I couldn't help but chuckle at the description of session 13 of MIT's OpenCourseWare on System's Biology:

I guess one could argue that slowing, halting and reversing the aging process is sufficiently ambitious (ya think?!?).

The synthetic biologists seeks to add to the the litany of cell functionality by creating new DNA sequences and downstream proteins.

So whose challenge is the greater? The synthetic biologist has the advantage of using rapid evolution cycles to test their new creations which are essentially organically driven robots where failure simply means trash what you have and start over. Compare that to the biogerontologist who seeks to engineer therapeutics for functioning organisms that typically prefer that they are not relegated to the trash bin (go figure).

The latter is akin to tuning a race car engine while it's traversing the track. This might seem like a ridiculous challenge but what if the engine had the ability to self tune itself? This is the case with biological systems. They are self tuning but over time they age and wear out, as do the underlying functional components. Fixing the components in the non self regulating machinery means wholesale replacements (organ/tissue replacements) or via rejuvenation therapies that simply try to patch things up as best one can. Fixing the components that are already self-tuning means reverse engineering these processes like a software engineer studying another's source code and then figuring out how to affect the inputs and outputs.

If there's any hope of making nearterm radical changes to our longevity, it will likely because we find a way to reverse engineer these self tuning mechanisms that are already capable of initiating innate repair programs.