Fight Aging!

Robert Bradbury posts a great deal of very interesting material to the Gerontology Research Group list. Like Aubrey de Grey, he has a "get it done" mindset that focuses on the end goal of healthy life extension, and raised money to make an effort back in the 90s - all of which is somewhat rare in aging research, sad to say. Not enough decisive action, not enough attention to raising funds and changing minds, and far too little straight talk.

It's always worthwhile to note that present best efforts are the next step on a long stairway; looking back, one can always find analagous previous best efforts. Progress is a matter of each round of initiative and fundraising producing greater impact and results than past efforts.

Just recently, Bradbury responded to a fellow looking for advice on fundraising for longevity research in the face of an adverse reactions from potential funding sources ("longevity research is bullshit", "no-one knows why we age," and so forth), from which these thoughts are excerpted:

For example there are books like Caleb Finch's "Longevity, Senescence and the Genome" (922 pages, 160 of which are the bibliography) which clearly documents variances in longevity of many species and goes into some of the causes of aging and why some species may live longer than others. There is Steven Austad's "Why We Age" (244 pages) which explains the evolutionary biology of aging.

Aging and longevity research is not "bullshit", but it should be realized that for a number of reasons one can view "aging research" as a situation similar to that of the 1986 movie with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long, "The Money Pit".

One thing that Aubrey has done a good job of pointing out in various ways is that indefinite longevity does *not* violate any physical laws. And as Steve Austad is good at pointing out (based on Medawar & Williams) there are reasons that "nature" has not handed us a genome which allows us to live indefinitely. And as I like to point out achieving the "impossible" tends to be a matter of timing. No amount of money in the world could buy you your personal genome sequence in 1990, yet today the $1000 personal genome sequence is on the "to be developed" list of the NHGRI (at NIH) (as well as a number of companies who see it as a $$$ milk machine).

I will be more than happy to stand in front of anyone claiming that pursuing "indefinite longevity" is "bullshit" and rip them to shreds (there are some images that were probably cut from Sopranos episodes that come to mind here...).

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It is useful to keep in mind that Larry Ellison, through the Ellison Medical Foundation, has probably personally dumped between $100 and $200 million into aging research and it could easily be argued that there is little to show for it. One of the key reasons for that, IMO, is that the money was spent within a "research" framework rather than a business (solution) framework. If we had days for discussion we could examine how much of the money ($500-800 M/year???) being spent by the NIA is being spent "effectively".

One way to prevent money from being spent wastefully is to have a clear goal up front to *produce* a deliverable -- where the deliverable is *not* a set of words on a piece of paper (the byproduct of most "research"). There should be a well defined set of steps to get from the current science to that deliverable. It could be argued that a lot of the "sunk" funding into aging and longevity research was spent before the science was as robust as it currently is so claims regarding "longevity bullshit" (which even I may have made a decade ago) are no longer valid.

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I strongly urge you to *not* specify "research of (or on) longevity". The science and theoretical basis of "longevity" is well understood. The mechanics of how it is accomplished in specific species (tortoises vs. sequoia trees) is less well understood. And you could easily dump tens to hundreds of millions of $ into researching how each long lived species achieves longevity (bats, elephants, whales, tortoises, lobsters, geoducks, etc.) and have very little to show with respect to extending human longevity.

Technorati tags: aging, gerontology, medical research