When you see an article on HN about how someone took some code, profiled it, and increased its speed by 10 times, I think it's tempting to credit virtue to the person who sped the code up. But I think you also have to remember that the only reason you could speed up the code by 10 times in the first place is that the original code left that much on the table. It isn't just that there is a person who was skilled enough to speed the code up, it is that somebody else left the opportunity behind in the first place.

For similar reasons, I find it quite likely to be engineering-meaningless [1] when someone takes a life form that lives for a 2-3 weeks and extends that by a factor of 5. We humans have the "live for fifteen weeks" problem solved. Optimization being what it is, it is very likely that whatever that improvement is already effectively exists in us. (Possibly not directly, possibly through some other mechanism that doesn't completely match, but it's probably done.) It is, unfortunately, much less impressive to "optimize" an organism that has left that much on the table.

Improve an elephant's lifespan by 50% with an intervention when they're already fully-grown and I'll really take notice. Unfortunately, there's all kinds of reasons why that's hard....

[1]: Contrast with meaningful to science. There's nothing wrong with studying this sort of thing as steps to both eventually treating aging, and just plain scientific understanding of the world, in the mean time. But something can be scientifically useful, and even perhaps someday eventually be useful to engineering through its contribution to a dozen other discoveries, while being "engineering-useless" today. Remember the context we're speaking in is in being excited about all the longevity news in the media and to hope that maybe it'll be ready by the time we personally need it.