Hi,
I’ve had a look around here but couldn’t find anything on Aubrey de Grey or his rejuvenation work. I’m sure some of you will be familiar with him but for those that aren’t:
TED Conference 2005
Wikipedia entry.Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey (born 20 April 1963 in London, England) is a British biomedical gerontologist educated at Cambridge University in the UK.
He is the author of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging. He is now working to develop a tissue-repair strategy that would rejuvenate the human body and thereby allow an indefinite lifespan -- a medical goal he calls engineered negligible senescence. To this end, he has identified seven tissue-damages caused by aging that need to be repaired medically before this can be done.
He has been interviewed in recent years in many news sources, including CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, the New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Free Talk Live, Popular Science, and The Colbert Report. His main activities at present are as chairman and chief science officer of The Methuselah Foundation and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research.
Now this is well out of my subject area so I can’t really evaluate his claims all that well. I also desperately want to believe that he’s on to something.
The gist of what he’s saying (from what I’ve understood) is that the underlying causes of aging all boil down to 7 basic problems. Figure out how to repair these problems, or even a 50% repair of the damage (still a big ask), and in theory there’s no reason why we couldn’t live indefinitely.
I would have thought that the claims he makes would have been long since shot-down but everything I’ve read tends to agree with him at least partly. I also remember a Skeptics Guide to the Universe show from last summer where they spoke about these principles (but not Aubrey explicitly) and were 90% positive.
Is there anyone with more knowledge on the subject who could point me in the right direction on this? Is this something to genuinely be excited about or is it so far off and far fetched that we’ll never see this theory proven one way or the other?
Thanks in advance,
Alt.
I think this is perfectly legitimate. The problem isn't identifying the problems associated with aging, it's actually doing anything about them. As far as I know there's been very little progress on the latter. The other big problem is one of cause and effect. Are these things actually aging itself, or are they just the result of some underlying mechanism? If the former, repairing them genuinely could lead to much longer life. If the latter, they could be no more effective than a face lift - they could cover the symptoms but not actually make you live any longer.
It's certainly a legitimate area of research, you just have to be a bit careful who you believe, since there's an awful lot of nonsense out there as well.
I wouldn't say that doing something about these 7 causes of aging is impossible. And as they all cause diseases (as well as kill us) and I would rather we lived a healthy old age than one where we are crippled by arthritis or alzheimer's I can't say it's bad to try.
However we do need to think whether it really is a good idea for us to be able to live for hundreds of years.
Some drawbacks of a much extended life expectancy I can think of
1. We'd have to abandon the idea of retirement. You would have to work
until you dropped as however much you saved as a retirement fund you would know it would have to last you for centuries.
Possibly not a real drawback? We may look forward to a well-earned happy retirement but would we really prefer to work on, given we remain strong, fit, healthy and mentally active? Take our retirement in the form of longer holidays and shorter hours?
2. Population. With death rates virtually zero, even with a low birth rate population would rise inexorably. If we wanted to avoid this we would have to, in effect, end the right to bear children.
(I assume here that extending lifespans would also extend the period at which females are fertile - but I think that's coming anyway)
The result would be a population most of whom would be hundreds of years old, with a tiny number of children, just sufficient to replace people who die by accident. Not a prospect which entices me.
3. Life, now measured in centuries, would become infinitely valuable in one sense - so we would become very risk-averse.
In another sense, time would become a lot less valuable. It would become something that we would be desperate to find ways to fill. Already we spend a lot of resources finding ingenious ways to waste time. How would we face up to 1,000 years of wet Sunday afternoons with nothing on the telly? Not Citizen Kane again, I've seen it 500 times?
4. Castro has been in power for 50 years - and old age is forcing him to retire - and death would force it eventually. Now any dictator or business tycoon could extend their reign for hundreds of years. It is rich and powerful people that are particularly interested in the idea of an infinite life span.
All valid points.Originally Posted by exile
1) Retirement - I can't really add anything to what you said. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is open to debate. I do hope to one day live in a world where people are actually good at their jobs. With some people that may take a good couple of hundred years of training.
2) Population - a world where every couple just pop out a few kids at will is one I'd like to see the end of. The idea that it wouldn't just be a natural right of everyone to have kids when they pleased might make the whole process a bit more important. Kids would be more special, legitmately so, and would hopefully be raised right. People would be forced to consider resources etc before going ahead with it.
What we lose in the "safety in numbers" department, we gain in quality of life.
3) We'd be too scared to do anything and we'd get bored - Life is just as fragile now. We would get bored easily, that's true. I'm sure it would do other strange things to our minds, too. We're not set up to think on those timescales naturally but we'd evolved the mindset and some habits to deal with it.
On the plus side of the same argument... if we're going to be around for a few hundred years we'd take better care of the environment etc. It wouldn't just be someone else's problem.
4) Rich and powerful would have priority (not necessarily desirable) - That is one issue. One I have no good answer for.
I still think the pros outweigh the cons. I desperately want to see some break through in this field. I really don't want to die so young. 80 years is barely time to do anything. If we can live a few hundred years I might get to see Newcastle win the Premiership.
I hadn't really thought about that side of things. The way I've seen it explained is quite definitive ("this is a problem, it builds up gradually then eventually kills you"). Are things really not quite that matter of fact?
It always amuses me when, in the context of news items like this, there is talk of what benefits "we" will get, and what "we" will do with them.
Who, may I cynically ask, is "we"?
Does anyone seriously think life extension (or brain improvement - also recently in the news) will be made available to the population in general. Like hell it will! It will be the preserve (no pun intended) of those in power and/or those who can pay for it.
That was partly what was behind my post - that the rich and powerful will have the most opportunity - as well as the most motivation - to seek a very long life.
However as with other technologies it would eventually filter down to the rest of us. In the West at any rate - and frankly virtually all of us registered here count as "rich and powerful" in global terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Grey...ew_controversyIn July of 2005, Pontin announced a $20,000 prize open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." (See Pontin's TR Blog "The SENS Challenge" [5]). Technology Review pledged $10,000 towards the prize, and The Methuselah Foundation, an organization co-founded by de Grey, pledged the other $10,000.
In March, of 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, PhD, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Anita Goel, MD and PhD, founder and chief executive of Nanobiosym; Vikram Kumar, MD, cofounder and chief executive of Dimagi, and a pathologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; Nathan Myhrvold, PhD, cofounder and chief executive of Intellectual Ventures, and former chief technologist at Microsoft; and J. Craig Venter, PhD, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute and developer of whole-genome shotgun sequencing, which sped up the human genome project.[6]
Technology Review received five submissions to its Challenge. Three met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. Accompanying the three submissions were rebuttals by de Grey, and counter-responses to de Grey's rebuttals.
On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge. In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and disproved SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: "Estep et al. ... have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it."
Summarizing the judges' deliberations, Pontin wrote, "SENS is highly speculative. Many of its proposals have not been reproduced, nor could they be reproduced with today's scientific knowledge and technology. Echoing Myhrvold, we might charitably say that de Grey's proposals exist in a kind of antechamber of science, where they wait (possibly in vain) for independent verification. SENS does not compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists; but neither is it demonstrably wrong."[7]
In publishing the results, Technology Review also announced that it would make a $10,000 payment to Estep et al. in recognition of what the publication called their "careful scholarship." David Gobel, Co-Founder of the Methuselah Foundation, commented: "While of course Technology Review is at liberty to make whatever ex-gratia payments it likes from its own funds, it is important to make it clear that this consolation prize was awarded outside the framework of the SENS Challenge, and without consulting or notifying the Methuselah Foundation, which contributed half the as yet unclaimed $20,000 SENS Challenge fund.'"[8]
In a letter of dissent dated 11 July 2006 in Technology Review, Estep et al. criticized the ruling of the judges, said the judges had little expertise in the field, said the judges apparently did not appreciate the issues involved nor did they understand the details of the Estep et al. refutation of De Grey's propositions. The letter concludes: "SENS is agenda-driven pseudoscience and unworthy of learned debate."
Quoted below I've got the Abstracts from both the "most eloquent" critique by Preston Estep and Aubrey de Grey's rebuttal. Links to the full documents are posted under each quote.
http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdfLife Extension Pseudoscience and the SENS Plan
Preston W. Estep III, Ph.D.
President and CEO, Longenity Inc.
Matt Kaeberlein, Ph.D.
Department of Pathology
University of Washington
Pankaj Kapahi, Ph.D.
Buck Institute for Age Research
Brian K. Kennedy, Ph.D.
Department of Biochemistry
University of Washington
Gordon J. Lithgow Ph.D.
Buck Institute for Age Research
George M. Martin, M.D.
Department of Pathology
University of Washington
Simon Melov, Ph.D.
Buck Institute for Age Research
R. Wilson Powers III
Department of Genome Sciences
University of Washington
Heidi A. Tissenbaum, Ph.D.
Program in Gene Function and Expression
Program in Molecular Medicine
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Abstract
Recent scientific advances have taken gerontological research to challenging and exciting new frontiers, and have given many scientists increased confidence that human aging is to some degree controllable. We have been on the front lines of some of these developments and the speculative discussions they have engendered, and we are proud to be part of the increasingly productive biomedical effort to reduce the pathologies of aging, and age-associated diseases, to the greatest degree possible—and to extend healthy human life span to the greatest degree possible.
In contrast to clearly justifiable speculations regarding future advances in human longevity a few have made claims that biological immortality is within reach. One, Aubrey de Grey, claims to have developed a “detailed plan to cure human aging” called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) [1, 2]. This is an extraordinary claim, and we believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidentiary support.
In supplementary material posted on the Technology Review web site we evaluate SENS in detail. Briefly, here are our conclusions: 1) SENS is based on the scientifically unsupported speculations of Aubrey de Grey, which are camouflaged by the legitimate science of others; 2) SENS bears only a superficial resemblance to science or engineering; 3) SENS and de Grey’s writings in support of it are riddled with jargonfilled misunderstandings and misrepresentations; 4) SENS’ notoriety is due almost entirely to its emotional appeal; 5) SENS is pseudoscience. We base these conclusions on our extensive training and individual and collective hands-on experience in the areas covered by SENS, including the engineering of biological organisms for the purpose of extending life span.
Most scientists believe pseudoscience poses a real danger to the integrity and public image of science. Since experts recognize SENS is pseudoscience, but it nevertheless has been featured widely and uncritically by popular media, we devote the rest of this short note and the first section of our web supplement to a more general response to this troubling aspect of SENS.
We believe the future will bring advances that are today almost unimaginable. How will the non-expert separate the false promises of pseudoscience from the likely outcomes of rigorously applied biomedical science and engineering? The long history of pseudoscientific claims shows us there are obvious identifying features of pseudoscience that are rarely or never associated with real science or engineering—but what exactly is pseudoscience?
The prefix “pseudo” means “false” and pseudoscience is generally accepted to mean practices that only superficially appear to be science, but violate central scientific precepts. One of the most clearly illustrative definitions of pseudoscience—particularly in the context of this SENS Challenge—was given by Richard Feynman, a widely respected physicist and staunch defender of science. He called some kinds of pseudoscience “cargo cult science,” a reference to practices of certain South Sea Islanders during World War II (pp. 310-311, [3]). Upon seeing the building of airports which brought in military cargo planes loaded with assorted material goods, the cargo cults built their own crude airport reproductions to lure in these inexplicably airborne behemoths loaded with fabulous cargo. Their simulated airports were complete with torch-lit runways, a “control” hut complete with bamboo antennas, and even a “controller” wearing wooden pieces over his ears as mock headphones. Feynman rightly thought that these elaborate but obviously superficial simulacra collectively made a powerful metaphor for pseudoscience camouflaged by superficial aspects of real science.
One can easily imagine why the cargo cults went through these rituals since rich rewards appeared to descend miraculously from the heavens for others who did—but the planes never landed for the cargo cults. Most of us know through experience that there are several missing ingredients preventing the cargo cults from succeeding. But what if we weren’t familiar with airplanes and airports, and the elaborate and technologically advanced civilization that produces and supports them?
Are there general principles that can help people to avoid this type of wasted effort, this wishful thinking that results in a focus away from real problems and real solutions?
We agree with Feynman that an important ingredient missing from cargo cult rituals and pseudoscience is a certain kind of integrity, a skeptical unwillingness to settle for convenient but superficial explanations no matter how dearly or desperately we wish them to be true. There are other important differences between science and pseudoscience, and a primary feature of our web supplement is a list of “General Features of Pseudoscientific Plans for Extension of Human Life Span” that we assembled with the help of some of our colleagues. This list is modeled after other published lists concerning pseudoscience [4], and it is designed to help non-experts distinguish life extension pseudoscience from legitimate science and engineering—including challenging but legitimate new developments. Not surprisingly, most or all of the points on our list clearly apply to the SENS plan and Aubrey de Grey.
However, given the recent successes and highly emotional nature of life extension research, Aubrey de Grey is not the first, nor will he be the last, to promote a hopelessly insufficient but ably camouflaged pipe-dream to the hopeful many. With this in mind, we hope our list provides a general line of demarcation between increasingly sophisticated life extension pretense, and real science and engineering, so that we can focus honestly
on the significant challenges before us.
http://www.technologyreview.com/sens...l_rebuttal.pdfRebuttal of Estep et al. Submission by Aubrey de Grey
Abstract
Estep et al.’s Challenge tactics centre on repeating the word “unscientific” as often as possible in the apparent hope that this will render the judges oblivious to the complete absence of substance in their submission. Particularly incongruous is their accusation that I use the media to skirt expert criticism, when the SENS Challenge itself is my most conspicuous effort to do just the reverse, exposing the public reticence of SENS’s off-the-record detractors and thereby forcing them to make their supposed case in print. Their summary consists entirely of claims of their own scientific infallibility, aspersions on my methods and credentials, and blurrings of the distinctions between the methods of science and of technology. Not wishing to descend to such tactics, I will ignore Estep et al.’s invective and instead summarise here my detailed enumeration [posted on the TR website] of the flaws in the specific criticisms given in their supplementary material [also posted there].
Estep et al. state that: “Any claim regarding extreme extension of life span in higher organisms must be regarded with extreme skepticism, and the evidentiary and logical support for such a claim must be as extraordinary as the claim itself.” This is correct for claims that such extension has been achieved, but not for claims that a particular plan for achieving it might (not would) succeed. Since human aging causes immense suffering and death, any plan that might dramatically postpone it merits detailed expert review; only if its chance of success can be evaluated as negligible should we ignore it. Similarly, their statement: “human aging is not well understood, and any prospective therapy or cure must be regarded as pure speculation… any claim of a cure for human aging prior to evidence of therapeutic efficacy, or prior to a scientifically supported mechanistic model of human aging, must be pseudoscience” forgets that, whereas science is about reducing our ignorance, technology is about sidestepping our ignorance.
Estep et al. highlight the three most challenging of my seven categories of aging “damage” and scorn my preferred approaches to combating them. One such approach, allotopic expression (AE), has been pursued experimentally for 20 years.1 The others were each the focus of a full-day workshop, one of them NIA-sponsored, involving eight eminent experimentalists spanning all relevant disciplines, whose enthusiasm for the approach was demonstrated by coauthorship of the article arising from the respective workshop2,3 – 14 of 16 attendees signed and the others declined for reasons unrelated to their evaluation of the approach (see ref. 3’s acknowledgements). Faced with this evidence – rather stronger than mere attendance at conferences – that my proposals are wholly legitimate, Estep et al. simply omit it from their critique. The section of one of these articles2 that they deride as “pseudoscientific pretense” was contributed by Prof. Bruce Rittmann, who, as shown by his biography,4 cannot easily be dismissed for lacking relevant experimental expertise (as Estep et al. so blithely dismiss me). I reject experimentalists’ criticisms only when I have detailed, robust scientific arguments and the support of more appropriately specialised experimentalists. Estep et al. evidently overlook how thoroughly their diatribe fits their own definition of pseudoscience.
In my interactions with experimentalists exemplified above, I always provide all the facts known to me that might help them to evaluate my proposals reliably. By contrast, Estep et al. repeatedly omit key facts that Estep certainly knows (though his coauthors may not). They lampoon my prediction from 2000 concerning AE, without mentioning that I made it assuming that Zullo et al.’s seminal breakthrough (which I presented at the time I made the bet5) would be published imminently in Science (where it was then in review), stimulating effort to perfect this approach; in fact, followup effort remained negligible until it was finally published in 2005.6 Thus, it is grossly misleading to suggest that my overoptimism arose from underestimating how hard AE is – and I fully explained this recently in a reply to Estep on a well-known mailing list.7 Similarly, Estep et 2 al. accuse me of selectivity in presenting my view that nuclear mutations and epimutations irrelevant to cancer do not contribute to age-related decline within a currently normal lifetime, even though Estep has been invited to respond to my paper in press in Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, which was invited and accepted by the world leader in that field (Jan Vijg) and in which I justify this conclusion in great detail and with abundant references.8 It is thus Estep et al., not I, who attempt to mislead readers by selectivity.
Exile - what makes you think it would filter down to the rest of us?
Apart from questions of cost, I reckon there would be active blocking of any such general availability. Individual governments, and the human race as a whole would have to embark on the most radical rethink of how the world is run, to deal with such matters as the already mentioned problem of allowing or disallowing new births. I'd say such a rethink would simply be too much for them, if the reluctant and piecemeal response to global warming is anything to go by.
I'm not sure that the government could do anything about it. It's a legitimate area of research, it's largely funded by the private sector and individual backers, and any attempt to outlaw indefinite life-spans will almost certainly be met with resistance. I know which way I'd be voting at the next election if a government tried to ban it (not that I think they would anyway).
The government wouldn't exactly need to outlaw it. It might be privately funded research, but if the resulting treatment were to be made available to all, the government, (ie everybody) would have to pay for it. The research would be done in Europe or America, I assume. Do you think the USA would then gift the treatment to, say, China, never mind Islamic countries? Here would be fertile ground for the growth of World War III.
In any case, I don't believe humans could handle a greatly increased lifespan. I think they'd go psychotic after about 150 years. We evolved over a long period into creatures with a lifespan under a century, and the mental setup to go with it. In so many ways we are psychologically centuries, if not milennia, behind the times - hence the state of the world now. At a stroke we'd have to deal with a very fifferent and new reality, and I don't think we could.
Have a listen to Janacek's opera "The Makropoulos Case". Emilia Marty is centuries old, thanks to an elixir which she eventually abandons, having lost her humanity and interest in living. Janacek believed that life means renewal, and that means death and renewal.
er....suicide would still be an option, would it not?
I'd love to live indefinitely. There is always something new to learn and I'm always interested in what is going to happen next in the world.
Imagine someone born 150 years ago. Would life be boring yet? Think of all they would of seen.
And you could make some wicked long term investments.
Unless there is horrible chronic illness, I could not say when I would choose to die.
Same here. It always bugs me when people go on about how terrible and boring immortality would be. The thing is, even if it does end up getting really boring, no-one is going to force you to carry on living. If you have the choice, why not just live as long as you want and if you do get bored you can end it. The attitude of "It might get boring so we shouldn't even try in the first place" just seems bizzare.I'd love to live indefinitely. There is always something new to learn and I'm always interested in what is going to happen next in the world.
Imagine someone born 150 years ago. Would life be boring yet? Think of all they would of seen.
And you could make some wicked long term investments.
Unless there is horrible chronic illness, I could not say when I would choose to die.
I'm not claiming immortality would be simply "boring", I'm saying that our minds, having evolved in the context of our present lifespan, would not be able to deal with it. Not perhaps boredom, but... well, I don't know, some kind of psychosis.
Neither am I saying it should not be tried, but I still maintain it would never be available to all. Those who run things would get round it somehow. And even if they were willing, how the hell would the complete turn-around in all human life be managed? As I said before, look at the fumbling way we're facing up (or not) to global warming.
Since I won't be alive by the time it happens, maybe I'm just doing the old fox-and-the-grapes routine!
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