
The productive, bizarre career of Nobel laureate Elie Metchnikoff - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/the-man-who-blamed-aging-on-his-intestines
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aab0
Stambler's book also covers Metchnikoff:
[http://www.longevityhistory.com/book/indexb.html#_Toc3283199...](http://www.longevityhistory.com/book/indexb.html#_Toc328319983)

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reasonattlm
Metchnikoff had the right attitude to the relationship between aging, health,
and science - i.e. that we should treat it as a medical condition and work to
fix it - but the misfortune to be born far too early for that goal to be
practical.

Some of the International Longevity Alliance folk promote May 15th as
Metchnikoff Day, a time to remind the rest of the world that we should be
working to cure aging:

[http://www.longevityforall.org/170th-anniversary-of-elie-
met...](http://www.longevityforall.org/170th-anniversary-of-elie-metchnikoff-
the-founder-of-gerontology-may-15-2015/)

Metchnikoff wrote a short book entitled "The prolongation of life; optimistic
studies", and it is well worth reading since it can be found online. He had
very modern attitudes in this respect, and the debates he reports having with
people around him vis a vis the desirability of treating aging as a medical
condition are exactly the same as those occurring today.

[http://archive.org/stream/prolongationofli00metciala/prolong...](http://archive.org/stream/prolongationofli00metciala/prolongationofli00metciala_djvu.txt)

How do we know that we are not too early, like Metchnikoff, or like the
optimists of the 1970s? When it comes to our understanding of biochemistry and
ability to manipulate our cells, we are as far beyond the 1970s as the 1970s
were beyond the gentlemen-scientists working at the end of the 19th century.
Why, however, is it different this time? Why are the seekers after agelessness
now rational scientists rather than another crop of self-deluded fools or
earnest workers overestimating the bounds of the possible? This is a question
that crops up. I can recall numerous conversations over the years in which I
was informed that someone knew an older fellow who was, back in the day, quite
confident in the forthcoming existence of longevity-enhancing therapies, and
yet where are those treatments decades later?

So why is it different this time? For one there is SENS, a detailed plan of
development leading to rejuvenation treatments that could be prototyped in
mice given a billion dollars and ten years, give or take. No such plan could
have been formed a century ago, and while much of the basic knowledge that
informs the SENS viewpoint of aging as an accumulation of cellular and
molecular damage existed in the 1970s, SENS could not have been proposed as a
serious project at that time even had someone had the realization. There was
simply no way to even guess at how much time and money it would have required
to build the tools to build the tools to develop the validation of the
theories so as to build the tools to build the tools to develop the therapies,
and so forth: it would have been a project on the scale of going to the moon,
and with far less certainty of success.

More importantly none of the proposed paths to add decades or more of healthy
life put forward in past generations, now obviously naive and wrong, were in
any way rigorous or supported by large fractions of the scientific community.
Only now do we have that, built on the vast body of knowledge of biology
accumulated over the last century, and on the new tools of biotechnology of
the past few decades. Only now are large numbers of scientists putting their
careers and their reputations into the extension of healthy life. Only now do
we have SENS approaches demonstrating life extension and improved health in
mice, such as the senescent cell clearance studies published this year, and
companies working on implementations.

Why is it different this time? The fact that funding for various scientific
establishment efforts to extend life is growing rapidly. Most of these are in
fact not going to move the needle all that much, but that isn't the point. The
point is that the consensus in a significant fraction of the scientific
community and its surrounding institutions of funding and review is that the
time has come. Investment and interest in any given field are cyclic, and this
present cycle will see billions poured into this field, and old narrow views
of the implausibility of life extension swept away. Scientists are the
arbiters of truth in our culture, though this is sometimes hard to see, and
the rest of the world will follow their lead when deciding whether to take
something seriously. That will create a feedback loop of funding and progress
in which, yes, a lot of less useful work will thrive, but so will significant
approaches such as SENS.

None of this was the case for past generations of what turned out to be
deluded optimism. It is the case now. The times have changed, and it is
different this time around.

