It seems I somehow missed a rather good interview with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey that was published at Betterhumans earlier this month. There are some good questions in there, touching on areas the average interviewer skips over. For example:

BH: [The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, or SENS] describes a whole battery of medical treatments that could theoretically defeat the aging process. These treatments range from relatively simple ones like injecting people with enzymes that can break down tough wastes inside of cells, to highly advanced ones like genetically altering trillions of somatic cells in full grown adults. Considering the differential technical challenges, what SENS therapies will most likely become available first, and which will be developed last?

AdG: Some of them are already pretty close: probably the closest is in fact not the enzyme therapy you mention, but the use of vaccines to eliminate extracellular aggregates (especially amyloid). But when we consider the others, actually I wouldn't like to make the call, because the hardest ones are the ones that the Methuselah Foundation and I are prioritising in terms of the early research. In other words, we're hoping that they will start to catch up with the easier ones. I suspect that the challenge of genetically modifying a high proportion of cells by somatic gene therapy will have been largely solved before we complete the development of all the genes that we want to introduce.

...

BH: At one point in your book, you criticize the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drawn-out medical approval process and suggest that drugs should instead be approved after completion of Phase 2 trials. Why do you want such a change, and won’t it lead to more deaths thanks to unsafe drugs and medical procedures becoming available?

AdG: I want this change because it will save more lives than it costs. This question has been carefully analysed by experts and it’s clear that we are vastly over-cautious now in approving drugs. That over-caution is not the fault of the FDA or the government, because it reflects public attitudes: every death from an unsafe medical treatment causes an outcry and a lot of legal action, whereas we turn a blind eye to death from the unavailability of good drugs. But when aging is recognised as defeatable, public opinion will become more rational in this regard, and so will public policy.

It's a long piece - there's much more to read though, so head on over and do just that.

Posted by Reason at August 19, 2008 7:31 PM | TrackBack (0)