Aging Is a Disease; Treat It Like One

theodp writes "In a letter to Sergey Brin, Maria Konovalenko urges the Google founder to pursue his interest in the topics of aging and longevity. 'Defeating or simply slowing down aging,' writes Konovalenko, 'is the most useful thing that can be done for all the people on the planet.' Calling for research into longevity gene therapy, extending lifespan pharmacologically, and studying close species that differ significantly in lifespan, Konovalenko says 'it is crucial to make numerous medical organizations recognize aging as a disease. If medical organizations were to recognize aging as a disease, it could significantly accelerate progress in studying its underlying mechanisms and the development of interventions to slow its progress and to reduce age-related pathologies. The prevailing regard for aging as a "natural process" rather than a disease or disease-predisposing condition is a major obstacle to development and testing of legitimate anti-aging treatments. This is the largest market in the world, since 100% of the population in every country suffers from aging.'"

Comments

Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs

[oodaloop]

And far more people exploiting our natural resources. We're way beyond capacity as it is. I doubt the planet could sustain a mere 100,000 first world consumers, and we're orders of magnitude above that and climbing. So drastically increasing the number of people on the planet, and drastically increasing those who are first world consumers doesn't help us. But hey, on the bright side, it's probable that we're well beyond the decision point to stop or reverse the effects of thousands of years of destroying the environment, so why not? Let's just go out in a blaze of glory!