Healthy Life Extension, Taken Seriously
Over at TCS Daily, Glenn Reynolds discusses recent attention given to biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) and Methuselah Foundation: "But what's news isn't so much that de Grey and what he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" are getting attention. It's that these sorts of ideas are getting serious attention, rather than being dismissed as absurd. The 60 Minutes story does feature scientists who point out that de Grey is invoking technology that hasn't been developed yet, but that's not much of a critique, since de Grey's chief point is that we can develop such technology if we work at it, not that such technologies already exist ... At any rate, the subject, which I've been flogging in these pages for a while, seems to be breaking out. Last year there was a sort of harmonic convergence of academic work on the subject, with three major books published almost simultaneously."