My Personal Longevity History (and Prejudices)

    What I'm going to say here involves my personal biases, and I may have to eat my words. 
    I've followed--albeit fitfully, and at considerable remove-- the progress of longevity research for over sixty years, and I feel that it's getting ripe. The alleviation of aging appears to me to be an easier nut to crack than either nuclear energy or space flight. In the 1930's, Dr. Clifford C. Furnas, in his 1936 book, "The Next One Hundred Years", observed that the large-scale release of "atomic" energy appeared to require the temperatures and pressures that are present only at the center of the Sun, and that if this were case, we would never be able to realize practical  "atomic" power on Earth. And there the matter stood until 1939, when Hahn and Meitner split the uranium atom. (That event was like the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth", although most of us remained ignorant of its occurrence until after the end of World War II.) 
    Space flight was at least as implausible as the practical release of nuclear energy. By 1939, the highest any rocket had flown was Dr. "Looney" Goddard's last rocket, which reached 9,000 feet. It was a long way from there to the moon. Furthermore, using the fuels of the day, to escape from the Earth's gravitational attraction, the ratio of the weight of the rocket at launch to the weight of the empty rocket after all its fuel had been expended would have to have been around 10,000-to-1... an absurd idea! On top of that the experts said), in a vacuum, the rocket would have nothing to push against. And there that matter stood, until 1944, when the first V-2 careened into London.
    As a space flight booster from childhood on, I suffered from the negativity and scorn of the "experts", I was persona non grata in graduate school in physics--until Sputnik captured everyone's attention, and big bucks began to flow into the field. All of a sudden, it became very respectable. I suspect that this will be the same way. One has to ignore the ankle-biters and the tinkers' chorus of nay-sayers and concentrate upon the doing of the deeds. After all, there are four stages in the introduction of any new idea:

(1) "It can't be done."
(2) "Maybe it can be done, but who would want to do it?"
(3) "All right, it's been done, but that's the last you'll ever hear of it."
(4) "I've been saying all along that this was the way to go, and see? I was right!"

    In the chapter on the future of biology in his "The Next One Hundred Years", Dr. Furnas says that what we really need from biologists is an understanding of photosynthesis or of how to subdue aging, but all the biologists are interested in (as of 1936) is mapping the sex life of the earthworm or discovering a new species of mulberry tree,. In the meantime, we keep dying.