The hallmarks of aging

Aside from love, death is one thing for which the entirety of human history has produced no progress, a problem for which “no explanation, no solution, has yet been discovered; [and thus] it will always be impossible to locate a common rule, resting on consensus,” to quote Rilke. Whereas any study of death remains largely closed off to science and its methods, great bounds in progress have been made in the condition that inevitably leads to it (i.e., the study of aging). Of course, aging as a concept has long been recognized, producing as it does a ubiquitous and characteristic phenotype: gray hair, wrinkled skin, reduced mobility, loss of hearing, changes to the spinal structure, and an overall decrease in health, among others.