning projects and culture improvements, organizing our teamwork, and helping me set the company strategy.

The ideal candidate combines scientific training (eg a PhD but degree not required) with excellent organization and communication, proactive problem solving, and handling a lot of balls at once.
Most of all you'd have good mind-meld with me, to absorb ideas and judgement fast.

Read more and apply here. And can learn more about GordianBio, including our mission and unique technology here.”

The central effort in promoting life extension revolves around broadcasting scientific achievements in this field.

The battle against aging often boils down to a newsfeed of scientific discoveries.

Thousands of people, across various platforms like Twitter, review articles, and YouTube, relay what gerontology researchers have discovered.

Among Longevity activists, there's a prevailing idea of alerting the public about the imminent discovery of anti-aging remedies.

However, there's a problem. This approach isn't really effective.

The efficiency of such popularization is probably less than 1%. Discussions about a few molecules and their interactions related to aging lead nowhere.

There are millions of such publications. It's like a chewing gum that people have been chewing for decades. How many interviews with leading experts do we need to realize that they have minimal impact?

I'm not against scientific news, interviews, or statements on the necessity of life extension. I strongly support them, but they are insufficient. This activity becomes harmful if we focus solely on it, as it drains the energy and strength needed for change.

It creates an illusion of progress, as if we've convinced someone to take action.

If we had a metric for social change, we would see the minimal impact of such work.

People are not rational. In a rational world, one interview, one lecture, one book would be enough to make life extension a universal social task. Moreover, in a society that accepts death, there are groups with entirely different interests, monopolizing resources and reluctant to allocate them to life extension.

There are people, knowingly or unknowingly, who promote death. Even under the banners of health preservation and life extension, there can be enemies whose true interest is personal enrichment. Selling promises of immediate life extension works well, even for non-effective remedies.

Overcoming tradition, stereotypes, and indifference involves incredibly complex tasks, the solutions to which are not just about listing aging science achievements.

Clearly, we need a different approach in the public sphere.

How?

Raise the level of abstraction, introduce new categories, use models of social processes, gather and analyze new types of data.

What's the first step? Change the language in which we discuss these problems. Introduce new categories, describe reality anew.

Like in mathematics, where we can't solve a vast class of problems using only arithmetic and require differential and integral calculus.

Like in physics, where we need a counterintuitive view of the world, where the passage of time depends on the speed of movement, or events in the quantum world completely contradict common sense. But this brings us closer to understanding the nature of reality.

Rationalists, in solving their problems, introduced several concepts, particularly CEV (coherent extrapolated volition) — how future AI will extrapolate our values.

Effective altruists think in terms of calculating expected utility and overlooked efficient ways of doing good.

Whenever we face complex new tasks, we need new categories, essentially a new language, to solve this new challenge.

What specific categories do we need?

We need a measure of readiness to act in the fight against death. The degree of obsession.

Characterize the strength and types of connections between community members. It may turn out that the most effective activity in the fight against death is to increase the connectivity of the Longevity community.

We need to characterize the Longevity field itself, its structure, types of changes, and development dynamics.

I will write more about these and other categories. Perhaps 90% of the ideas won't find agreement with the reader.

But I can state from my experience that without a new language, a new picture of reality, metrics of social changes, and new categories, we will stagnate. We urgently need to create this.

Timofey Glinin:

Today, my pride knows no bounds. For almost three years, the Open Longevity project dedicated itself to constructing a comprehensive database, capturing every facet of how genes influence aging. The Open Genes endeavor wasn't a walk in the park: it demanded immense dedication, a harmonious collaboration between software developers and aging biologists. And now, our tireless efforts have culminated in a groundbreaking scientific publication in one of the world's leading scientific journals—Nucleic Acid Research.

This achievement primarily stands as a testament to the relentless drive and dedication of Ekaterina Rafikova and Constantine Rafikov, who poured their heart and soul into this database. Mikhail Batin and Anastasia Egorova who inspired us to make our dreams to reality. But I must admit, it brings joy to my heart too. As the scientific lead at Open Longevity, we've demonstrated our capability to produce monumental cornerstones for the entire industry.

Within this database, we've meticulously curated more than 2,000 genes, detailing their contribution to lifespan alteration, their influence on aging pathways, and identifying specific variants associated with longevity.

Scientific articles are diverse, and the painstaking task of standardization often had to be done by hand. But now, we've birthed a tool that enables us to bioinformatically compare the contributions of these genes, and to hunt for combinations of genetic interventions.

We've proven what we're capable of, but this platform's journey is just beginning. The horizon brims with exciting ideas: like launching bioinformatic competitions based on Open Genes, incorporating more information on protein interactions, and so much more. And as daunting as these tasks may sound, they are surmountable, especially with the backing of the most passionate anti-aging community out there.