This week, Dr. Gordon Lithgow, associate professor at the Buck Institute, showed up in San Francisco and spoke to a packed house on aging, new technologies and why interdisciplinary connections are helping to unravel the mysteries of growing old. While politics often slows down progress, computer scientists can play a role in speeding things up.
In his talk, “The Reality of Age Research,” Lithgow told 100 members of the Ask a Scientist club that while the scientific community knows how to study aging much better than a few decades ago, the idea that aging is a disease is still very contentious. That’s because, if aging is a disease instead of a normal phase of life, that implies that something must be done to stop it — politically a lost cause in many cases, especially when applying for a federal grant.
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