What is being done to raise awareness of life extension therapies?
The big challenge at the moment is trying to get the possibility of serious life extension and serious combating of aging out there as something that people appreciate as actually foreseeable. One of the big challenges is that a lot of people in the senior echelons of gerontology have, essentially, a vested interest in ridiculing ideas that appear to overturn the established orthodoxy that aging is more or less impossible to do anything about. But really, that's just a short-lived problem because ultimately, all gerontologists do know that aging is really bad for you and they'd really like to do something about it. So, it's just a matter of time. However, in order to make it happen faster, we really need initial results in the laboratory that are taken seriously and that show that some of the more ambitious sounding aspects of rejuvenation therapy may actually be not quite as hard as they may appear at first sight. And gradually, the whole aura of impossibility will break down. Another aspect of course is to get people to just think about it more because the terrible problem that exists at the moment where people will refuse to think seriously about the feasibility of seriously combating aging because they feel, well it would be bad anyway, we wouldn't want to do this, it would be too disruptive to society. While at the same time, when you point out that actually their reasons for being scared of a poor state in the world are not actually well thought out, it becomes apparent that the reason they are refusing to think seriously about the desirability of seriously combating aging is precisely because they don't think it's possible, and so it's completely circular.
