Aging is important:
- Aging kills 100,000 people per day.
- 2/3 of all deaths are caused by aging.
- Trillions of dollars are spent annually on the diseases and disabilities of aging.
- Aging populations with lower percentages of working age adults threaten developed economies.
Aging is tractable:
- Aging is reducible to between 7 and 12 distinct biological causes, depending who you ask.
- Human trials for some interventions into aging, such as senolytic drugs, show promising results.
- Experiments in mice provide further evidence of tractability.
Aging is neglected:
- The very idea of curing aging is controversial to the point of taboo among most policymakers and scientists.
- The SENS Research Foundation, one of the leading organizations working on curing aging, has a budget of only a few million dollars per year.
- Some broadly publicized efforts to extend lifespans, such as Alphabet's Calico, focus on low-hanging fruit and not fundamental intervention in the root causes of aging.
Therefore, aging should be the 5th cause area that the effective altruism movement devotes its attention and resources to, joining global poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, and meta-EA.
It's been some time, and Stan Pinsent was the primary on this project (I only provided some some input). Copying from what he wrote previously:
"How much sooner life extension technology is expected to arrive with an additional USD 10 million in research, conditional on radical life extension being possible? In 2020 Aubrey de Grey predicted that a 10x increase in funding would accelerate SRF's research by a factor of 2. It seems reasonable to assume that as a major proponent of life extension research (de Grey has donated his career and most of his personal wealth to it), this estimate is optimistic. De Grey, who was fired in 2021 and started his own research organization, later said that talent, not money, is the main barrier to progress. Since his 2020 prediction, SRF recieved a record USD 30 million annual income in 2021, which means that funding is probably now less effective than it once was. Given SNS expenditure of USD 3-5 million per year up to 2020, I interpret de Grey's prediction as "with $40m funding research would progress twice as far in a year as it would have with $4m funding". However, we have added complication of SRF's recent $30m windfall. I assume that in light of the improved funding situation, SRF's annual expenditure will grow to $20m a year. Let a year of research at a funding level of $20m be our "unit year". Then the number of unit-years of research performed in a year with $Xm extra funding can be modelled as R = ((X+20m)/20m)^log10(2) (with R=unit years of research, F=funding). This fits the prediction well because (1) when X=0, one unit-year of research is completed and (2) when the total funding is multiplied by 10, the research output doubles. Given that we are considering the impact of an $Xm donation, the question can be framed as "how many extra unit years of research could be achieved in a year with $(X+20)m funding?". So I calculate number of unit-years of research that can be performed in a year with $(X+20)m funding, then subtract 1. Note that because the prediction only extended to total funding levels up to $40m, this formula is only valid for X<$20m."