Why do we age?

Determine the fundamental biological, molecular, and evolutionary causes of ageing in humans and other mammals, clarifying the mechanisms that initiate and drive organismal ageing.

Background

This is a broad, foundational question in biogerontology that the authors list among examples of open problems with significant representation in the ageing literature. It reflects longstanding uncertainty around the primary causal factors of ageing.

The paper used NLP-driven analyses to quantify literature representation and highlighted that this question remains central to the field, motivating both mechanistic studies and translational research.