For various reasons, such as people promoting their books, the mainstream media has been giving more attention than usual these past few weeks to the topic of healthy life extension. The quality of the resulting articles is fairly low, as is usually the case. When given marching orders to cover any particular topic, the average journalist grabs the first few specific items that show up in a search of recent articles, wraps them with some pretty words, and launches the result without any attempt at achieving or conveying real understanding of the subject. When it comes aging and efforts to treat aging as a medical condition, just like any other quite complex topic in science and medicine, that real understanding is absolutely vital in order to distinguish between arrant nonsense, legitimate but poor approaches, and efforts that might do very well indeed if given sufficient support. The media is not the place to search for comprehension, on this or any other subject, sadly. So we see articles in which supplements, calorie restriction mimetic research, senescent cell clearance, and spa treatments are all ranked equally, without judgement or insight - options spanning the gamut of the aforementioned arrant nonsense through to potentially viable rejuvenation therapies.

Does it do the cause of human rejuvenation any good to have the press talk more rather than less, when nine-tenths of what is published is wrong, useless, or outright disinformation? It can be argued that there is no such thing as bad publicity. If these bland articles spur some people into moving from the class of those who do nothing into the class of those who head off to find out more, then some of the more active of those folk will eventually make their way into our community. There are many roads to learning about SENS-like rejuvenation research: from the personal health and fitness world; from time spent in other areas of the life sciences; from a passing interest in living longer acquired via supplement sellers; because it is talked about among members of an otherwise unrelated community, such as in the Bay Area technology circles; and so forth. So long as people arrive and help with meaningful progress in research and development, help to grow the community, I don't think the road taken matters all that much. Even if it starts with a few eye-rollingly terrible articles in the press.

Only Human: Meet the hackers trying to solve the problem of death

Why Do People Want to Live So Long, Anyway?

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is famous for a lot of reasons. He's an acclaimed bioethicist and oncologist and has two very well known brothers, but another thing people always seem to remember about him is that article he wrote in 2014: "Why I Hope to Die at 75." Emanuel's embrace of an early end - one that's only a few years shy of the U.S. life expectancy of 78.8 -is the exact opposite of how most people in America feel about dying. In a survey from the Pew Research Center, nearly 70% of American adults said they wanted to live to be up to 100 years old. But why? "The quest to live forever, or to live for great expanses of time, has always been part of the human spirit," says Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. People now seem to have particular reason to be optimistic: in the past century, science and medicine have extended life expectancy, and longevity researchers (not to mention Silicon Valley types) are pushing for a life that lasts at least a couple decades more.

How Silicon Valley Is Trying to Hack Its Way Into a Longer Life

The titans of the tech industry are known for their confidence that they can solve any problem - even, as it turns out, the one that's defeated every other attempt so far. That's why the most far-out strategies to cheat death are being tested in America's playground for the young, deep-pocketed and brilliant: Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, has given more than $330 million to research about aging and age-related diseases. Alphabet CEO and co-founder Larry Page launched Calico, a research company that targets ways to improve the human lifespan. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has also invested millions in the cause, including over $7 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a nonprofit focused on life-extension therapies. Rather than wait years for treatments to be approved by federal officials, many of them are testing ways to modify human biology that fall somewhere on the spectrum between science and entrepreneurialism. It's called biohacking, and it's one of the biggest things happening in the Bay Area. "My goal is to live beyond 180 years," says Dave Asprey, CEO of the supplement company Bulletproof. "I am doing every single thing I can to make it happen for myself."

Should We Die?