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Comment by forloop | Hacker News Reader

> Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

David Sinclair[0] is wealthy and well known for his work in longevity. He Sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.

D Sinclair's earlier work was on resveratrol, and there's some more products coming. Well, actually one has arrived—in the US at least: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sinclair_%28biologist%29

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Citing a single outlier does not change the prospects of an academic researcher going into longevity work.

Elysium has 5 Nobel Laureates on their board[0]! Their Chief Scientist is Leonard Guarente of MIT.

Novartis[1], the pharmaceutical company, who ranked number one in world-wide sales in 2013 is working on a longevity drug based on rapamycin.

Elizabeth Blackburn got a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 2009, for her work on telomeres!

Quite frankly: lulz!

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis

nothing you said changes the incentives in front of researchers. Grant money is there in the billions for cancer research, obesity research etc. There is essentially no grant money there for basic longevity research. I say this having spoken with people trying to get funding for basic longevity research.

Maybe there's just less longevity researchers. The absolute funding makes little difference from an individual career perspective–even if it does have a large effect on the field as a whole.

I've linked to a page of academics from top institutions[0]. If you're at Harvard researching longevity, then you're doing OK career-wise, imho.

If you sell your company for $720 million, you're doing OK career-wise, imo.

Demonstrably, you're incorrect.

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team

Cancer cells are by definition immortal.

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