Understanding and tackling aging: two fields communicating (a little) at last

Those who have followed this journal's, and this author's, efforts over recent years to stimulate the rational design of interventions to combat aging have good reason for bewilderment that the concerted application of our knowledge of biology to the defeat of humanity's foremost killer needed to be kick-started by a bearded troublemaker whose formal academic training was not even in biology at all. Elsewhere in this issue I bemoan the persistent balkanisation of traditional gerontology, whereby biologists, clinicians, sociologists and psychologists studying the elderly seem almost studiously to avoid each other even when participating in the same conference. In this commentary, however, I have something more positive to report. A string of recent and forthcoming conferences, organized not only by those at the forefront of life-extension research but also by highly influential mainstream groups, have publicly endorsed the Methuselah Foundation's goal of defeating aging. The field of biomedical gerontology-the interface between biogerontology and geriatrics, where biological knowledge is focused on developing the geriatrics of tomorrow-is not a traditional component of gerontology, having been poorly appreciated by biogerontologists and geriatricians alike, but these developments show that it is rapidly taking its place at that table.