A great example of the way in which researchers leap to try to alter downstream consequences of aging. This impulse is why 99% of all efforts to treat aging as

A great example of the way in which researchers leap to try to alter downstream consequences of aging. This impulse is why 99% of all efforts to treat aging as a medical condition are doomed to failure. The research community has an institutional problem in that all the short-term incentives have them studying the biochemistry of the system in a broken (aged) state, and then working backwards towards causes. Each link in the chain takes years of work. The first place they stop is thus a long way removed from any root cause, but then the incentives work to say "prove your work is valuable" and someone tries to commercialize it. All medicine for age-related disease (so far) is marginal precisely because it attempts to compensate for or tries to improve downstream consequences that are a long way removed from fundamental damage that causes aging. You can change the oil as much as you like in a car that is failing for mechanical reasons, but the degree to which you gain benefit from that action is much what you'd expect. You can press the accelerator to try to drive a faltering engine faster. Same story. You fix problems by fixing the root causes, not by ignoring those root causes in favor of things that happen to be what is right in front of you.