"Development is taking too long, so I won't be able to benefit from it in my lifetime."
Some older people are not interested in the faster development of effective medicine against age-related diseases, or rejuvenation medicine, because they believe that this medicine will not be fully developed within their lifetime and that they will therefore not benefit from it.
There is encouraging progress, and so it is not unlikely that a large part of the population alive today will benefit from rejuvenation therapies - this applies even to those who are already at a relatively advanced age.
The objection that people have been trying in vain for thousands of years to find a fountain of youth or immortality is correct. But the same applies to flight, access to space, the ability to restore paralyzed limbs and freedom from smallpox, polio and tuberculosis: all of these things were impossible for hundreds of thousands of years until the necessary technology became available and was put to use. Now they are already possible for the majority of the human population and are being extended to the rest.
And even if these treatments may come too late for some of us: if we do nothing today to accelerate rejuvenation research, we run the risk of spending our last days wondering whether we could have spared ourselves and millions of other people years of unnecessary suffering if only we had decided to act sooner.
According to the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, we will reach LEV (longevity escape velocity) in ten to twelve years (as of 2018) 1.
The bioinformatician and theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey predicts that we have a 50% chance of reaching LEV around the year 2036 2. This would mean that people who are healthy enough at that point and from then on regularly make use of the latest rejuvenation therapies will never die of age-related causes.
Among other things, this prediction is based on de Grey's assessment that we will achieve RMR (robust mouse rejuvenation) with a 50% probability in three to five years.
Regardless of these predictions, rejuvenation is a rapidly growing field of research that has already seen some breakthroughs. The first components of a comprehensive anti-aging therapy, such as senolytics, are already being tested in clinical trials 3. Others are close to that stage. This should make us confident that a revolution in biomedical research - and, as a result, in human life - lies ahead of us in the next few decades.
- https://singularityhub.com/2017/11/10/3-dangerous-ideas-from-ray-kurzweil/
- https://longevity.technology/longevity-escape-velocity-by-2035-and-it-will-be-free/
- Wissler Gerdes EO, Misra A, Netto JME, Tchkonia T, Kirkland JL. Strategies for late phase preclinical and early clinical trials of senolytics. Mech Ageing Dev 2021 Dec; 200: 111591. doi: 10.1016/j.mad.2021.111591. Epub 2021 Oct 23. PMID: 34699859; PMCID: PMC8627448.
External link on the topic of timeframe