In celebration of its fifth anniversary, the journal Nature Aging asked some of the researchers who contributed to the journal early on – including USC Leonard Davis Associate Professor Bérénice Benayoun – to discuss the future of aging and age-related disease research.
In the Q&A published on January 21, Benayoun shared her thoughts on the impact of the field on human health and what challenges need to be addressed to ensure sustained progress.
Excerpt:
Nature Aging: There is growing public interest in aging and age-related disease research. What can researchers do to ensure that aging science can be trusted and benefits everyone?
Benayoun: Because everyone is aging, and everyone is worried about the effects of aging on themselves or their loved ones, our field is uniquely primed to attract attention from the public. This is why we as aging researchers must always communicate remaining uncertainties to the public. We must resist the temptation to give advice (or feign a certainty we do not have) to the greater public before human studies are conducted. As one example, I am worried about the popularization of direct-to-consumer DNA methylation age products without more guardrails and disclaimers — we know these readouts function well on a population basis but are extremely variable in any given individual. However, they are marketed as foolproof ways to know whether you are aging gracefully. Although caution does not sell as well as gimmicks, it is our responsibility to put caution first to maintain the trust of the public.
What advice would you give to researchers entering the field now?
The time is now! We understand so much more about various aspects of aging biology — spanning neuroscience, immunology, systems biology and so on. We have so many tools that allow the rigorous, unbiased, systematic interrogation of biological systems. Aging research has earned its place in biology as an important field. The field is finally in the position to integrate and expand that knowledge across systems, approaches and models, building on our field’s unique, inherent transdisciplinary roots. For newcomers to aging research, my advice is to embrace that uniqueness, to approach aging research without the constraints of any biological subspecialty, and to take that bird’s eye view that only newcomers can have. The field welcomes your point of view!
Where do you see your field heading in the next 5 to 10 years?
In the next decade, I think the future of our field will be precision geroscience — understanding what shapes aging trajectories and which levers can be potentially acted upon to promote long-term health, not only based on private unique genetic variation but also other important factors that we are just beginning to appreciate, such as biological sex, environmental constraints (for example, urbanization and pollution), social drivers (for example, interpersonal interactions or pet ownership) and life history (for example, pregnancy and lactation, and parenthood). Aging is an integrative process at the intersection of many factors, some of which are mutable and some immutable. The future of our field is in understanding how these factors shape individual aging trajectories, which will provide us with unique handles to personalize our approaches to mitigate the deleterious effects of aging on health.
