Aging goes to Washington
Breanna Deutsch is the person who took aging to Capitol Hill. She spent her career in the US House and Senate and in Washington policy communications, and during the healthcare debates she kept asking a question nobody else was: what actually makes people sick in the first place? The answer, over and over, was aging — and almost no one in government had ever heard of longevity medicine.
So she did something about it. She helped found the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI) — the first non-profit built to lobby and educate Congress about aging. Her logic is disarming: there is a lobbying organisation in DC for every disease, and for animals you’ve never heard of — but there was nothing for aging itself. Meanwhile scientists follow the money, and the Biology of Aging corner of the NIH receives “pennies” next to cancer or Alzheimer’s.
Her core argument is the one that reframes everything: treating each disease one at a time is a Band-Aid, because the body keeps aging underneath. The more effective move is to go after the wound itself — aging — and to fund the science that can. And the politics turn out to be easier than you’d think: once members of Congress understand it, longevity is completely bipartisan. Everyone from the right to the left gets behind it, because every single constituent is impacted by aging.
The proof is on the board. A4LI launched the first Longevity Science Caucus in Congress — bipartisan, with a Democrat and a Republican chair — and held its first briefing on the Hill. Breanna prefers to work behind the scenes (that, she says, is the real secret of Capitol Hill), and it is exactly the piece the field was missing: not more science, but the government machinery to carry it to everyone.
