Join Our Fight

Doug Treadwell

If you could save the ones you love from an otherwise incurable disease, what lengths would you go to? How much would you give of yourself to give them one more year? What would you do to give them just one more month? What would it be worth to hold their hand for one more day? If you were the one suffering, how hard would you work to find a cure?

Aging is a disease that is slowly killing us all. It takes our grandparents, our parents, our brothers and sisters, and eventually it takes us and our children. Before it takes us, it makes us wrinkled and weak. We have learned to accept this unpleasant future as an unavoidable fact, but it is not unavoidable. With your help we can cure this disease like any other disease.

Because this disease afflicts everyone, we no longer see it for what it is. If aging was something you could catch or be infected with, we would treat it much differently. If someone could cough on you and make you wrinkled, weak, and feeble minded, we would be looking for a cure. Aging is a disease passed on from generation to generation, like a genetic heart defect or some kinds of diabetes. Like any other disease, it can be cured.

It may sound strange to say that aging can be cured, because we do not normally think of it that way. We tend to think of aging as a one way process that cannot be stopped, caused only by the passing of time. Years pass, so people get older. When they are very old, eventually they die. In fact, what we call aging is actually a gradual wearing down of the machines inside our cells. Like any other machines, these machines can be repaired with the right tools.

We do not have the tools we need to repair our cells, yet. Every day brings us closer to having them, but without your help they may come too late for your family, too late for you and me, and perhaps too late for your children. Technology has made many things possible that would have been impossible only a few decades ago. Within the next ten or twenty years we will have the technology to fight this disease, but we will need people who know how to fight it.

If you are hoping that some other person who is much smarter than you and who lives somewhere far away is going to defeat this disease for you, consider that they may be thinking the same thing. If you are reading this, you are probably far more capable than many people. There are no doubt millions of people who are counting on you to solve the problems they cannot. You don’t need to be a genius. You only need to challenge yourself to take on this important work. For your family, for yourself, for the millions of people who will benefit from your efforts; for love, for life, please join our fight.