Aging

 LA Times - The anti-aging movement has also gotten a boost — and a fair share of ridicule — from extreme tales of rich immortality biohackers such as Los Angeles multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who claims that death is no longer inevitable. The 46-year-old tech entrepreneur follows an audacious $2-million-a-year “don’t die” plan — downing shots of olive oil and protein-packed “nutty pudding” and obsessively measuring his bodily functions down to the duration of his nighttime erections — in an attempt to turn back his biological clock. Longevity is the medical frontier and lifestyle fad of the moment, but it remains a hotly debated and controversial topic within the scientific community.

Although human lifespan has more than doubled since the early 1900s — life expectancy at birth is now about 73 years globally — it is unclear whether any of the buzzy treatments widely marketed today will amount to a meaningful increase in quantity and quality of life down the line. Skeptics criticize much of the remedies being peddled as scientifically unproven and nothing more than hype and false hope. There are also moral questions at play and a basic philosophical disagreement over whether aging should be considered a disease that can be reversed — and, if so, what that even means. Without aging being defined as an illness, longevity treatments face a murky regulatory path with the FDA.