Why Scientists Don’t Make Predictions: The Funding Politics of Aging Research

“A great ass-covering way to say no is to say, ‘Well, this person said something irresponsible on television,'” de Grey explains. “Whether or not the thing they said on television actually was irresponsible, if it could be characterized as irresponsible, like over-promising and under-delivering or getting the public’s hopes up or whatever, then that’s good enough.”

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Dr. Aubrey de Grey: people can live for 1000 years.

In the prestigious halls of biogerontology—where scientists untangle the mysteries of human aging—a curious silence persists when it comes to discussing timeframes. Ask most aging researchers when we might defeat aging, and they’ll quickly pivot to discussing incremental progress or the complexity of their work. This isn’t mere scientific caution; it’s a carefully calculated strategy shaped by the brutal realities of research funding.

“I actually wrote a paper on this called “The duty of biogerontologists to discuss time frames publicly”, and I wrote it in 2004,” says Dr. Aubrey de Grey, founder and Chief Science Officer of LEV Foundation. “So it’s been a real problem.”

While remarkable progress continues in labs worldwide, the culture of avoiding predictions has created what de Grey considers a dangerous disconnect between scientific potential and public awareness. This strategic silence might be protecting individual careers, but at what cost to humanity’s battle against its oldest enemy?

The Politics of Prediction in Scientific Funding