Aging—not cancer, not heart disease—is the true underlying cause of most human death and suffering. We accept as inevitable that as we advance in years our bodies and minds begin to deteriorate and that we are ever more likely to be felled by dementia or disease. But we never really ask—is aging necessary?

In Ageless, Andrew Steele, a computational biologist and science writer, takes us on a journey through the laboratories where scientists are studying every bodily system that declines with age—DNA, mitochondria, stem cells, our immune systems—and developing therapies to reverse the trend. With bell-clear writing and intellectual passion, Steele shines a spotlight on a little-known revolution already underway.

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After obtaining a PhD in physics from the University of Oxford, Andrew Steele decided that ageing was the most important scientific challenge of our time, and switched fields to computational biology. He worked at the Francis Crick Institute, using machine learning to decode our DNA and predict heart attacks using patients’ medical records. He is now a full-time science writer and presenter based in London. He has appeared on Discovery and the BBC.

For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks