12. Progress Requires Better Measurements, Larger Datasets, and More Ambitious Interventions

What is especially needed to accelerate progress in the aging field? First, a very large, fully open, longitudinal, interventional human atlas, including harmonized multiomics, multimodal imaging, physiology, EHR, foundational health models, and biobank spanning organs and systems, with frequent sampling, wearable data, and standardized perturbations (diets, drugs, lifestyles, known genotypes), all coupled to rigorous biomarker benchmarking. Such an atlas would shift the field from fragmented observations to a shared reference framework for tracking how interventions reshape human aging trajectories. Second, a major multidisciplinary initiative focusing on fundamental principles of aging, organized around shared infrastructure. Rather than concentrating on individual genes, pathways, or organs, it would prioritize system-level understanding of how structure, function, and repair interact over time. Some of the informative directions include studying embryonic rejuvenation to understand rejuvenation via structure and function formation and developing tools to assess biological age at cellular resolution in living organisms. Third, scalable human-relevant testbeds (organoids, assembloids, and in  vivo platforms) paired with manufacturing capabilities for regeneration and replacement, so that candidate strategies can be iterated rapidly and compared systematically rather than explored one at a time. Advances in AI will be central here: integrating large-scale biological data, learning causal structure across scales, and enabling new classes of predictive models grounded in real-world dynamics and physiology (world-model-based, physically grounded AI). Together, these resources would transform aging research from a collection of promising ideas into a cumulative, engineering approach capable of real progress.