May 25th, 2026
One of the defining features of the field of aging research is the lack of consensus at the detail level regarding what exactly aging is, why it happens, how it happens, how best to measure it, and how best to treat aging as a medical condition. Thus a fair amount of the scientific debate in the field is either implicitly or explicitly arguing over the definition of the field in some way, not just reporting data or proposing programs. The past three decades have been characterized by the development of overarching taxonomies of the manifestations and mechanisms of aging that attempt to provide answers to pressing questions for scientists such as "what should we study in order to improve our understanding of aging" and "how should we proceed towards the development of therapies for aging".
Initially the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) emerged from scientific outsiders as both a proposed description of root causes of aging and a call to action to do something about these causes from a humanitarian perspective. Later, the Hallmarks of Aging and Pillars of Aging emerged from scientific insiders, descriptions of manifestations of aging with no attached ethical imperative, the Hallmarks in particular coming to dominate discussions of the taxonomy of mechanisms of aging. The Hallmarks, for better or worse, are now treated much like a checklist for planning out future research aimed at understanding or treating aging. How these shifts within a field occur, how a field of scientific endeavor describes itself, is of course a well studied topic in and of itself. Thus one can find commentary such as today's open access paper on the transformation of the aging research field in recent decades.
