A review of the Longevity Delusion: Money, Myths, and Bad Science

This review is published in the BMJ. https://www.bmj.com/content/395/bmj-2026-101072 If you want to get rich quick, then you should consider joining the longevity goldrush. But, as Seamus O’Mahony describes in his brilliant and sobering book The Longevity Delusion: Money, Myths, and Bad Science, you’ll have to compete in a crowded world of “biogerontologists and other academics, pharma and biotech firms, venture capitalists, private longevity clinics, ‘wellness’ resorts, manufacturers of nutritional supplements, anything with the label ‘blue zone’, and a parasitic economy of influencers and lobbyists.” There’s serious money to be made because baby boomers, many of them wealthy and politically powerful, are terrified of death, decrepitude, and dementia and will pay generously for a longer life—or at least a longer time in good health. Unfortunately, as O’Mahony explains, science hasn’t been able to deliver, although, ironically, politics could. The snag is that political action would…