Draft placeholder — final essay to be supplied by the author.
The framework that has organized aging research for over a decade proposed a set of interrelated cellular processes — genomic instability, telomere attrition, cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, and others — as the shared drivers of biological decline. It gave a fragmented field a common vocabulary.
Subsequent work has complicated that picture in productive ways. Several of the original hallmarks appear more interdependent than initially described. Others have proven harder to isolate as causes rather than consequences. The framework has been revised and extended more than once.
The framework gave a fragmented field a common vocabulary. Subsequent work has complicated it in productive ways.
What has not changed is the central premise: that aging is a process with identifiable mechanisms rather than an undifferentiated decline, and that mechanisms which can be identified may eventually be modified.
This piece reviews where the evidence now stands, which interventions have credible human data behind them, and how to read a field in which the gap between preliminary findings and popular claims remains unusually wide.
