There's an interesting discussion over at Fighting Aging, on the efficacy of the current institutional and philosophical approaches to life extension:

I think I take the opposite side of the argument from Linksvayer above: in my opinion it matters greatly as to the banner you raise funding beneath. The problem we face today is not a lack of funding for medical research per se - rather, it is a culture disinterested in tackling aging head-on. It doesn't matter how much money is flowing into the study of aging or treating age-related disease if the defeat of aging is not a primary, agreed-upon, widely supported goal. There has never been any trouble in raising funding for new methods of tackling specific age-related disease, but look at the rate of progress today in extending healthy life span in the old; it's faster than zero, but if healthy life extension continues to be incidental and inefficient, we will all still age, suffer and die - and not significantly later than we would have done if medical science stood still. In this context here, I rate "not significantly" as a couple of decades - sounds good, but it is enormously worse than what is possible if we get our act together.

It doesn't have to be that way, however - we have a chance to change things quickly enough to matter. The change we need to enact is at the level of infrastructure, understanding and intent. When the expected cost of development and commercialization of new technology runs into the hundreds of billions, it doesn't happen by accident. At that scale, the only change and progress to come about is that enacted deliberately and with intent, in an atmosphere of sufficient support and understanding to make ongoing fundraising and collaboration possible.

In other words, if you're not working on A, don't expect to achieve A.

For someone my age, there could be a big (as in fatal) difference between ten years and twenty, though it's obviously much more critical for those more advanced in age than me. "Spin-off" is often used as a (flawed) argument in favor of NASA spending. It's not flawed just because many of the things claimed for it (teflon, Tang, microchips) are patently false, but because the argument can always be made that if one wants better microchips or breakfast beverages, efforts spent directly toward those ends will be more effective. I think that "Reason" is making the same argument here, and he's right.

I wasn't sure how to categorize this post. This kind of research, and breakthroughs, are going to require a combination of science (figuring out how stuff works) and technology (figuring out how to make it work better).

you're missing an '/a' tag in the body of this post.

On the other hand, it's not clear how well the focus on cancer has actually worked. One can make a case that we're not treating it any better, we're simply detecting it earlier and treating a lot of cases that wouldn't have been malignant, thereby boosting the percieved survival rates without making significant real progress.

It should also be considered that, beyond a certain point, the distinction between 'age-related diseases' and 'aging' will become very blurry...

A focused effort is surely preferable (certainly to me, I'll be 53 this friday), but understanding the various things that go into what we call 'aging' will also inevitably fall out of other basic biologial research, espically that directed at cancer and other diseases of growth and development.

If nothing else, it'll make it much harder for those bio-ethecists who oppose modifying the aging process, to draw their lines.

efforts spent directly toward those ends will be more effective

I agree with your points overall, but I'm not sure I agree with this one sentence. I often think that our achievements are more often than not linked to advances in something completely unrelated. Perhaps we just need lots of entropy input in order to come up with original ideas...