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Aging was considered inevitable. The thing that is inevitable in my mind is death, but aging can be totally modified. That was the hope, but now it's a promise. What we’re doing now as a field is realizing that promise…how to die young at a very old age. Are you interested in living forever? No, no, I don’t have a fear of death, and I’m not an immortalist. I know people who are, but that’s a belief, that’s a religion. For me, I am interested in interfering with aging so that we can prevent disease. I want us to be healthy and then die one day. Read More: How Tracking Your Health Metrics Can Help You Live Longer Until 150 years ago, life expectancy was between 20 and 30. Today, lifespans have increased threefold. That’s a huge achievement. We harnessed agriculture so people could eat well, we cleaned water, built sewers, developed vaccination. Improving public health is what really got us through. Over those 150 years, every year we have lived a little bit longer than the year before…until we got to the age of about 60. Then all of a sudden we have diseases that never used to kill us. Over the course of human evolution, there were pandemics, there were wars, but people didn't die from Alzheimer's disease or diabetes or heart disease. Those are new diseases, right? Aging is what drives many diseases, so we need to interfere with aging before it causes diseases.
