Inside Brown’s Center on the Biology of Aging, faculty are collaborating on groundbreaking research that challenges what we know about aging and explores how we might extend healthspan—the number of healthy years we can live free from disease.
For most of human history, average life expectancy hovered somewhere around 40 years. Otherwise healthy people died of infections and trauma, malnutrition and plagues. Modern medicine made most of these acute causes of death things of the past; humans now live into their 70s on average, and well into their 80s in many countries.
But this longevity has come at a cost. Diseases virtually unknown until the 1800s are now among humanity’s most common killers: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, dementia. For too many of us, our “golden years” are a long, painful, and expensive decline as we succumb to the diseases of aging.
Brown is at the forefront of a new era in aging research
But does growing old have to be this way? While aging might be unavoidable, scholars in the field question whether it’s inevitable that we fall apart.
Brown is leading the charge to find out. The Center on the Biology of Aging was created to unify existing knowledge and to accelerate new research. It’s part of the University’s broader integrated life sciences ecosystem, which is now poised for further expansion with the planned state-of-the-art Danoff Laboratories. The faculty, students, and postdocs involved are getting to the bottom of why our bodies age, why we age at different rates, and why our aging bodies are more susceptible to chronic disease.
“This is a field that is very young and has been evolving very, very quickly. And it’s a very different way to look at medicine,” says John M. Sedivy, Ph.D., the director of the center. “We look at a more fundamental level and try to do something about the underlying mechanisms that drive a lot of these diseases.”