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January 30, 2017
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Two black swans
I want to focus on two of these big changes. One is the demographic transition caused by increased life spans and sub-replacement birth rates. Some call this the flipping of the demographic pyramid.
The failure to recognize this change has already had serious societal problems. It has put Social Security, Medicare, pension plans, and many government budgets on the track to ruin.
We could have planned for this explosion in the number of older people and the reduction in the work force that pays their bills. But we didn’t, and the consequences will be brutal.
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The second big change is the accelerating progress in anti-aging biotechnologies. There are compounds in labs right now that could dramatically improve and extend human health by a decade or more.
Even more startling are the recent announcements by two respected scientific organizations, including the Salk Institute, that aging can be reversed. Though the Salk Institute scientists are talking about “reversing the signs of aging,” they’re really working on making people biologically younger....
...President Trump may appoint a proponent of anti-aging biotechnologies to lead the FDA. Trump’s candidates all know that biogerontologists want rapalogs approved for anti-aging purposes. So if one of them takes over the FDA, we might see a moonshot program to quickly validate a safe rapalog for anti-aging purposes....
...I’m also happy about Trump’s pick for head of the OMB, Rep. Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney is brutally honest about the impending failure of the transfer programs for the aged. As biogeronotologists and demographers have been pointing out for years, those failures could be prevented if we can provide American workers more years of health.
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