Lifespan: Why We Age - and Why We Don't Have To

if we are to make real progress in the effort to alleviate the suffering that comes with aging, what is needed is a unified explanation for why we age, not just at the evolutionary level but at the fundamental level.

Like death and taxes, aging has long been seen as an inevitable part of the human condition. But during the last 30 years, our scientific understanding of what aging is has improved, and with that, what once seemed impossible is now getting closer to being true: today, only a lucky few make it past 80 in good health, but what if most people did so?... See more

Aging research today is at a similar stage as cancer research was in the 1960s. We have a robust understanding of what aging looks like and what it does to us and an emerging agreement about what causes it and what keeps it at bay. From the looks of it, aging is not going to be that hard to treat, far easier than curing cancer.

Yet I believe that such an answer exists—a cause of aging that exists upstream of all the hallmarks. Yes, a singular reason why we age. Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.

I will also tell you why I have come to see aging as a disease—the most common disease—one that not only can but should be aggressively treated. That’s part I.

There’s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive—decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility—is no virtue.

What’s the upward limit? I don’t think there is one. Many of my colleagues agree.14 There is no biological law that says we must age.15 Those who say there is don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re probably still a long way off from a world in which death is a rarity, but we’re not far from pushing it ever farther into the future.