Fight Aging!

I thought I would draw your attention to a pair of long, excellent posts from two other healthy life extension blogs. Firstly, Jay Fox writes on accelerating change and the implications for longevity science:

"The intuitive view is that the pace [of technology] will continue at the current rate," despite the fact that "a serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential."

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The take-home message here is not that technology is incapable of increasing lifespan beyond the treatment of a few diseases, but that there is a whole frontier of biomedical research which has the capacity to greatly extend lifespan.

Meanwhile, Kevin Perrott points out the "a peculiar new-found reluctance on the part of a few of Aubrey de Grey's colleagues to provide opinion on his theories" over at Health Extension:

There was a time not too long ago when much more vociferous denounciation was available.

Declining to comment because they don't want to endorse his work however is a bit thin I think. Perhaps they just might as well say that they have not read his work enough to formulate an opinion for if they had, surely these highly trained individuals would be able to logically refute his theories based on their vast knowledge?

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Well, I for one would like to hear a little more commenting and some proper debate. I have been following reasonably closely how the biogerontology community responds to de Grey's theories and have yet to encounter any well thought out and researched position which can justify saying that what he proposes is not possible. Quite the reverse, we are faced everyday with much that indicates that his proposals are likely.

I think that "no comment" is a promising sign - it shows that those scientists most closely connected to aging research are starting to take Aubrey de Grey's work more seriously. In other words, realizing that they cannot just dismiss it out of hand when they cannot muster a proper debate or appropriate level of familiarity with the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) proposals. The next step, as SENS gains more support and influence, is for these scientists to become familiar with this work, participate in scientific debate on the details and merits, conduct research, and thereby make progress in the fight to cure aging.