Right now, we’re stuck in a loop of "biomarker-chasing," prioritizing what’s easy to measure over what’s actually true. Walk into any top-tier longevity lab and you’ll see millions pouring into clock development—epigenetic, proteomic, transcriptomic. We’ve become world-class at telling people exactly how fast they’re dying, but we’re still embarrassingly illiterate about the mechanistic "why."

Funding bodies crave the certainty of a digital output. A clock looks great on a grant application, but investigating the Acetyl-Proteome as a Metabolic Buffer? That’s messy. It’s high-variance, technically demanding, and defies the neat "yes/no" validation that NIH-style review boards love. We’re busy mapping the surface of a sinking ship while the bilge pump—the delicate, compartmentalized regulation of mitochondrial versus nuclear acetylation—fails unnoticed.

I’m worried we’re building a multi-billion dollar house on a foundation of Compartmental Acetylation Desynchronization (CAD) that no one is paying to stabilize. If we keep subsidizing the symptoms of systemic entropy rather than the regulatory bottlenecks that allow NAD+ fluctuations to wreck protein stability, we aren't doing longevity science. We're just running a high-tech hospice.

We need a radical shift in how we allocate capital. We’ve got to stop rewarding incremental tweaks to aging signatures and start funding the "un-fundable"—the high-risk structural biology that explains why a cell loses its ability to buffer metabolic noise.

I’m looking for collaborators who are tired of the "clock" treadmill. If you have the data or the wet-lab capacity to map how Sirtuin desynchronization impacts specific protein folding stability in vivo, stop going for the low-hanging fruit. Let’s pool our resources and pivot toward the bottleneck.

Are we actually interested in solving the transition from healthspan to senescence, or are we just satisfied with being the most accurate funeral planners in history? The data is whispering the solution, but it doesn't fit on a slick investor deck. That’s exactly why we need to focus on it.