Aubrey de Grey on Rejuvenation Biotechnology
From Slate, an example of Aubrey de Grey expanding the definition of regenerative medicine to include SENS: "Aging is bad for you. Whether you call it a disease, not a disease, a set of disease precursors, or some other variation on the theme, it is a medical condition, and thus a legitimate target - in principle - for medical intervention. But is it a practical target? Medicine generally targets individual problems - a particular strain of virus, for example, or damage to a particular area of flesh. Aging seems like a huge number of progressive, chronic diseases all interacting with one another. Might such complexity be beyond the power of medicine - even medicine decades hence - to address? Once these progressive, chronic diseases have become debilitating, piecemeal targeting of them is far less effective than medicine generally is against other, aging-independent diseases. The complexity is bad enough, but what's worse is that the diseases are progressive - they get harder to treat as time goes on, because they are simply the later stages of intrinsic, lifelong processes of accumulation of molecular and cellular damage. Is there a way out? ... in the past decade a new approach to medical intervention in aging has been explored: regenerative medicine. The attraction of this approach is that it acknowledges the irreducible complexity of aging but attacks the problem more pre-emptively than contemporary geriatric medicine does. Regenerative medicine can be defined as the restoration of structure to any damaged tissue or organ. As such, it encompasses molecular, cellular, and organ-level repair. As applied to aging, it amounts to preventative maintenance: periodic partial elimination of the accumulating damage of aging before that damage reaches a pathogenic level, thus postponing, maybe indefinitely, the age at which the ill-health of old age emerges."