PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For most of human history, average life expectancy hovered somewhere around 40 years. People who were generally healthy died suddenly from infections, trauma, malnutrition and plagues. Modern medicine made most of these acute causes of death things of the past — humans now live into their 70s on average, and well into their 80s in many countries. At any given time, there are more than half a million centenarians around the world.

But this longevity has come at a cost. Diseases virtually unknown until the 1800s, which strike at a later, post-reproductive age, are now among humanity’s most common killers: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, dementia. For too many, the “golden years” can be a long, painful and expensive decline as people succumb to the diseases of aging.

Stopping chronic conditions before they start, with lifestyle interventions, regular screenings and thorough check-ups, has long been the province of clinicians who practice preventive medicine. But for basic scientists, it’s a relatively new area of research. Many who study aging and age-related disease now believe that if they can uncover the mechanisms of aging, they might be able to understand aging’s role as a risk factor for disease and discover new avenues for prevention.

The Center on the Biology of Aging, which dates back to the late 1990s but received official center designation in 2018, embraces the goal of studying human health span. That research focus, representing an emerging academic discipline, has the potential to transform human health and life.

Members of the center, who were previously scattered across the Brown campus, are now located on the same floor at 225 Dyer St., across from the Warren Alpert Medical School and near the under-construction Danoff Laboratories, in a neighborhood that is rapidly becoming a hub in Providence for the life sciences. The center, part of the Division of Biology and Medicine, brings together faculty with diverse research approaches in an organized effort to study the basic biological processes associated with aging, said John M. Sedivy, a professor of biology and the director of center.

“This is a field that is very young and has been evolving very, very quickly,” Sedivy said. “And it’s a very different way to look at medicine. We look at a more fundamental level and try to do something about the underlying mechanisms that drive a lot of these diseases.”

Sedivy and a growing number of colleagues across the University are homing in on various processes and biomarkers to get to the bottom of why bodies age, why they age at different rates and why aging bodies are more susceptible to chronic disease. Their ultimate goal is extending not the human lifespan, but human “health span”: the number of healthy years people live unencumbered by disease. 

“It’s not really how long you live,” Sedivy said. “It’s how well you live.”

Sedivy and his colleagues at the center believe that by identifying the drivers of aging, it will be possible to develop drugs that treat multiple conditions, so that a patient might take one pill, instead of four. And if the intervention happens sooner, maybe people will go to pieces later — or not at all.

This story was adapted from a Medicine@Brown feature written by Phoebe Hall. Read the full feature on the magazine’s website.