English to Russian Art/Literary General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

Интервью со специалистами по демографии, смысл слова понятен, вопрос - как лучше перевести, учитывая акцент на этом слове, но при этом без лишнего пафоса?

- You have ***spearheaded*** the application of reliability theory to the modeling of aging and mortality. Reliability theory is designed to describe the behavior of man-made machines, which differ from living organisms in that they do not incorporate significant in-built self-repair machinery. To what extent do you feel that this difference diminishes the applicability of reliability theory to living organisms?
- Thank you for your kind use of the term ***‘‘spearheading’’***. Yes, we first started to apply reliability theory to the problem of biological aging more than 30 years ago...