The gatekeepers of medicine—the medical organizations of various countries, the heads of popular research clinics, the government institutes of health who dispensed large financial grants, the pharmaceutical companies—all operated out of an eighteenth-century paradigm which fought the symptoms of disease without much thought about prevention. Their targets were various microbes, faulty genes, and runaway tumor cells—and most thought such problems were the inevitable results of aging. Under this point of view, the huge majority of grant money was going to the large research facilities looking
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