Ambitious New Anti-Aging Trial in Humans

I gather HN harbours some of them.

I don't see this area of work as a useful way forward to major impact on human aging and life span, though it will no doubt increase understanding of the way in which metabolism reacts to the causes of aging as they increase. Like much of what goes on in the research community, it is an effort to tinker with secondary and later aspects of aging. Changes in factors in the blood are not the cause of aging, they are the consequence of cellular reactions to the causes of aging. So this sort of work is changing the oil and cleaning the spark plugs in the hopes of small gains rather than repairing and replacing the failing engine parts in the hopes of large gains.

But that is somewhat beside the point. The important thing here is that organizations like the Society for the Rescue of Our Elders have come into being and are surveying the field for things they can do to impact aging, ways to accelerate the otherwise very slow progress of clinical translation in a field of research that is, on the whole, still pretty reluctant to actually make waves and public noise. Given who is involved in the Society, it will mean a lot of garbage in addition to the actually useful stuff like senolytics, but overall it is much better to have people actively trying to organize trials to gain evidence rather than not. That speeds up the process of winnowing out the useless, marginal projects and promoting the useful ones, on the basis of the results rather than debate over mechanisms.