I totally agree with you. What I mean is that most of the money currently being poured into, say, repairing heart disease damage could instead be poured into researching the nature of metabolism in general. Trying to manage the symptoms for heart disease, morbid obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, and all the other diseases associated with aging just doesn't seem nearly as efficient as fixing the common problem causing all of these. We would still want to explore the nature of biology once something like SENS succeeds, true, but we wouldn't need to do so by dumping tons of money into repairing people who are dying right now of those diseases. It becomes "How does this work?" research instead of "How do we keep these people from dying tomorrow?" research.