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Realizing SENS as Soon as Possible By Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah Foundation Chairman and Chief Science OfficerThis is one of my five FAQ ("Frequently-Asked Questions") pages: it covers criticisms of how I'm going about making SENS a reality. The other FAQ pages respond to: - Antioxidants/meditation/hormones will do it won't they? Why all this complicated stuff?
No, antioxidants/meditation/hormones won't do it. Since such approaches are already available and money can be made from selling them, there is of course a fair degree of downplaying of the limitations of existing products in the available literature on them, most of which literature is generated by those who are selling the products. Modest health benefits may indeed result from some of these products, and that's fine -- but neither they nor any foreseeable improved versions of them have any chance, on current evidence, of giving us more than a few years extra healthy or total lifespan over what we will get just by living and eating sensibly. Looking at this question from the opposite angle, however, we can see that the pharmaceutical industry has succeeded in educating the public about the mechanisms of aging that are alleged to be slowed down by antioxidants and such like, and it's a fair bet that many people are inclined to buy these products because they understand a bit about how they're supposed to work, whereas if it were entirely a matter of faith they might not buy them. This makes it all the more important to spread the word about how aging can genuinely be postponed and treated by foreseeable therapies. - Why do you engender possibly unwarranted optimism about timescales?
All biogerontologists are asked one question more than any other by non-biologists: How soon do you think we'll start to see real life extension treatments?
Most of my colleagues absolutely refuse to answer this question, because they feel that no answer can be scientifically defended and hence that to provide an answer is to misuse their exalted status as scientists. I agree with that stance in areas of science that are not medically relevant, but not in medical areas: I feel that those with the best information have a duty to state their best-guess timeframe, because that information determines people's life choices, whether or not the public's assessment of the reliability of what experts tell them is accurate. Thus, though I know that my best guess is highly tentative, I don't regard that as justifying silence. There's also the fact that providing concrete timeframe estimates (even while always emphasising how tentative those estimates are) may help to undermine people's apathy. Most people seem to feel that, well, we all die some time, so is there all that much point in putting all that effort into buying ourselves another few years, or even another few decades? This is, I'm sure, the main reason why most people in the developed world are so inattentive to their health, spending no time or money on exercise, fruit and vegetables, etc. -- it just doesn't seem like fun, and if one's life is a bit shorter as a result, well, that's a price worth paying. That's a big reason why I tend to be quite outspoken about what I consider the likely rate of progress in combating aging in the coming decades and the consequent impact of how long people will live -- and live healthily, let's not forget that. Once people realise the sheer scale of what they could gain if they just hang in there until these therapies arrive, I reason, maybe they'll start to see that a bit of sacrifice now is worth it after all. - Why are you so fixated on mice?
Simple -- they have four characteristics that, jointly, make them the species in which life-extension successes dramatic enough to convince the public that aging is postponeable in humans will be achievable soonest. These characteristics are: (a) they're cheap and long have been, so biologists have developed loads of cool tricks for altering their genes and so on which don't exist in most other animals; (b) they're furry, so people identify with them more than with fruit flies and such like, (c) they're big enough to do surgery, bone marrow transplants and such like on, which fruit flies and nematodes aren't, and (d) they're not all that long-lived, so the effectiveness of candidate anti-aging interventions can be determined fairly quickly. One class of animals that also seems an attractive proposition is cats and dogs. These are even better than mice in terms of (b) and (c) above, they're not all that much worse in terms of (d), and there is a fifth advantage, namely people's emotional attachment to them. This has paid off somewhat in one important area, somatic cell nuclear transfer or cloning: John Sperling, the billionaire who founded the University of Phoenix, started and funded a company, Genetic Savings and Clone to clone dogs and cats, and he did this largely to clone his own dog, Missy. Missy died a few years ago now but they have plenty of her cells and dog cloning may be only a year or so away. (Cats turned out to be easier, and GSC are now cloning them for profit at an increasing rate.) GSC are not just riding on the coattails of science -- they were the first to clone cats and they seem set to be first with dogs too. But the current problem for leveraging this motivation in terms of the SENS therapies is that those therapies are a decade away even in mice, and not many pet owners think about their pets' aging until a lot closer to the pet's death than that. This may not be a showstopper, though, and I remain open to suggestions in this area. - Why do you promote both the Methuselah Mouse Prize and targeted research (the IBG)?
The prize strategy and the "Apollo Project" strategy are starkly divergent, so it does seem odd to some people that I should support both. But it's easy really. The real reason the Manhattan Project was successful was nothing to do with the urgency of the job: it was because no fundamental conceptual or technical breakthrough was needed. US physicists in 1940 were every bit as confident that an atomic bomb could be built, and of the general principles of how to do it, as they are now concerning nuclear fusion. All that was missing was the will. Conversely, the War On Cancer was a blatant case of a few influential scientists talking up their work and ideas and bending the ear of the top politicians of the day with no scientific basis worthy of the name. Prizes are the best way to bring money and effort to bear on a problem, IF it's very unclear how to solve it and therefore fundamental conceptual advances are needed. The only other time they make a big difference, I think, is when there is a lot of glamour involved -- that brings philanthropic money in. In this sense the X Prize is the exception, a case of the latter category. Really the X Prize effort was run more as a couple of Apollo Projects than as a Longitude/Orteig/etc prize -- the experts had the knowledge, they just had insufficient funds until Paul Allen and other billionaires were attracted in. The above sums up why I favour the two-pronged approach of getting as much money into the MMP as possible ASAP but also getting an institute going ASAP. Put simply: I don't know whether the development of rejuvenation therapies good enough to get us to escape velocity is a project like the atomic bomb and space tourism or whether it's more like the chronometer. The degree of detail in the SENS strands as they stand today makes me feel that it's probably more like the atomic bomb, but I could be wrong. I'm FAIRLY sure that if it's like the chronometer then the quickest way to find that out is to treat it like the atomic bomb and fail, because the ways in which such mice die will unmask the things I haven't thought of. But that takes time, and it's POSSIBLE that by then people striking out on their own in an attempt to win the prize will cure those aspects of aging without even having necessarily unmasked/characterised them. - You'd get further with those in power by being less confrontational
My main problem with this sort of advice is just that the softly-softly approach has been a catastrophic failure for gerontology for 50 years. How long does a failed strategy have to fail before we should abandon it? I just don't foresee policy-makers channelling funds into life extension behind the public's back -- the public must lead them. (How to convince the public is another matter, addressed below). An additional problem with trying to say things about life extension that one thinks people want to hear, rather than telling it like it is, is that in large part it comes down to advocating modest life extension (in terms of both feasibility and desirability) but playing down the feasibility of extreme life extension so that the more controversial desirability of extreme life extension is sidestepped. This fails because it falls foul of the inequality concern. If the choice on offer is between leaving aging as it is and adding a couple of decades to life, it's very hard to claim that the money spent on achieving those few decades would not be better spent on increasing the life expectancy of those sectors of global society whose present life expectancy is much lower than it would be if aging were their only problem. Only if one considers the prospect of indefinitely (or at least very greatly) increased lifespans does that argument against life extension research lose its force. - Vested interests (government/pharma/fundamentalists/...) will stop you
Government ultimately has one goal above all others: to get re-elected. This means they can only manipulate the public in two ways: by keeping information from them or by making something else even more important to the public than the thing they disagree with the public about. Neither option will be available in this case. Besides, remember we're talking about delaying a cure for something that everyone in government suffers from..... so whatever the political risks and uncertainties, the usual rules may not entirely apply. Big pharma has often been cited to me as an enemy of SENS because it makes its money from keeping people alive but frail, so that they have to carry on buying the products. But that's not a problem for SENS, because even though people will be restored to youthful health, they will still have to obtain the very intricate and laborious procedures discussed on my science pages -- and they'll have to do quite a few of these things, maybe all of them, periodically forever, probably at least every decade. So big pharma will want to be involved, because effective life extension medicine satisfies all their requirements for a very attractive product. Religious people aren't against curing aging because of their religion -- remember that all faiths teach that life is sacred and death should not be hastened, however much better the afterlife may be than this one. But the devout do have the same mental block about curing aging as everyone else: they have brainwashed themselves into believing that aging is really a good thing, because that's the easiest way to put something so ghastly but yet inevitable (which most people still think it is, of course) out of one's mind. But non-religious people, when confronted with the utter lack of defensibility of all the arguments against curing aging, will often retreat to the position that, OK, they should help the effort to cure aging as soon as possible, but they don't feel like it, sorry. Religious people don't do that: when they become convinced that it is their duty as good Christians or Muslims or whatever to help a given cause, they'll actually do it. Some of the most energetic people in the life-extension movement are intensely religious. - No amount of lab progress will help: people don't really care about aging
This is basically a challenge to me to provide evidence that people do actually want to live longer (so long as the extra life is healthy). There's abundant such evidence -- it's called the anti-aging industry. If you ask people the question whether they would like to live a lot longer in good health, they get all solemn and ambivalent about it and start going on about the social and economic consequences -- but actions speak louder than words. Also, it's important to remember that the correct question in deciding whether this research should be expedited is not whether most people want to live longer but whether most people feel that people should have the choice to live longer if they want to. - Even when biogerontologists are convinced it's possible, people won't be
It's true that my strategy relies on the belief that where scientific consensus leads (in terms of what's possible and what isn't), society reliably follows. There are some cases which might be regarded as counterexamples: genetically modified crops in the UK and stem cell research in the USA are two that spring to mind. But wait! -- look more closely at those two examples. Genetically modified crops are thought by most scientists to be unlikely to be dangerous to the ecology, but most scientists certainly do not think that they have a zero chance of being dangerous, so the question for the public is not whether to believe scientific consensus but how to weigh the risk against the benefit -- and of course the magnitude of that benefit is a matter of legitimate debate. As for stem cell research, the problem is again not one of whether these therapies are possible or whether they would be therapeutic, but of whether they are ethical. I'm not saying that won't also happen with aging -- but look what's happening with stem cell research: it's not proceeding as fast as it might in the US, but it's still proceeding pretty fast, and faster elsewhere, and that's mainly due to the support of large swathes of society, enabled and encouraged by scientific consensus in this field.
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