LiveScience on the SENS Challenge
LiveScience has up an article on the results of the $20,000 SENS Challenge. It, like the results themselves, is illustrative of confusion as to the nature of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence (SENS), and what is meant by "science" - confusion that will have to be cleared up at some point in the near future. Given that the first SENS projects aimed at repairing one aspect of age-related cellular damage are presently underway at the hands of scientists - in laboratories, using the scientific method, aiming at publication and peer review, and so forth - I think it's rather hard to say it's not science. Science is a matter of plans, tasks and speculative research as well as what has come before and is, for the moment, proven. SENS is science in the sense of an ongoing - and only partly funded as yet - project plan based upon the best of present day knowledge, not science in the sense of what you find in a textbook. You can find more in this vein in my commentary on the results at Fight Aging!
Link: http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060711_sens_challenge.html