Jay Fox comments on debates over SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) within the healthy life extension community.

The important thing to keep in mind is that, in debating how "good" an anti-aging treatment is, we only need to consider whether it will allow people to live long enough for something better to come along. In other words, the first effective anti-aging treatments don't need to completely cure aging, they just need to buy us time for something better.

In that light, Dr. de Grey has admitted that his 7-point strategy is likely not going to be a true cure for aging. It's not good enough to cure aging, but he believes it will be good enough to buy us time, so much time that future advances will continue to buy us more time, etc. In effect, once his 7-point plan is achieved, future biomedicine will always stay at least one step ahead of the aging process. This is what Dr. de Grey means when he says "escape velocity".

I do not doubt that Dr. de Grey's plan will work, and so it may be perceived as somewhat hypocritical that I am sometimes critical of Dr. de Grey's plan. What needs to be made clear is that I don't doubt that Dr. de Grey's plan will work; what I have reservations about is whether it will be available soon enough, and broadly enough, to save the most lives possible. That is, I believe that there are other strategies which will make escape velocity occur sooner, for more people, and in effect, save more lives.

My position on these sorts of discussions is that we are still in the stage of needing many more qualified and useful people (e.g. scientists, folks with money to spend on research, advocates with a large audience, etc) to take part. It's never too early to critique and improve ideas - especially when it comes to getting to the end goal more rapidly - but we still need to devote much more effort to raise awareness and bring new faces to the debating table.

Posted by Reason at February 10, 2005 2:53 PM | TrackBack (0)