Early this year, I attended a longevity science conference in Miami hosted by the academy that Sinclair helped found. That weekend, about 65 scientists from around the world compared notes and waited in line for coffee and complained about the weather in the city, which was experiencing a freakish cold snap. Iguanas, stunned by the below-freezing temperatures, were falling from the sky, tumbling from their perches in trees and littering the sidewalks. Scientists wearing Oura rings and Apple watches skirted the tropical reptiles as they tried to get their 10,000 steps or maximize their high-intensity interval training. Others snapped photos to send to friends who were zoologists: Were the iguanas done for? Or might they be revived?
Becoming a member of the academy is an honor for longevity scientists, and protecting the group’s reputation was on the agenda for the first day of discussion. Its leaders had come to believe that they had a P.R. problem, as groundbreaking research like cellular rejuvenation gets mixed up, in the public’s mind, with businesses selling unproven supplements and billionaires like Bryan Johnson grabbing headlines by infusing himself with his son’s blood. “There are too many terms, too little clarity, mixed messaging, public confusion and so on,” Nir Barzilai, a professor at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and the academy’s president, told the crowd.
Barzilai, who is known for his work exploring longevity genes in centenarians, went on to introduce a branding consultant he hired, who warned the group that there was a misalignment between the work they were doing and “the fringe anti-aging approaches” and the “snake oil” that did the field harm. After some debate, the group voted to rebrand itself the Academy of Geroscience — the name the consultant recommended. (“Geroscience” literally means “the science of aging.”) Ringel, the Life Biosciences executive, seemed undecided about the name — he wasn’t sure it captured the great potential of the field to transform the human life span.
The conference showcased the debate that longevity researchers — or geroscientists — are having about how to set expectations for the public. Until he joined Altos, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, like Sinclair, had been known to make grand proclamations about just how much life extension we could anticipate and how soon: In 2019, Izpisua Belmonte told MIT Technology Review that he believed there was probably already an individual born who would live to be 130; humans, he said, might eventually live 50 years beyond our current life span.
By contrast, Barron, the Altos chief executive, shies away from that sort of prediction. He fears that others in the field are raising expectations so high that the public might not recognize a miracle of progress when it occurs. Even if we cured all cancer tomorrow, Barron said, we’d add maybe only two or three years to the average American’s life span. “So if we extend health span by three years,” he said, “you’re doing the equivalent of something which will not happen anytime soon, which is curing cancer.” Should Altos manage to add five years to life expectancy — more than Barron even could hope for, he said — he feared that the public would still be disappointed. “Even delaying ovarian aging by three years or Alzheimer’s by three years — that would be transformative,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/magazine/cell-rejuventation-biotech-longevity-research-altos-labs.html
