Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation took a few hours from his packed schedule yesterday to answer questions from the community at /r/futurology. It is a pity that we can’t get a full day of his time at some point — clearly there are way too many interested folk with questions and not enough hours to answer more than half of them. It is a sign of progress, I hope, that ever more people recognize that the SENS approach to the development of rejuvenation therapies is promising, and understand enough of the science to ask intelligent questions about the details.
SENS is simple enough to explain at the high level: identify the cell and tissue damage that (a) appears in old tissues but not in young tissues, and (b) is caused by the normal operation of metabolism, not by some other form of damage. The resulting short list includes the causes of aging. It may include some other things as well, that in the end turn out not to need fixing, but why take the chance? In modern biotechnology and life science research, it is faster and cheaper to develop a repair therapy and see what happens than it is to painstakingly figure out how everything fits together.
When de Grey first evaluated the field of aging research, back before the turn of the century, he found that the causes of aging by the above definition were largely known, with a good deal of evidence in support of each one. Yet next to no-one was working on fixing them. Since then, he has campaigned tirelessly to build organisations, assemble allies, raise funding, and persuade researchers, and all of that to ensure that the scientific and biotechnology communities do in fact move ahead with a repair-based approach to building functional rejuvenation therapies. It has been surprisingly hard work, given a research community that was hostile towards the idea of treating aging as a medical condition versus merely observing it, and a public at large who seem disinterested in living longer in good health.
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