Biogerontology and Health
Epistemic status: I'm stealing the idea from the lesswrong forums, as it may help me fight my perfectionism that stops me from blogging. This post is better than just brainstorming but not quite like a proper literature review. Regarding some of those fields, I have read hundreds of articles, whereas for others I have only my intuition as a (mediocre) biogerontologist. This post is subjective. Ongoing project? Data may be updated within the next 12 months if/when I decide to reach out to other aging researchers and aficionados for an informal survey.
Roughly a decade of progress in biogerontology I've been following different aspects of aging research for about a decade, on and off, with a particular focus on translational biogerontology. The optimist in me of course wished to see faster progress, but realistically speaking we have seen some real breakthroughs given limited funding and limited acknowledgment of aging as a treatable condition. While it is hard to say at this vantage point, it is possible that aging research has accelerated, altough I am not entirely sure if it grew faster than other biomedical research did in the last decades. For a similar take, Reason from fightaging has called the pre-2000 era the "lost decades" of aging research and it is indeed difficult to look back without feeling some anger at the many wasted opportunities. However, instead maybe we can look forward with some level of optimism.
If you are interested in earlier decades, this review by Arlan Richardson provides some good reading for the period between 1970 to 2020 (Richardson 2020) and for 1985 to 2010 there is one by Martin Brand (2011). Unfortunately, these are a bit American-centric.
