Peddling to the Masses

Worms and flies might not seem all that exciting, but when scientists announced that they could boost these creatures' life spans, the world beat a path to their door. Now some researchers say that intense public interest might be skewing the funding and direction of research on aging.

Virtually every culture throughout recorded history has yearned for a substance that could restore youth. And judging from the popularity of purported antiaging treatments, today's society is no exception. But the purveyors of restorative creams and hormone cocktails are not the only ones who've responded to the public's lust for a long and healthy life. To some degree, biologists are also heeding the call.

A small cadre of scientists have dedicated their careers to understanding the underlying process of aging. Already they have found, in animals from flies to mice, that tweaking specific genes can produce creatures that live exceptionally long and healthy lives. In the process, the scientists who study these organisms have found themselves in the limelight, their discoveries igniting visions of extended youth.

On the plus side, the public's interest in longevity could boost funding for research on the biology of aging, says Gene Cohen, director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. But the media spotlight might compromise scientists' integrity by luring them into a high-stakes race to commercialize their work, notes Thomas Johnson, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Cohen and Johnson explore the role that the public plays in research on aging in this month's SAGE Crossroads Webcast.

That researchers are influenced by public opinion is only natural, says Johnson. Scientists are people, too. They read newspapers, watch television, and get caught up to some extent in the public's thirst for products that might delay or even reverse aging. Maintaining youthful vigor is "a dream mankind has had since the dawn of history," he says. "To think that we may actually be able to start doing something about it is … a heady experience."

Any researcher who says otherwise is not being entirely honest, Johnson adds. "A lot of scientists really do believe that they are just doing objective analysis, free of any societal prejudice," says Johnson, who studies longevity in worms and mice. "But I just think that those are people who don't know themselves." And because the media gravitate toward research on aging, scientists who work in the area find themselves on the public stage more often than researchers in less glitzy fields. That added exposure can drive some scientists to promote their research through the press, says Johnson: "These people have a tendency to see themselves more as media figures and to work in areas of research where there may be media exposure. In some sense, they promote their research in a more media-driven fashion than is the norm in other areas of research."

The media attention has drawn scientists into the field, says Johnson, but it has also led to more secrecy. For example, at a 1997 Gordon conference on the biology of aging that Johnson organized, more than half of the data presented were unpublished. At the same conference in 2000, researchers presented, almost without exception, only published work. "There really is a loss of collegiality," he says.

Johnson attributes at least part of this secretiveness to the chilling effect of so many researchers being affiliated with biotechnology companies. Steven Austad, who studies long-lived mice at the University of Idaho in Moscow, concurs: "Scientists can be bought very cheaply compared to, let’s say, politicians. I worry about that."

Johnson admits that he was not immune to such temptations. In 1995, he helped launch Genoplex Inc., a biotechnology company that he thought would develop antiaging drugs. He says he went in with his eyes open, knowing that secrecy is key for corporate success because "your very existence depends on proprietary products and information." He left when the company had trouble securing funding.

Cynthia Kenyon, a founding member of the biotech company Elixir and a developmental biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says she doesn't see the harm in corporate affiliation or media attention. The fanfare that greeted her discovery of long-lived worms did not change her approach. Her experiments represent "the same kinds of things we had been doing before, except that instead of focusing on the role that genes played in [embryonic/larval] development, we [now focus] on the role that genes play in aging."

One place that public interest certainly sways the scientific agenda is in funding, says Cohen. Not that the public is clamoring for research on the basic biology of aging. But voters do exert their influence on the distribution of research dollars through scores of organizations that lobby for studies of illnesses, says Cohen. And as the baby boomers start hitting retirement, the pressure for research on aging-related diseases will only increase. "The boomers are the first group in history that's grown up with real positive models of aging," says Cohen. "They see these people out there in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who are doing so well, and they say, 'I expect to be there and I want to be healthy too.' "

Unfortunately, because the public remains focused on disease, fewer dollars go toward studying the underlying mechanisms that lead to age-related decline, says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City: "It is hard for [people] to step back and see that there is actually a common environment to these diseases that has to do with the fact that we are aging." That thinking is "a big tragedy," says Barzilai, because studying the biology of aging will yield insights that apply to all aging-related diseases.

The public can--and should--influence how research progresses, says Robert Binstock, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. But, he says, today's society remains woefully unprepared to deal with the repercussions of longer life and has "hardly begun to discuss them" (see "Extending Life or Compounding Misery?"). To foster a public dialog on the ramifications of extending human longevity, Binstock advocates creating a program modeled on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications program that the National Institutes of Health established to promote public understanding of genome research.

"Everybody hopes to get old," says Barzilai. But perhaps the best way for the public to promote healthy aging is to focus less on every new tantalizing finding and more on the most ethical and effective use of potential antiaging therapies, should they appear.

Karyn Hede, a freelance writer living in Richland, Washington, hopes aging gracefully isn't just for worms.