BSRA Chair David Weinkove on how a league table by British Society for Research on Aging membership reveals a wide spread of UK research.
As Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing I often get asked where is the best place in the UK for the biology of aging and it’s difficult to answer. Many institutions across the whole country carry out research in this area. That’s why our annual meetings are so fascinating – scientists studying the biology of aging interact with each other sharing a common interest but with very different approaches. Yet despite all this activity across the world, it has yet to produce a breakthrough that helps people slow aging. So, is this spread of research good for the field or should it be more focused on achieving that breakthrough?
To attempt to quantify and map research in the UK, we used data from the BSRA membership. 56 UK institutions have at least one BSRA member, showing an incredibly wide distribution. UCL and the University of Birmingham top the table with 11 members, and the University of Oxford and Aston University are close behind with 9 each. The rest in the top 10 are Imperial College, King’s College London, Universities of Liverpool, Westminster, Sheffield and Loughborough.
Colleagues at UCL and Birmingham were very pleased with the result. Both institutions have invested in the field; others though are keen to correctly point out that the League Table doesn’t reflect the whole of aging research in the UK, or the range or quality of the research – that would take much more analysis.
The table raises an important question of should aging research be so spread out? I think there are strong arguments for and against. The truth is we still understand very little about the biology of aging – and therefore we can’t bet on one approach or philosophy being the one that produces major breakthroughs and there is likely to be more than one successful strand of research. Secondly, aging itself happens on many levels of biology – molecular, cellular, tissue, organ, physiologically and so we need to have broad expertise to understand it. That can’t all be supported by one institution.
On the other hand, experiments in aging requires a lot of resource and better focussing of that resource would be fruitful. Experiments in aging take longer and require bigger cohort sizes than experiments in other fields of biomedical research. It takes several years for a human to show signs of aging, although the speed of aging increases with age. Look back at a photo of yourself 5 years ago and you’ll see a big difference, but you are unlikely to notice changes in a photo from last month. Another feature of aging is that it varies greatly from one individual to another, whether you are studying humans, or animals like tiny worms and flies. Therefore, you need large sample sizes, which is another reason that experiments are expensive and require a lot of work.
Altos Labs are spending $3 billion dollars working on one particular aspect of aging research – cellular epigenetic reprogramming. They have one institute in Cambridge in the UK and two in California. This budget dwarfs what is spent on academic aging research in the UK, and many world-leading researchers in the field have been recruited by Altos. I argue that the UK needs to be bold in its investment in research on aging. It needs to keep investing across various areas and a wide range of institutions but bring people together into teams around various aspects of biology. The MRC and BBSRC sponsored UK aging networks made a difference, and have brought scientists from different disciplines together but they are ending soon. The £2 million across 11 networks was a lot more money than the income of the BSRA but still insufficient to support much actual research. The commitment needs to be bigger and more effective. At the BSRA we are raising money for more research and continue to argue for more government and charitable support. Not just for the sake of doing research but because we want the research to be applied to humans, to keep people from getting chronic diseases as they get older and enjoy life!
League Table of Institutions by number of BSRA members (full data here).
Dr Jürg Bähler, Director of Institute of Healthy Ageing UCL: “We are proud to be top of this table. We continue to work on the biology of aging and diseases of aging using various models and have several active members of the BSRA.”
L–R: Professor Adam Croft, Head of Department of Inflammation and Ageing, University of Birmingham and Dr Jürg Bähler, Director of Institute of Healthy Ageing UCL. Birmingham and UCL top the table of BSRA members per UK institution.
Professor Adam Croft, Head of Department of Inflammation and Ageing, University of Birmingham: “We were proud to host the BSRA’s 73rd Annual Scientific Meeting in 2024 when we welcomed researchers from across the country.”
About David Weinkove
David Weinkove is a Professor in the Department of Biosciences at Durham University and, since 2022, Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing. His own research focuses on using the nematode C elegans to address biological problems in both academia and industry, and he has over 4000 citations of his work.
As a postdoc, David worked with David Gems, Nullin Divecha, Ronald Plasterk and Erik Jorgensen. He is passionate about applying the strength of C elegans research to industrial applications and he cofounded Magnitude Biosciences in 2018 to bring automated technology together with experienced C elegans scientists to increase productivity in the field.
Article photographs courtesy of David Weinkove, Jürg Bähler and Adam Croft. Graphic courtesy of BSRA.