Two hallmarks funded. Eight ignored.
Andrew Steele took a PhD in physics, decided that aging was the most important scientific and humanitarian challenge of our time, and moved into computational biology. He spent about five years there — and discovered something that shaped everything since: even biologists don’t know very much about aging. He is married to a doctor who, when he first started talking about this, thought he was crazy. He changed her mind, but the episode told him there was a public understanding problem sitting underneath the science.
So he wrote Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old — two years full-time, and harder than it looks, because aging touches every part of our biology and he is a perfectionist who had left formal biology training at school and was determined not to get anything wrong.
That care is the point, not a footnote. His view is that communicating aging has to be as scientifically rigorous as possible, because rigour is what lets the field say things people trust — and trust is what the field actually needs.
His most useful contribution here is a piece of arithmetic. His book breaks aging into ten hallmarks. Two — senescent cells and epigenetic reprogramming — have attracted enormous interest, attention and money. Which means eight are barely being looked at. Some are still on the drawing board; some work in cells or in mice. None promise a profit inside five years, so investors and pharma will not touch them yet.
His conclusion is unfashionable and probably correct: this is work best done by governments, who can take the long view that venture capital structurally cannot. Which produces the advice he actually gives — once the basics are handled, the most valuable thing you can do for your own longevity is spread the word.
