Fight Aging!

Frank from Anti-Aging Medicine & Science sat in on the Immortality Institute's latest online chat session, this time with S. Jay Olshansky as a guest. He comments:

I came away from the chat with the feeling that Professor Olshansky has been unfairly villanized by some in the anti-aging community. Folks, he's on our side. While he doesn't see radical life extension happening any time soon, he believes that anti-aging work should be done and he is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

I've probably done my share of unfair villanizing in the past, but in my defense I should note that Olshansky has changed his public position on healthy life extension over time. The positive spin to put to that is that Aubrey de Grey is succeeding in his fight to bring the scientific community around to his way of thinking about things. The sort of criticisms I have applied in the past to Olshansky are still true for many other prominent folks in the research community; people whose public and private stances on healthy life extension research are quite different, or who refuse to address the issue publicly in a substantiative way. Progress at this early stage is a matter of broading and expanding the discussion as much as anything else.

UPDATE: You can find the chat log in the discussion thread for the chat session. Go read it - interesting stuff.

[17:01] <BJKlein> Jay, so why are you picking on us?
[17:01] <JayO> because I want you to succeed.