In the 1960s and '70s there was a great deal of optimism about science - including tackling aging. In the following decades not much progress was made. There were studies and experiments, like low calorie efforts, but those were in mice and mice studies are only exploratory. We can't ethically wean human babies on a starvation diet, we don't make any decisions on animal models, no drug has ever been approved on those because mice are not little people.

Due to lack of progress, some argue that resilience, not longevity, should be the therapeutic endpoint. Lifespan is the wrong objective so people in the field have been targeting the wrong way.

The International Conference on Targeting Longevity 2026 April 8th and 9th in Berlin will discuss if focus on individual pathways such as senescence, mTOR signaling, or metabolic targets has held back progress and single-target therapies may need to give way to coordinated modulation of biological networks rather than single target therapies. If aging is not a single process but a network failure, the future of longevity may depend on learning how to stabilize biological complexity.