Progress in gathering support for rejuvenation research has long been hampered by a number of widespread false beliefs. Every time we pitch someone unfamiliar with the topic, seeking material assistance in the long process of developing clinical treatments to control aging and thus extend life, the same initial hurdles must be overcome: the false belief that longevity assurance therapies would make people older for longer, not younger for longer; the false belief that overpopulation is inevitable if life spans increase; the false belief that only extremely rich people would benefit or have access to therapies. These are resilient myths, surviving in spite of the fact that they are easily disproved, and despite the fact that scientists explain over and again in detail as to why they won't come to pass.

No-one aiming at the treatment of aging is trying to build treatments that will make old people linger in increasing decrepitude. It isn't even possible to do that with a rejuvenation treatment that repairs damage: aging is an accumulation of damage, and reductions in that damage translate directly into a longer maintenance of youthful physiology. Researches have published countless papers on overpopulation in the general sense to show that what people see as overpopulation is simply poverty resulting from bad choices and bad governance, people choosing to make a wasteland in the midst of plentiful resources. Malthusians predicting vanishing resources have always been wrong; resources are created and replaced the moment that price increases look likely. Where researchers have created models of future population growth under the influence of radical life extension, populations do not grow rapidly. Wealth, security, and longevity produce incentives that reduce population growth.

As to only the wealthy having access: every mass-produced medical technology is initially briefly expensive, and then later affordable, and then later again dirt cheap. You don't have to take my word for it. Go out and look at the price histories of thousands of drugs and other treatments. Treatments to repair the damage that causes aging will be the same for everyone, infusions and injections that are turned out in bulk from pharmacological assembly lines, or available in tens of thousands of clinics where cell samples are needed to produce personalized therapies from a standard template. These treatments will be similar in manufacture and distribution to drugs that today range in cost from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars. The challenge will be delivery to the third world, because that is a challenge for every technology, not delivery to the average person in the first world. It is nonsensical to think that treating aging will be any different from the past treatment of disease in its logistics.

There are many other resilient persistent false beliefs that impact the ability to talk sensibly about the development of medicine for aging. The idea that multivitamins and antioxidants are a good thing, for example. The supplement industry continues to drown out the voice of the scientific community in this matter. It is done and settled in medical science that high dose vitamins and antioxidants do nothing or cause a modest level of harm, but you wouldn't know that from a tour of any shopping center. When people fixate on supplements, they tend to shy away from consideration of supporting research: doing something, anything, now satisfies the need. Of course it does nothing to actually help matters when it comes to living a longer life, but no-one should claim that we humans are particularly rational or consistent in our approach to life.

The science myths that will not die