Given that many major scientific discoveries occurred with the prototypical mad scientist working alone, often apart from their main field, this description doesn't seem out of the norm for what I'd expect in somebody trying to urgently raise the signal of a very early and promising discovery.

Let's consider the universe where Katcher has discovered the secret to aging. At some point in that universe, Katcher's work is going to be relatively unknown and unsponsored, and at a later point there will be trillions poured into it. The above quote you posted aligns just fine with the earlier part of that timeline so now you're just left to decide, given your priors about major scientific discoveries, how likely it is that a major scientific discovery can come from a "dark horse".

That may have been true a century or two ago, but that seldom occurs anymore now that scientific discovery has matured into an industry.

The vast vast majority of research discoveries happen within the system as part of large collaborations.

It's always healthy to have people going against the grain, but even they can find funding if they have ideas they can express coherently and that stand up to scrutiny.

This is still true. Your second sentence is correct, but the rest is not. Most research does come from within the system. Unconventional research does not and cannot come from within the system.

Funding comes from calls from proposals which are within existing, established research fields. Funding outside of a current research field is nearly impossible to find. If your research isn't in an established field, there isn't an NSF/DARPA/etc. call to respond to, and there is no program officer who has any interest in your work.

Similar through the whole research pipeline. New areas of research don't have established venues where you can publish, people to cite your papers, or a community to write academic reference letters for you. People who work in new fields are usually doing so as nights and weekends projects, or are independently wealthy.

And although the vast majority of independent researchers are crackpots, a few are credible and do occasionally make major breakthroughs. Importantly, the majority of breakthroughs outside of established fields are made be people unsupported by NSF, and without good venues to publish (although quite often, those individuals are academics working in their spare time, so half within the system and half outside).

I'm not taking a stance on the topic, but I think that if you quote the part that you did, then you should also quote the part right before it, for full context:

> In the race to effect substantial, system-wide rejuvenation, Harold Katcher is a dark horse. He has the right academic credentials and a solid history of research. In fact, in earlier life he was part of a team that discovered the breast cancer gene, brca1. I asked Harold for a biographical sketch, and have printed it in a box at the end of this posting.

And here's the bio sketch itself:

> So, you might consider me a late bloomer. While I have thousands of citations in the literature, with publications ranging from the discovery of the human ‘breast cancer gene’, to protein structure, bacteriology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, and biochemistry, there was no center or direction to my work as I had given up my personal goal of solving/curing aging when I learned that ‘wear and tear’ was the cause of it. Yet something happened in year 1985 when I was in California working with Michael Waterman and Temple Smith (fathers of bioinformatics) that is inexplicable: I found myself in Intensive Care with a tube inserted into my trachea and the knowledge that I might not live. And then I had a dream: I dreamed that somehow in the far future (and on another world), I was being feted for ‘bringing immortality to mankind’. Clearly, I survived that incident (started with an infected tooth). I lived a wonderful life – becoming a computer programmer (which I loved), leaving that for the University of Maryland’s Asian division, becoming a full professor and then the Academic Director for the Sciences, in Tokyo, Japan. By the time I left Japan in 2004, (my daughter Sasha was a fourth-grader, (yonensei), in the Japanese school system), I was teaching for U of M online – somewhat retired, and looking forwards to writing computer programs for fun and profit. Yet I never ever forgot that dream. It was clearly impossible; I had no lab – and really, there was no way to repair all damaged cells – it’d be like sweeping back the ocean. And then, in 2009, I read an old paper from 2005, a paper written by the Conboys, (Michael and Irina), Tom Rando and others, coming from Irv Weisman’s lab, that completely changed my life; that showed me that everything I believed about aging was wrong – that aging occurred at the organismic level, not at the cellular level and could be reversed. Well, the rest of the story is about persistence and the blessed intervention of Akshay Sanghvi who too saw there was another way and provided the structural, monetary, and emotional support (and some good ideas) that had me start a new career at age 72 in Mumbai, India. I feel twenty years younger than I did three years ago, I guess that’s another hint about aging. Now the ‘mystical’ dream? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that that happened – take that as a datum.

Katcher is definitely a credible researcher, but that doesn't mean he's not also a crank. Consider Linus Pauling and his megadose vitamin C obsession.