It is considered to be somewhere between very technically challenging and actually impossible to significantly increase life span without making people healthie

It is considered to be somewhere between very technically challenging and actually impossible to significantly increase life span without making people healthier. Without fixing the underlying damage that results in raised mortality with aging. The medicine of the past few decades has really aimed at doing just this, however, extending life without fixing the underlying problems. It is the heroic model of medicine, throw everything at the symptoms rather than the cause: compensating or patching over the problems, tinkering with metabolism, intervening in consequences or secondary contributing factors, but never going near the root causes. It has been expensive. It has eked out only marginal, incremental gains. It is a history of failure dotted with the occasional hard-won success. It has conditioned people to think that this model is the only way forward. It is wrong, bad, and the research and development community need to adopt a better way forward. I think that when senolytic therapies to clear senescent cells become more widely used, that will be a pleasant surprise - to find a pharmaceutical approach to age-related conditions that improves the situation for near all individuals and pathologies of aging, cost-effectively. It reduces inflammation, partially resolves loss of regenerative capacity, turns back atherosclerosis, restores loss of tissue elasticity to some degree, effectively treats osteoarthritis, clears out many forms of bad immune cell, removes a contributing cause of Parkinson's disease, and so for for a much longer list. The reason it will be so much better is that it targets a root cause of aging, a form of damage, and directly repairs at least some of it (25-50% in some tissues for some of the approaches). One of the candidate therapies, dasatinib/quercetin, costs ~ $30-100 / dose. Take it once every few years. I think it very hard to argue that this is going to cost the world money. The reason why present strategies have poor results is because they are terrible at achieving their goals. They have tiny effects. Do better, and the picture changes.