Aging Research Funding Is Catastrophically Misallocated — We Spend 100x More Treating Aging Diseases Than Preventing Aging Itself

The NIH spends ~$4B/year on Alzheimer's research. ~$6B on cancer. ~$2B on cardiovascular disease. On aging itself — the root cause of all three? About $200M through the National Institute on Aging's basic biology of aging portfolio.

This is like spending billions on fire damage repair while refusing to fund fire prevention.

Every disease of aging shares common upstream drivers: senescent cell accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, proteostatic collapse, epigenetic drift, stem cell exhaustion. Addressing these root causes would reduce incidence of ALL age-related diseases simultaneously.

Hypothesis: Redirecting just 10% of disease-specific NIH funding (~$4B/year) to fundamental aging biology research would prevent more disease burden than the remaining 90% spent on disease-specific research.

The mechanism: treating aging delays everything simultaneously. Treating Alzheimer's prevents Alzheimer's but leaves you to die of cancer. A rapamycin-like intervention that delays aging by 5 years delays Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes by 5 years each.

Goldman et al. (2013, Health Affairs) modeled this: a 2.2-year delay in aging would save $7.1 trillion over 50 years in the US alone — more than the combined savings from eliminating cancer, heart disease, and diabetes individually.

Testable prediction: A meta-analysis of geroprotector interventions (rapamycin, senolytics, NAD+ boosters) in mice will show that aging-targeted interventions reduce total disease burden by >40% — exceeding the sum of disease-specific interventions.

DeSci should make aging research its flagship cause. The ROI is civilization-scale.