Aging is a Disease That Can Be Cured Within My Children's Lifetime

thescientist |  The concept of aging is undergoing a rapid transformation in medicine. The question has long been asked: Is aging a natural process that should be accepted as inevitable, or is it pathologic, a disease that should be prevented and treated? For the vast majority of medicine’s history, the former position was considered a self-evident truth. So futile was any attempt to resist the ravages of aging that the matter was relegated to works of fantasy and fiction. But today, the biomedical community is rethinking its answer to this question.

The controversy has been fanned, to a great extent, by one Aubrey de?Grey, a Cambridge University–trained computer scientist and a self-taught biologist and gerontologist. Over the past decade, de Grey has undertaken an energetic campaign to reframe aging as a pathologic process, one that merits the same level of attention as, say, cancer or diabetes. Although many of de Grey’s claims remain controversial—notably, that the first person who will live to 1,000 years old is already among us—I agree that we can and should pathologize aging. In fact, it seems we already have.

“Aging” is a term we use to describe the changes our bodies undergo over time. Colloquially, we tend to refer to early changes, say from infancy to early adulthood, as maturation or development and reserve “aging” for changes that occur thereafter. The early changes are generally considered good: stronger muscles, wiser minds, and so on. The later changes are far less popular: thinning skin and hair, weakening bones, and other forms of decline.