New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.

You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.

Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.

If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.

Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive.

The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.

Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

That's consistent with what I said, yes.

Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich.

It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.

The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.

Not necessarily. We already have drugs that can hit "genetic disease" targets in adults, and we can modify adult genomes to a minor degree.

Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.

I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help.

It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.

It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.

Given the current state of the NIH, I'm not sure if we are "getting on this" with any diseases right now. I've seen quite a number of my colleagues end up retiring or stopping their research programs all together at a university that has its NIH funding halted for being politically insubordinate.

Seems more like billionaires spending money on trying to live forever has an edgy image in non-billionaire cycles. Sure, maybe Gates and Buffet really aren't that interested in living forever, but the likes of Thiel and Musk aren't exactly noted for techno-pessimism or caring whether the average normie thinks they and some of their investments are creepy, and they absolutely have the dealflow and the connections to evaluate any promising life extension ideas. If they're still spending more on stuff like 140 characters, maybe the low hanging fruit just aren't that low

Trump might get the science out of america, but he won't be able to get rid of science in general. It will just happen elsewhere. Europe is already becoming the center for mRNA vaccine research, and other places with less regulation will not sleep on biotech possibilities either. We just got a malaria vaccine that is not perfect, but good enough for Africa and about to be actively deployed in endangered areas, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It took decades and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but people like Bill Gates fronted most of the bill. There's no reason to think that science couldn't attack aging disease with the same ferocity if someone foots the bill.

Thiel put a couple of million in some edgy stuff with little to show for. It is nothing compared to the order of magnitude that Gates invested in malaria.

Well yeah, that's my point. He's the exact opposite of the scenario you suggest, someone who's so committed to promoting the idea of life extension he'll chuck a couple of million at woo merchants in the space purely for signalling purposes, someone who go on podcasts talking about the compatibility of "ending death" with Christianity and has a personal life extension regime, but when it comes down to actually putting significant capital down towards near term life extension, he doesn't see the opportunity. It's not because he doesn't want to look edgy, it's because he doesn't believe what he's being pitched is going to deliver on useful timelines.