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.
CEARCH did a shallow dive on ageing a few months ago (link), but our tentative conclusion is that life extension reasearch doesn't look too cost-effective (n.b. ideas tend to look good up front and worse as we understand the idea more and discount for more complications, so if anything we should expect the cause to even less cost-effective than current estimates suggest).
In any case, Nuno has a list of relevant research here if anyone wants to read more.
I am surprised that the CEARCH research reached the conclusion that aging research is not cost effective, when research published in nature reached the conclusion that -
"We show that a slowdown in aging that increases life expectancy by 1 year is worth US$38 trillion, and by 10 years, US$367 trillion." (ref - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00080-0#Sec2 )
How can research that made it into one of the most reputable scientific journals reach such divergent conclusions?
Of course the question of how much money is needed to invest in the ... (read more)