This month the Alliance for Aging Research celebrates the 20th anniversary of our founding as a not-for-profit organization working to increase support for research to extend the healthy years of life. Twenty years ago, the science of aging was at the bottom of medical research priorities and lacked prestige as an academic discipline. Of the 11 federal health research institutes at the time, the National Institute of Aging ranked 10th in terms of budget and only a handful of scientists around the world were engaged in aging research. Over the past two decades, aging research has gained respect and prominence, yet much remains to be done.

As we mark this 20-year milestone, we stand closer now to previously unimaginable scientific and medical advances than ever before. In 1986, the notion of genomics, regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, and the potential they hold for transforming health care and disease, would have appeared mainly in futurist journals and science fiction. Today scientific discoveries may soon fulfill their great promise; and Americans are coming to realize the vast impact aging baby boomers will have on our world.

Call it the Silver Tsunami: the rising tide of chronic diseases of aging that threatens to engulf American health care in the 21st Century. For sheer size, economic impact and lack of precedent, the Silver Tsunami stands alone. Unlike bird flu or exotic infectious diseases that may or may not come to our shores, a tidal wave of chronic illnesses and disabilities is a certainty with the aging of America's 77 million Baby Boomers. The stakes are high—both in terms of national economic productivity and societal impact. To meet this challenge head-on, we must accelerate the pace of innovation and discovery, develop effective public policies that reflect the needs of an aging society, and improve health care for older Americans.

To succeed, we must imagine the possible and work in creative collaborations across disciplines to develop new products, therapies and behavioral strategies to delay, treat and cure diseases of aging.

The Alliance will mark its anniversary by joining together with prominent scientists from around the world on Capitol Hill, where we will call upon policymakers to embrace the possibility and the critical need to achieve a “Longevity Dividend.” Such a society-wide benefit would result from a modest deceleration in the rate of aging sufficient to delay all aging-related diseases and disorders by about seven years.¹ Scientists believe that aging research has the potential to achieve this goal and produce social, economic and health bonuses both for individuals and entire populations— a dividend that would benefit current and future generations to come.

By extending the time in which individuals remain physically and mentally vital, people would remain in the labor force longer, personal income and savings would increase, and age-entitlement programs would face less pressure from shifting demographics. Collectively, these changes would all presumably contribute to more robust national economies.

The scientists' statement calls upon national and world leaders to make healthy aging a major research priority and to develop strategies that will “lead to the permanent extension of healthy life that would result from a successful effort to slow the rate of aging.”

Please continue as part of the Alliance as we imagine what's next in aging research and place a real sense of urgency into our pursuit of the longevity dividend.

Daniel Perry
Executive Director

[1] S. J. Olshansky, “Can we justify efforts to slow the rate of aging in humans?” Presentation before the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, 2003.