Wellington, FL, October 9, 2023—On October 3, 2023, the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation released its historic Dublin Longevity Declaration, a groundbreaking document addressing one of humanity’s most pressing needs: extending healthy longevity for all humankind. Signed by a large and growing list of scientific luminaries and other supporters, the declaration asserts the critical importance of extending not just the lifespan, but the human healthspan.
“LEVF’s goals and objectives track closely with those of the Healthspan Action Coalition,” said Bernard Siegel, co-founder and director of the HSAC. “The declaration recognizes a new reality that is emerging in mainstream science. The aging process, which underlies almost all human diseases, was always thought to be inexorable and irreversible,” he continued. “A concept that has long been relegated to science fiction, that aging is amenable to manipulation, is no longer science fiction. It’s a fact that has recently been recognized by the World Health Organization.”
An outgrowth of discussions at the Longevity Summit Dublin, held in August, 2023, the declaration seeks to reframe outdated concepts of a basic process intrinsic to the human condition—the decline of health and vitality in later life, leading to disability and, ultimately, a strictly circumscribed life- and healthspan. The prominent aging researchers Brian Kennedy and Aubrey de Grey co-authored the declaration, and its release was coordinated with International Longevity Day and Longevity Month (October).
The declaration asserts that science is reaching a tipping point, wherein hundreds of potential interventional strategies in animals have been found to reverse aging and extend the healthspan, while new research targets in human aging are presenting themselves at a rapid pace. At the same time, new tools like artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation and cellular reprogramming are accelerating the pace of discovery. The declaration, endorsed by the HSAC, calls for a surge in allocation of resources to longevity science to bring much of this promise to fruition in the foreseeable future.
“We need a moonshot moment for longevity and healthspan,” said Siegel. “One of the many principles that the HSAC shares with the declaration and the LEVF is the recognition that aging and healthspan are multifaceted and encompass everything that impinges on the human organism, including social and economic forces. Large numbers of unhealthy people are not only a pressing humanitarian issue, but a terrible drain on worldwide economics. Economists such as Andrew J. Scott and Oxford’s Martin Ellison have calculated that even modest gains in the common healthspan would save nations trillions of dollars per year.”
Siegel also echoed the declaration’s assertion that extending the human healthspan well into later life would radically transform society for the better, as more people would be able to enjoy the wisdom of age along with the health and vitality of youth. “The 19th-century Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach said, ‘In youth we learn; in age we understand,’” said Siegel. “How many of us have lamented that if we had only had the maturity of our later years when we were young, our lives would have been so much more accomplished and interesting? Thanks to emerging science, such a possibility is now within striking distance.”
The HSAC encourages all interested parties to show their support by signing the declaration.
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About Healthspan Action Coalition: HSAC is a nonprofit organization working on multiple levels to extend the global human healthspan. It unites a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the search for, development of, and delivery of new medical treatments aimed at extending not just the lifespan, but the period of life spent in good health and free of disease or disability. While recognizing that virtually all human disorders entail an acceleration of the aging process, the organization seeks to harness the latest developments in longevity research as a new avenue of disease treatment and prevention. Its mission is to create a worldwide, cross-sector, societal movement aimed at bringing together the disparate forces that have the ability to ensure that every person on the planet has the resources to live not only longer, but to remain healthy, vital and independent until the very end of life. It is led by a team of seasoned, experienced individuals and scientific pioneers with proven track records of effecting major change in the aging, science and healthcare fields.
