The coming of age of AGE
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EDITORIAL
The coming of age of AGE Aubrey D. N. J. de Grey
Received: 23 November 2020 / Accepted: 24 November 2020 / Published online: 27 November 2020 # American Aging Association 2020
The field of biogerontology is over a century old. It began in the wake of the stupefying advances made in the nineteenth century in understanding the basis for the infectious diseases that historically killed about 40% of babies before their first birthday—and, of course, in translating that understanding into control of such diseases. From that perspective, it was entirely logical to view the diseases and disabilities of late life as the next medical frontier, and to be optimistic about future progress. By the end of World War 2, this line of thinking had become sufficiently mainstream to warrant the formation of learned societies bringing together its leading researchers, of which the US example the Gerontological Society of America was founded in 1945. The inaugural issue of its journal, the Journal of Gerontology, was emblazoned with the slogan “Giving life to years, not just years to life”—illustrating unambiguously both the goal of biologists in this young field and also the appreciation that that goal is so often misunderstood to be about lifespan for lifespan’s sake, rather than as a mere side effect of healthspan. By the 1960s, however, and despite substantial progress, that misunderstanding was alive and kicking. What were researchers to do? Wisely or unwisely, most of them elected to pursue a path of political correctness, downplaying the dreaded side effect of life extension and focusing on aging as a phenomenon whose details might be understood but whose manipulation was a A. D. N. J. de Grey (*) SENS Research Foundation, Mountain View, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
matter of science fiction. The calculus was that this was the best way to secure government funding for such work—and indeed, in the near term at least, so it proved, with the formation of the National Institute on Aging. The discussion of intervention as a goal became severely deprecated, and a few years later, when the concept of “compression of morbidity” was introduced, it was embraced with positively indecent fervor as a way to further obfuscate the situation and reassure those pursestring-holders unable to get past fears of inability to pay pensions, etc. Only a few prominent experts held true to the field’s original ideals. One, Roy Walford, became relatively well known to the general public for his promotion of calorie restriction. But the most vocal among his peers was the author of the first bona fide mechanistic theory of aging, Denham Harman. Once it became clear that he was but a voice in the GSA wilderness, he resolved to use his prestige as a safe haven for like-minded but less established colleagues, and in 1970 he created a breakaway society, the American Aging Association, to which he assigned the non-acronymic abbreviation AGE. That same name was given to the Association’s journal—until, not too many years ago, it was changed to (you
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