My takes: ---------- How long until life-extending medical therapies are developed? How long is a piece of string? Questions of time depend on questions of m

My takes: ---------- How long until life-extending medical therapies are developed? How long is a piece of string? Questions of time depend on questions of money. Over the past decade the rough estimates for a fully funded crash research program to realize SENS in mice as rapidly as possible have floated around $1-2 billion over ten to twenty years. It might cost less than that now, given the rapid advance of biotechnology, but not enormously less. Unfortunately SENS is nowhere near as well funded as this: the current budget for the SENS Research Foundation has only recently reached $5 million / year. So it will certainly take time to increase funding to the optimal levels of $100 million / year or more; this is a major undertaking involving the creation of many new major programs of medical research throughout the world. That in and of itself might require decades, and it is hard to estimate the pace of growth in the early stages of a new industry. Any number of small, happenstance choices made by today's investors and researchers might gain or lose years of future progress. Meanwhile on the other side of the fence drug discovery programs are undertaken in search of ways to modestly slow aging. We know that it can take a decade and $1 billion to push a good drug candidate through validation and regulatory hurdles, all the way from early tests to clinical use. There are no good candidates at this time, but every sign that some may emerge in the next few years based on analogs to rapamycin. So it's not unreasonable to think that a first generation drug that might slightly slow aging in humans could emerge in the mid to late 2020s. Even at that point the research community may not be able to say whether it in fact actually slows aging in humans, however, versus definitively knowing that it produces positive changes in short-term measures of health. ----------