I recently spent four days at the annual Progress Conference in Berkeley, California, organized by the Roots of Progress Institute — an organization whose mission is to create a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.
I usually find conferences pretty soul-sucking: hotel conference rooms, fluorescent lighting, bad food. Trying to snatch a few moments of conversation with friends or colleagues while organizers remind you to clear the hallway and join the official sessions. Sitting in the back of a large ballroom, laptop out, sneaking in a little work while people disguise their own mini-talks as questions for the speaker.
Apparently, I’ve been going to the wrong sort of conferences.
Progress Conference 2025 was held at Lighthaven, a quirky and very Berkeley space filled with overgrown gardens, conversation nooks, and oddly shaped rooms that felt more like part of an eccentric mansion than a traditional conference center.
But the biggest difference? The people.
The conference was packed with talks, possibly too much so — compelling sessions sometimes ran concurrently. But the organizers encouraged what they called “the garden track,” blocking out time in the day to mingle in the garden and talk.
It was hard to define the “type” of person who attended the conference. I connected with third-generation farmers trying to bring progress to agriculture, physicians rethinking health policy, old friends in the urbanism space, and more. There was even a professional conference organizer who wants to advance the way we convene.
The plenary sessions were as diverse as the attendees. The first main stage event was an interview with Michael Kratsios, Trump’s science advisor and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The choice was controversial and emphasized the diversity of the crowd.
I found myself in frequent discussions about the “big tent” feel of the conference and the progress movement in general. Was it too diverse? Too open? Not clear enough on its aims or purpose? It did include a mixed group — and a very mixed bag of topics and viewpoints — but there was a vibe at the conference, a sense of life, a connection that made disagreements feel like opportunities.
In a plenary session on the second day, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, began to imagine what a better, more comfortable, more convenient airport could look like. Why don’t our airports look like that already? “We live in a world,” he explained, “full of things that are radically improvable, and yet we’ve learned to live with most of the problems.” To this sentiment, the crowd seems uniformly aligned: the big tent, the differing opinions, the differing fields, coming together in the belief that life is radically improvable and that each of us can be a part of that improvement. That each of us can bring about progress.
It is an inspiring ethos to live in, even just for a long weekend.
The pursuit of longevity
In the sections of the conference dedicated to health and longevity, the speakers and perspectives were as diverse as the plenaries. Many of the speakers did ostensibly fall under the umbrella of longevity science, and I took the opportunity to explore the topic as an area I’m less familiar with.
Science fiction, of course, includes many examples of extended lifespans, from Heinlein’s Lazarus Long to the reincarnating Time Lords of Doctor Who. But novelists usually focus on the extremes: the eons-old travelers who are functionally immortal compared to our own mere span of decades. Longevity researchers, by and large, chase a more proximal goal. What would an extra year mean to you, if it were a functional and healthy year? What if you could have five more years, or 10? What would it mean for society if people worked an average of 1, 5, or 10 more productive years?
But that’s still an incredibly broad target. Eradicating a specific childhood disease might have the same, or greater, impact on overall lifespan curves as finding a miracle drug to grant an extra year or two at the end of life to everyone who doesn’t succumb in childhood. The longevity crowd at Progress Conference 2025 played in both arenas: exploring the impact of specific technologies or treatments on longevity, and focusing on aging qua aging as its own disease.
Aging as a disease
Almost every speaker in the longevity group began their talk by sharing how underrepresented aging is in the science funding landscape, with only a small fraction of all science dollars going toward research in the field.
One challenge with breaking off aging as its own area of inquiry, especially with longevity as an outcome, is that most people don’t die of old age. Most people die of diseases, and many diseases become increasingly common as we age. So the first hurdle for the longevity field is defining its terms. Some speakers imagined how better preventive measures against cardiovascular disease could lead to increased longevity. Is that disease-targeted research or aging-focused?
Although still muddled, the emergence of longevity science as a standalone discipline is an exciting moment in the history of medicine. Throughout most of human history, most people died from a specific injury or disease. Childhood mortality rates were 10% in Europe as recently as 1950. They’re now below 1%, and in the past 75 years, life expectancy has nearly doubled across the world.
But these trends were not caused by eradicating “aging” — they came from curing or preventing diseases that cut life unnaturally short. The longevity talks, even those beginning with a plea for more focus on the field, oscillated between the potential impact of curing a specific disease and the potential impact of addressing the biological hallmarks of aging itself. Genomic instability, telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence — the new frontier is a challenge to find targeted interventions that impact these biological hallmarks. Not a cure for an illness, not a repair for an injury. Not the eradication of disease, but the pursuit of life. As the poet Alfred Tennyson wrote so many years ago, it is “…life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that I want.”
Longevity economics
Interspersed with discussions of longevity science were talks on the economics of longevity. How would society change if people, on average, lived even one additional year? Of course, this depends on the quality of that year. Experts estimate that up to 25% of all Medicare spending goes toward treating and supporting beneficiaries during their final year of life. But if we could extend the average number of productive years, with each person working one additional year, the resulting benefit to the global economy would be in the trillions.
Discussing the economics of longevity is a challenge in part because the biggest thieves of productive years of life are specific diseases or injuries. An economic model of all-cause mortality does, by its nature, include all causes of mortality. John Burn-Murdoch, a data analyst and reporter for the Financial Times, hosted a Progress Conference 2025 session focused on the impact of suicide and drug use on longevity in the 20th century. He argued that the historical trend for longer lifespans is threatened today by social mechanisms that particularly impact young people.
If longevity science includes funding toward addressing all threats to lifespan in its calculations, it is the most funded field in the world today. If it considers only funding that goes toward addressing biological markers of aging, it is a much smaller tent. But overall, the economists at the conference promoted one conclusion: More life, and fuller, is better for the economy. While the utilitarian argument is not the one that wins me over, it’s good to know that all of our interests are aligned in pursuit of longer, healthier lives.
Putting death on ice
Alongside the more general discussion of longevity science were fascinating deep dives into specific research areas. One of my favorites came from Laura Deming. Unlike most of us, who are only bothered by the idea of growing older when we start to experience the impacts of aging for ourselves, Deming became interested in the problem of aging when she was eight years old. She then began studying biogerontology at 12. Although she has a wide range of longevity interests and research projects, the focus of her talk at the conference was cryonics.
My prior knowledge of the topic consisted of liking Futurama and holding a vague certainty that Walt Disney’s head is frozen in a vault somewhere. (Fun fact: This is apparently an urban legend. Walt Disney was cremated, and it’s an example of the Mandela effect that so many of us think otherwise.) The actual father of cryonics was Robert Ettinger, born in 1918 and himself cryopreserved in 2011. Similar to Deming, he was smitten with the idea of longevity while still quite young. In his case, he fell in love with the stories published in the classic science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.
Ettinger assumed that by the time he grew up, scientists would discover the secret of immortality. He was already frustrated by what he saw as a lack of progress when he stumbled on reports of a French research team exploring cryopreservation. He began to advocate for the idea that everyone should be cryopreserved for reanimation by a later generation with more advanced medical technology, writing long letters at random to individuals selected from Who’s Who in America. Eventually, he published a book (The Prospect of Immortality) that captured the attention of Isaac Asimov, among others, and rocketed him to media fame.
In her talk, Deming called Ettinger’s plan “an ambulance to the future.” Her case is a compelling one. “One year of medical progress,” she argued, “can increase patient survival from 6-9 months to 10+ years.” And in specific disease cases, like metastatic melanoma or cystic fibrosis, dramatic recent advances mean that people born a year or two apart have dramatically different life expectancies. An ambulance to the future could mean a cure. Her current work is focused on a more proximal goal: cryopreserving organs to extend their viability and enable more transplants. Researchers have already demonstrated that a rat kidney that had been frozen, thawed, and then transplanted into a rat can regain full function. Human trials seem likely.
What’s next?
Most of my writing focuses on the history of medicine and innovators who found cures and solutions to problems that we barely remember today. To sit for four days with people who are so focused on the future, so committed to the next frontier, was an exciting departure. To pursue longevity, not survival — to target aging itself, not a specific disease — is to shift the paradigm of medicine. A transition from less disease to more life. The science is still in its early days, and it’s happening largely along non-traditional paths and with non-traditional funding and support models. In that, it keeps company with many of the true medical breakthroughs in history.
Coming out of the conference, I look forward to seeing frozen organ banks that enable more transplants, gene therapies that target cellular senescence, and pharmacological interventions that we can take like vitamins to extend the lives of our cells (and ourselves). But my main takeaway from wandering through gardens with longevity researchers? A reminder that human life is an unqualified good. More life is better, and the frontier of medical science is premised on that understanding.
This article Aging as a disease: The rise of longevity science is featured on Big Think.
The post “Aging as a disease: The rise of longevity science” by Laura Mazer was published on 11/19/2025 by bigthink.com