After the Fund Longevity rally we were having dinner and my friend — a deeptech angel — shared how he'd gone to see a doctor the other day.
— My foot clicks when I step on it. — Any complaints? — Well, my foot clicks. — I don't think you understand — is there pain? — No, I don't think you understand. I don't want it to start hurting. I came to take care of it before it does.
The medical chart lets you write "pain" but not "aging." As if a clicking foot is just a clicking foot, and not the first symptom of the inevitable failure of the entire body. But if it doesn't hurt — there's no urgency. The doctor sent him home.
Why does the system know how to respond to a sore foot but has no idea what to do about the clicking? Maybe because nobody wants to live forever?
Actually, they do. In 2021 the Oxford Longevity Project asked people in 25 countries one question: would you want to live forever if it were possible? 37% said yes. That's roughly 3 billion people.
And what did those 3 billion do when Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for partial cell reprogramming — a discovery that showed for the first time that cellular aging can be reversed? Nothing. The news lasted a day before being pushed out by some football scandal.
Because the urgent always defeats the important. How do you make aging — urgent?
How aging can claim the spotlight?
A patient
On July 15, 1985, Rock Hudson — an actor beloved by all of America — appeared at a press conference, gaunt and grey. AIDS. Before Hudson, AIDS was a disease of people America didn't want to see. Gays? Addicts? Oh, so convenient categories to look away from! After Hudson, it was a disease of the man you watched movies with on Saturdays. Donations doubled within months. Congress allocated 221 million dollars. Elizabeth Taylor, who before this couldn't get a single star to show up at a charity event — they told her "I don't want to be associated with that" — had to book bigger venues. The facts didn't change. The face did.
We need Arnold Schwarzenegger to say — look, I did my workouts! I am still dying of AGING. This could have been avoided, fund science!
Death in public space
On October 11, 1992, a hundred and fifty people gathered at the Capitol carrying urns, bags, boxes. Inside — ashes. David Robinson carried the ashes of his partner Warren. Warren had asked before he died: use my body for something political. Alexis Danzig carried her father's ashes. They walked to the White House, got past security, and poured the ashes over the fence onto the presidential lawn. Then they picked up megaphones and started saying names. This is my partner. This is my father. This is my friend.
Artist David Wojnarowicz, himself dying of AIDS, had written: I imagine that every time someone dies, friends put the body in a car, race at a hundred miles an hour to Washington and dump it on the steps of the White House. They did exactly that — only instead of bodies, they brought ashes.
This was ACT UP — people who five years earlier had stormed the FDA, chained themselves to the New York Stock Exchange, staged die-ins on the steps of government buildings. They lay down on the pavement and pretended to be dead — so that passersby couldn't pretend nobody was dying. They carried open coffins through the streets — so the city couldn't hide its dead. They showed up to hearings and knew the drug approval protocols better than the officials. The FDA changed its procedures. That change is still in effect today.
A society that hides death doesn't know how to process it when it shows up in front of the cameras. So you have to bring it out. Again and again. ACT UP understood this. Do we?
Aging buries quietly. War kills fewer people — but it does it with a bang, so the whole world watches. Aging kills more — but quietly, one by one, behind closed doors. A quiet death is not news. Not news is not politics.
In the minute it took you to read this essay, another 70 people died of aging. No procession, no megaphones, no names. So as not to distract the rest of us from urgent business. When a disease kills everyone — it becomes weather.
Targeted lobbying
Mary Lasker didn't shout. She walked into congressmen's offices with a folder. She brought scientists and coached them: these people don't understand anything about what you do — just tell them how you're going to cure cancer. The National Cancer Institute budget grew from a million and a half in 1946 to a hundred and ten million by 1961.
By the late sixties she decided things were moving too slowly — and started placing full-page ads in the newspapers of specific congressmen, in their home districts. Their constituents started calling. Then — a full page in the New York Times: "MR. NIXON: YOU CAN CURE CANCER."
On December 23, 1971, Nixon signed the National Cancer Act. A billion and a half dollars. Because not signing had become more expensive than signing.
Lasker made it politically impossible to vote against cancer. Aging doesn't have anyone who will do the same. Yet.
The patient who doesn't know he is the patient
A cancer patient has a diagnosis, a protocol, a patient advocacy organization, a caucus in parliament, and a pink ribbon on a minister's lapel. A person dying of aging has a birthday! Congratulations!
Every person over fifty is a chronic patient.
Everyone who has lost someone to a heart attack, to dementia, to "he just faded" — is a patient's family member. The base is larger than any patient movement that has ever existed. But they don't know they're a group. They don't act like they have a common enemy — or that this enemy can be held to account.
Cancer and AIDS patients didn't find a ready-made category. They created their own.
We are people being killed by aging that no one treats because no one calls it a disease.
And what are we doing about it?
Among us are sporty people, biohackers, cryonicists, entrepreneurs, scientists. We are all building personal lifeboats hoping to survive the gap until the technology arrives. I get the logic. I'm building mine too. But a lifeboat is not a continent.
The political infrastructure that funds a thousand searches simultaneously — that is what moves timelines on civilizational-scale problems. Cancer didn't start being beaten because someone in a garage found a pill. It started being beaten because a movement tore billions out of the budget and put thousands of people to work on it at the same time.
There are 3 billion of us. That's enough.
There is no checkbox in the medical chart for "aging." There is no budget line for "research and stop aging." There is no coalition in parliament. Someone has to make sure they get there.
After the Fund Longevity rally we were having dinner and my friend — a deeptech angel — shared how he'd gone to see a doctor the other day.
— My foot clicks when I step on it.
— Any complaints? — Well, my foot clicks.
— I don't think you understand — is there pain?
— No, I don't think you understand. I don't want it to start hurting. I came to take care of it before it does.
The medical chart lets you write "pain" but not "aging." As if a clicking foot is just a clicking foot, and not the first symptom of the inevitable failure of the entire body. But if it doesn't hurt — there's no urgency. The doctor sent him home.
Why does the system know how to respond to a sore foot but has no idea what to do about the clicking? Maybe because nobody wants to live forever?
Actually, they do. In 2021 the Oxford Longevity Project asked people in 25 countries one question: would you want to live forever if it were possible? 37% said yes. That's roughly 3 billion people.
And what did those 3 billion do when Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for partial cell reprogramming — a discovery that showed for the first time that cellular aging can be reversed? Nothing. The news lasted a day before being pushed out by some football scandal.
Because the urgent always defeats the important.
How do you make aging — urgent?
How aging can claim the spotlight?
A patient
On July 15, 1985, Rock Hudson — an actor beloved by all of America — appeared at a press conference, gaunt and grey. AIDS. Before Hudson, AIDS was a disease of people America didn't want to see. Gays? Addicts? Oh, so convenient categories to look away from! After Hudson, it was a disease of the man you watched movies with on Saturdays. Donations doubled within months. Congress allocated 221 million dollars. Elizabeth Taylor, who before this couldn't get a single star to show up at a charity event — they told her "I don't want to be associated with that" — had to book bigger venues. The facts didn't change. The face did.
We need Arnold Schwarzenegger to say — look, I did my workouts! I am still dying of AGING. This could have been avoided, fund science!
Death in public space
On October 11, 1992, a hundred and fifty people gathered at the Capitol carrying urns, bags, boxes. Inside — ashes. David Robinson carried the ashes of his partner Warren. Warren had asked before he died: use my body for something political. Alexis Danzig carried her father's ashes. They walked to the White House, got past security, and poured the ashes over the fence onto the presidential lawn. Then they picked up megaphones and started saying names. This is my partner. This is my father. This is my friend.
Artist David Wojnarowicz, himself dying of AIDS, had written: I imagine that every time someone dies, friends put the body in a car, race at a hundred miles an hour to Washington and dump it on the steps of the White House. They did exactly that — only instead of bodies, they brought ashes.
This was ACT UP — people who five years earlier had stormed the FDA, chained themselves to the New York Stock Exchange, staged die-ins on the steps of government buildings. They lay down on the pavement and pretended to be dead — so that passersby couldn't pretend nobody was dying. They carried open coffins through the streets — so the city couldn't hide its dead. They showed up to hearings and knew the drug approval protocols better than the officials. The FDA changed its procedures. That change is still in effect today.
A society that hides death doesn't know how to process it when it shows up in front of the cameras. So you have to bring it out. Again and again. ACT UP understood this. Do we?
Aging buries quietly. War kills fewer people — but it does it with a bang, so the whole world watches. Aging kills more — but quietly, one by one, behind closed doors. A quiet death is not news. Not news is not politics.
In the minute it took you to read this essay, another 70 people died of aging. No procession, no megaphones, no names. So as not to distract the rest of us from urgent business. When a disease kills everyone — it becomes weather.
Targeted lobbying
Mary Lasker didn't shout. She walked into congressmen's offices with a folder. She brought scientists and coached them: these people don't understand anything about what you do — just tell them how you're going to cure cancer. The National Cancer Institute budget grew from a million and a half in 1946 to a hundred and ten million by 1961.
By the late sixties she decided things were moving too slowly — and started placing full-page ads in the newspapers of specific congressmen, in their home districts. Their constituents started calling. Then — a full page in the New York Times: "MR. NIXON: YOU CAN CURE CANCER."
On December 23, 1971, Nixon signed the National Cancer Act. A billion and a half dollars. Because not signing had become more expensive than signing.
Lasker made it politically impossible to vote against cancer. Aging doesn't have anyone who will do the same. Yet.
The patient who doesn't know he is the patient
A cancer patient has a diagnosis, a protocol, a patient advocacy organization, a caucus in parliament, and a pink ribbon on a minister's lapel. A person dying of aging has a birthday! Congratulations!
Every person over fifty is a chronic patient.
Everyone who has lost someone to a heart attack, to dementia, to "he just faded" — is a patient's family member. The base is larger than any patient movement that has ever existed. But they don't know they're a group. They don't act like they have a common enemy — or that this enemy can be held to account.
Cancer and AIDS patients didn't find a ready-made category. They created their own.
We are people being killed by aging that no one treats because no one calls it a disease.
And what are we doing about it?
Among us are sporty people, biohackers, cryonicists, entrepreneurs, scientists. We are all building personal lifeboats hoping to survive the gap until the technology arrives. I get the logic. I'm building mine too. But a lifeboat is not a continent.
The political infrastructure that funds a thousand searches simultaneously — that is what moves timelines on civilizational-scale problems. Cancer didn't start being beaten because someone in a garage found a pill. It started being beaten because a movement tore billions out of the budget and put thousands of people to work on it at the same time.
There are 3 billion of us. That's enough.
There is no checkbox in the medical chart for "aging." There is no budget line for "research and stop aging." There is no coalition in parliament. Someone has to make sure they get there.