The Divide-and-Conquer Approach to Delaying Age-Related Functional Decline: Where Are We Now?

Over 20 years ago, together with seven illustrious colleagues, the author proposed that efforts to postpone the decline and debilitation of aging might most promisingly be pursued by tackling the various lifelong processes of accumulation of damage through a panel of interventions, rather than seeking a magic bullet that would retard them all. A decade later, this approach was embraced in a paper that rapidly became, and is still, by far the most highly cited publication in the biology of aging this century. Here I survey the progress that the field has made in relation to this philosophy and the challenges that remain.