Rallies to support anti-ageing research on April 8

On April 8, the first-ever simultaneous rallies in 14+ cities across Europe and the U.S. will demand governments massively increase aging research funding and create regulatory pathways for treatments targeting aging itself. I ran an ITN assessment and addressed the main concerns, as well as a quick calculation — modelled on Coefficient Giving's BOTEC framework — suggesting that even under conservative assumptions, attending costs you a few hours and clears standard EA cost-effectiveness bars. Details and sign-up for all cities at fundlongevity.org. We are yet low in numbers, and your participation matters A LOT!

Why aging deserves way more attention

Most readers here are familiar with the 80,000 Hours problem framework — scale, neglectedness, tractability. On scale, aging is difficult to beat.

Roughly 100,000–110,000 people die every day from age-related causes, accounting for about two-thirds of all global deaths. Our World in Data's mortality visualisations tell an unambiguous story: non-communicable diseases — virtually all age-driven — now account for 74% of global deaths (up from 61% in 2000). Deaths in people aged 50+ constitute roughly 75–85% of all global mortality, with the 70+ cohort representing the single largest share. Every major killer in this age group — cardiovascular disease, cancers, COPD, dementias, diabetes — is a disease whose risk rises exponentially with biological aging. According to OWID's analysis, 80-year-olds are approximately 10 times more likely to die in a given year than 60-year-olds. Respiratory disease mortality at ages 60–64 is roughly 440 times higher than at ages 20–24.

The aggregate burden runs to approximately 940 million DALYs per year — approximately 19× the burden of malaria. The 940 million number is a highly conservative estimate based on GBD 2021 data — roughly 33% of all-cause DALYs. The 2023 Global Burden of Disease update from IHME confirmed that NCDs now account for nearly two-thirds of the world's total death and disability burden, and the WHO has warned of slowing global health gains driven by aging populations.

A disability-adjusted life year (DALY) is a measure of overall disease burden, representing a year lost due to ill-health, disability, or early death.

This isn't merely a health problem. Scott, Ellison, and Sinclair estimated in Nature Aging (2021) that slowing aging enough to add just one year of healthy life expectancy would be worth $38 trillion to the U.S. economy alone. A ten-year gain: $367 trillion.

Peter Singer's expected-value argument

Peter Singer has written sympathetically about longevity research. In his "Should We Live to 1,000?" article (Project Syndicate, 2012), following a Princeton seminar with Aubrey de Grey, Singer applied classic expected-value reasoning to the question: even if there is only a small chance of success, the enormous potential payoff makes anti-aging research a better bet than areas of medical research that are currently far better funded. Singer's earlier scepticism, grounded in total utilitarian reasoning, had by then shifted toward a person-affecting view — recognising that in developed countries, aging is the ultimate cause of 90% of all deaths, so targeting aging itself is the efficient upstream intervention. Curing any single age-related disease yields only modest benefit, because patients will succumb to another disease within years. (For a comprehensive treatment of objections and counterarguments, see Karl Pfleger's Eliminating Aging: Motivations, Objections and Counterarguments.)

Singer acknowledges that malaria and diarrhoeal diseases may be higher priority in absolute terms, but argues that developed countries will continue funding their own health challenges regardless. Given that constraint, anti-aging research may represent the highest-impact marginal allocation within developed-world medical spending.

The Dublin Longevity Declaration

The Dublin Longevity Declaration, co-authored by Dr. Brian Kennedy (NUS) and Aubrey de Grey and published by the LEV Foundation, has attracted 200+ expert signatories and thousands of public supporters. The signatory list reads like a who's-who of aging biology: George Church (Harvard/MIT), David Sinclair (Harvard), Eric Verdin (Buck Institute CEO), Nir Barzilai (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), María Blasco (CNIO Director), Ronald DePinho (former MD Anderson president), Matt Kaeberlein (University of Washington), and Valter Longo (USC), among many others. The Declaration states plainly that biological aging is malleable, not inevitable, and calls on governments to act accordingly. It has been endorsed by the Healthspan Action Coalition and covered by Forbes, Longevity.Technology and numerous other outlets.

The funding gap is huge

Government spending on aging biology is tiny relative to the problem. The U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) has a total budget of roughly $4.5 billion, but the vast majority fund Alzheimer's and dementia research specifically. The NIA Division of Aging Biology — the portion that actually funds geroscience and the mechanisms of aging — receives approximately $346 million per year. For comparison, the National Cancer Institute receives ~$7.3 billion, HIV/AIDS gets ~$3.1 billion, and Alzheimer's alone receives ~$3.5–3.9 billion. Aging biology — the root cause underlying most of these diseases — gets roughly 1/20th of what cancer gets. Open Philanthropy has allocated just ~$7.7 million to aging research compared to $108.6 million for criminal justice reform.

Private capital has surged, but it doesn't fill the gap. Longevity venture funding hit $8.5 billion in 2024, with mega-rounds from Altos Labs ($3B), Retro Biosciences ($1.2B), and others. But private capital overwhelmingly targets commercial drug development, not the basic science, biomarker validation, and clinical trial infrastructure that only governments fund. 

The ratio is staggering. U.S. healthcare spending is ~$5.3 trillion per year (2024), with roughly 85% going to chronic age-related disease. That's about $4.5 trillion treating the downstream consequences of aging, versus $346 million researching the process that causes them. The U.S. spends roughly $13,000 treating age-related diseases for every $1 spent researching aging itself.

And the situation may be about to get worse. The proposed FY2026 federal budget would cut NIH funding by roughly 40%, with the NIA specifically cut from $4.5B to $2.69B. In Europe, the picture is even starker: since Horizon Europe launched in 2021, the EU has awarded a total of €23 million to projects studying the underlying biology of aging — 0.08% of Pillar 2 spending.

The TAME trial: Is there funding at the end of the tunnel?

If you want a single illustration of everything that is broken about the longevity funding and regulatory landscape — and why political advocacy is the highest-leverage intervention — look at the TAME trial.

In 2013, Nir Barzilai and colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine received an NIA grant to design the first-ever clinical trial targeting aging itself: Targeting Aging with Metformin. The idea was not primarily about metformin — a cheap, off-patent diabetes drug with a well-documented safety profile stretching back to the 1950s. It was about creating a regulatory template. The FDA does not classify aging as a disease, which means no drug can be approved to treat it, which means no pharma company will fund trials for it, which means the entire therapeutic pipeline is stuck. TAME was designed to break this deadlock by using a composite primary endpoint — heart disease, cancer, dementia, stroke, and death — as a proxy for aging itself.

In 2015, the researchers met with the FDA, which — to many people's surprise — agreed to the trial design. This was a landmark moment: the FDA had effectively acknowledged that a clinical trial could target the aging process. All that was left was funding. That was over a decade ago. The trial has still not enrolled a single patient.

The trial design is ready. The coordinating centre (Wake Forest University) is in place. Fourteen trial sites across the U.S. have been identified. The cost — estimated at $45–75 million for 3,000 participants over six years — is modest by clinical trial standards. The reason is structural: metformin is a generic drug. No pharmaceutical company stands to profit from the results. The NIH contributed roughly $5–9 million — useful for biomarker development, but far short of what was needed. The remaining funding gap led to a farcical series of near-misses — Adam Neumann's failed promise, partial foundation commitments, crypto-millionaires courted in Lisbon. A December 2025 review in Expert Opinion still described TAME as having been "delayed since 2016 without clear and explicit reasons." A June 2025 paper in Journals of Gerontology noted plainly that the trial "has not been launched to date due to need for funding."

Let this sink in: a paradigm-shifting trial that the FDA already approved, using one of the world's safest and cheapest drugs, designed by world-leading geroscientists, has been stuck in funding limbo for thirteen years. Meanwhile, $13 billion flowed into private longevity companies — because private capital follows commercial incentives, not public health ones.

ITN assessment

Let me lay out the ITN framework for funding aging research explicitly:

Importance scores extremely high. Aging accounts for at least 1/3 of all DALYs globally and ~70% of all deaths. Kudos to authors of some earlier posts: "Aging should be effective altruism's 5th cause area" and "How to evaluate neglectedness and tractability of aging research"!

Neglectedness is high for direct aging research. The Longevity Biotech Fellowship roadmap notes that only about 1% of private and 0.5% of public U.S. biotech funding targets aging directly. Open Philanthropy's allocation to aging research ($7.7M) is dwarfed by its criminal justice reform portfolio ($108.6M).

Tractability is the contested dimension. Optimists point to senolytics entering human trials, the identification of 7–12 distinct hallmarks of aging as discrete targets, and dramatic lifespan extensions in model organisms. As Laura Deming argued on the 80,000 Hours podcast, aging is among the most malleable biological phenomena we've found — single-gene mutations can make worms live twice as long, and these findings translate across species. The question is not whether aging is modifiable — that's been demonstrated — but how quickly we can translate animal findings to humans. Sceptics note the absence of human proof-of-concept and worry that talent, not funding, is the primary bottleneck.

A 2025 EA Forum post by Geoffrey Miller pushed back on the "wait for AGI" argument, noting that superintelligence will not magically solve longevity due to biomedical data limitations and experimental feedback loop constraints. Even with advanced AI, biological experiments take time, and the regulatory and clinical infrastructure must be built now.

The quantitative case

The most detailed public reasoning on cost-effectiveness of aging research comes from SarahC on the EA Forum (2019), using Owen Cotton-Barratt's framework for problems of uncertain difficulty:

• $42/DALY (narrow definition: only ~$1.8B in aging-specific research counts toward current spending)
• $1,050/DALY (broad definition: all age-related disease R&D at ~$104B counts)

For reference, GiveWell's Against Malaria Foundation estimate sits at roughly $245–438/DALY. Even the broad estimate for aging research is competitive with the best global health interventions, and the narrow estimate is an order of magnitude better.

The tractability update: why 2026 is different

Tractability has historically been the weak link in the EA case for aging research. Open Philanthropy's investigation expressed uncertainty about how much of the $2.7B in NIH aging-tagged spending is relevant. And 80,000 Hours has noted that "one reason [aging] is neglected is because many scientists believe it to be very hard to solve."*

*There are several counterarguments: 1) We can significantly affect lifespans of model organisms — translation to humans is lagging behind. 2) We can accelerate aging (e.g. smoking), suggesting deceleration is possible. 3) Animals like naked mole rats, certain sharks, whales and lobsters show very low rates of aging, offering ideas. 4) We don't need to Solve Aging — let's start with affordable organ replacement, brain grafts, and cheap personalised cancer vaccines.

Several recent developments suggest the political and scientific environment is shifting — partly because of the advocacy pressure that TAME's stalling generated:

ARPA-H launched a $144 million aging programme. In February 2026, ARPA-H announced the PROSPR programme — seven research teams, up to $144M over five years, explicitly treating aging as a tractable biological process. Awards include the VITAL-H trial ($38M, testing rapamycin, SGLT2 inhibitors, and semaglutide in healthy adults) and Columbia's FAST project developing aging biomarkers. Crucially, PROSPR exists because advocates pushed for it — TAME's decade-long battle laid the conceptual groundwork.

The regulatory logjam is beginning to crack. Eli Lilly is now in negotiations with the FDA to run a TAME-like trial with a GLP-1 agonist — a patented, profitable drug that solves the funding problem TAME could not. Barzilai himself noted that "this administration is very good for aging research, and the FDA is engaged."

The scientific consensus is consolidating. The Dublin Longevity Declaration (200+ signatories), the XPRIZE Healthspan ($101M, 100 semi-finalists), and a growing class of geroscience-guided drug candidates all point toward a field that is becoming clinically serious. The April 8 rallies coincide with the Targeting Longevity 2026 World Congress in Berlin (April 8–9), creating potential synergy between scientific and political advocacy.

Expected value of rally attendance

Following the Coefficient Giving approach, I model the expected value as a chain of conditional probabilities times the value of the outcome, divided by cost:

EV = P(rally movement influences policy) × expected funding increase × DALYs per dollar of aging research / your cost of attendance

Historical base rates for advocacy → research funding

Advocacy has an extraordinary track record of moving government research funding:

• HIV/AIDS: NIH AIDS funding grew from $5.6M (FY1982) to $1.62B (FY1998) — a 289× increase over 16 years. ACT UP's direct actions — shutting down the FDA, storming the NIH — were pivotal.
• Breast cancer: The NBCC's "$300 Million More" campaign helped nearly quadruple federal breast cancer funding from ~$150M to over $550M between 1991–1996.
• ALS: The Ice Bucket Challenge raised $115M in six weeks, and generated roughly $7 in follow-on funding for every $1 donated — a total impact approaching $1 billion.

These aren't anomalies. Research on protest effectiveness (Madestam et al., studying the Tea Party movement) finds that protests have significant multiplier effects on political outcomes.

Putting it together

EV = 0.03 × $50,000,000 × (1/210) × 0.05 × (1/500) × $50,000

≈ $35,700 in expected social value

Your cost: ~$100–1,000 (transport + opportunity cost of 2–5 hours, depending on your city and wage rate). If we take ~$300, SROI: ~120×.

This hopefully clears the "worth your time" bar comfortably. And note how conservative these parameters are.

* The goal is not a $50M increase but a 1,000× funding increase — trying to be super conservative here.

** This is not going to be a one-time effort; we need to maximise the P. Increasing the number of attendees will affect the P. You can further help by not only coming yourself but also bringing friends and family. The additional positive effect from networking and spending time with the longevity community is not taken into account.

Sensitivity: the hits-based case

Coefficient Giving explicitly embraces hits-based reasoning: "a 10% chance of 30,000× is equivalent to a near-certain 3,000× opportunity." Aging advocacy is exactly the kind of high-variance, high-upside bet that this framework is designed for. The reason is simple: the scale of aging (>940M DALYs/year) is so colossal that even a tiny probability of shifting policy generates enormous expected value.

If the Fund Longevity movement contributes even fractionally to creating the political conditions for an "Aging Moonshot" — analogous to the Cancer Moonshot ($4B+ in additional NCI funding under Biden) — the expected value per attendee would be astronomical.

What the rallies are asking for

Fund Longevity's demands are deliberately broad:

1. Massively increase public funding for aging research with the explicit goal of making aging a treatable condition.
2. Create a regulatory pathway that allows treatments targeting aging itself — not just individual age-related diseases — to be developed, tested, and approved.
3. Classify aging as a treatable condition in regulatory frameworks.
4. Frame access to life-extending medicine as a fundamental right.

The initiative is a grassroots, non-profit coalition founded in Stockholm by Linus Petersson and Andrei Panferov, supported by organisations including the Swedish Longevity Cluster, the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, and the International Longevity Alliance. Felix Werth, founder of the German Party for Biomedical Rejuvenation Research (Partei für Gesundheitsforschung) — which has participated in 23+ elections since 2015 — is among the key organisers. Experts backing the initiative include biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, Ilia Stambler (International Longevity Alliance), and philosopher Patrick Linden (MIT Press).

The concrete asks for each country are in the development phase — we're on the lookout for contributors!

Addressing the standard objections

"Isn't AI safety more important?" Possibly, for those who weigh x-risk heavily. But the two cause areas are not in direct competition for the same marginal resources. The ask here is a few hours of your time on a Wednesday evening. The opportunity cost is low. And for EAs who are sympathetic to longevity but have felt there's nothing concrete to do — this is concrete.

"Private capital is already flowing — why does government funding matter?" Private investment targets late-stage drug development. Basic geroscience research, biomarker validation, regulatory precedent-setting, and clinical trial infrastructure depend on public funding. TAME is the clearest proof: $13 billion flowed into private longevity companies while a $50 million trial — the one trial most likely to unlock the entire regulatory pathway — couldn't get funded, because the drug is off-patent and no company profits from the result. The ARPA-H PROSPR programme exists precisely because the market won't fund this kind of high-risk, high-public-benefit work. Private and public funding are complements, not substitutes.

"Self-interest will drive funding eventually." Eventually is doing a lot of work in that sentence. TAME has waited thirteen years for "eventually." Every day of delay costs roughly 100,000 lives lost to aging. Using Coefficient's "speed-up" framework — where the impact of advocacy is modelled as bringing forward an outcome that would eventually happen — even a 1-year speed-up on a major policy shift could avert millions of DALYs.

"Shouldn't we focus on global health rather than developed-world longevity?" Singer addresses this directly: developed countries will continue funding their own health challenges regardless, and within that spending, anti-aging research is plausibly the highest-impact marginal allocation. Additionally, treatments that slow aging would ultimately benefit everyone — ageing populations in low- and middle-income countries are growing the fastest.

What you can do on April 8

Rally details:

• Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026, 17:00–18:00 CEST (local times might vary)
• Cities: Amsterdam (Dam Square), Berlin (Platz der Republik), Brussels, Ljubljana, London (Trafalgar Square), Madrid, Paris (Place du Palais Bourbon), Rome (Piazza del Popolo), San Francisco (Ferry Building), Stockholm (Riksgatan 3), Tel Aviv, and more
• Livestream: Global broadcast on YouTube featuring leading scientists and longevity advocates. Register at fundlongevity.org
• Speakers: Aubrey de Grey (LEV Foundation President), Alexander Panchin, Peter Lidsky, Laurence Ion, and other leading scientists and advocates
• Can't attend in person? Tell your friend/colleague. Watch the livestream. Share the event.

The expected value calculation suggests this is among the highest-impact ways you could spend a Wednesday evening. After all, aging kills and hurts more people every day than any war, pandemic, or natural disaster. The policy doesn't cope with the problem at all. Showing up is how that changes.

Further reading

• EA Forum topic page on aging research
• Cost-Effectiveness of Aging Research (SarahC, 2019)
• Peter Singer: "Should We Live to 1,000?"
• Laura Deming on 80,000 Hours podcast (#181) — deep dive into the science and feasibility
• Eliminating Aging: Motivations, Objections and Counterarguments (Karl Pfleger)
• Our World in Data: Causes of Death
• Dublin Longevity Declaration
• Fund Longevity — Rally details and sign-up

Written by Vladimir Leshko, organiser of the Amsterdam rally at Dam Square. I'm personally involved with Unlimited Bio — a Próspera (Honduras)-based longevity gene therapy startup. I have no financial relationship with Fund Longevity. This post reflects my personal assessment of the expected value of attending.

Thank you so much to Thomas, Andrey, Anton, and Quentin for providing feedback!

The original post had a mistake in the calculation- the social.value of attending was wrongfully calculated as 3,600 USD.