There are two ways you can react to DeepMind making progress on protein folding. The one is to say: “Great there’s progress”. The other is to look at the inability of the existing companies to innovate.
When Illumina started having their monopol on sequencing technology, the cost effectiveness of the technology suddenly stopped going down like is was before.
After Theranos went bust we don’t have new companies that go after cheaper blood tests even through that would be important to reduce the costs of understanding what happens.
Sorry, I don’t quite follow—what’s the point here? That funding SENS alone is unwise? If so, I don’t think that’s the major concern, as SENS has a tiny budget (~$5 million) and have a good track record funding some of the best work in the field.
If we live in a world where we have a bunch of promising approaching for anti-aging drug development and our problem is that not enough capital goes towards persuing them, research that provides additional perspectives doesn’t seem to be most important.
By ‘approaches’ I meant, ‘therapeutic approaches’, not ‘perspectives on aging’.
What I tried to emphasize in the OP is we have a good-enough model (or, ‘perspective’) on aging which is the hallmarks of aging, and that the limiting factor now is funding to (1) develop new approaches to therapeutically addressing these hallmarks and (2) translate these findings into humans through the financing of longevity biotech startups, though (1) is the more important than (2).
(1) Having that argument between tool-spending and more application focused spending. Arguing that clash in detail is good for giving people an overview over it.
The OpenPhil report on Mechanism for Aging asks here “How likely is it that general-application tools and basic research areas that might not be thought of as part of “aging research” (analogous to epigenetics, stem cells, neuroscience, and drug delivery) will be bottlenecks to accomplishing the core objectives described above? ”
(2) On average I think that tool research is not emphasied enough in biomedicine. It frequently happens that better tools make important new research possible.
Thomas Kuhn argued that focusing to much on application usually leads to an academic field being very unproductive.
When doing academic research you never know beforehand what you will find. Sometimes reserarch can evolve into a tool direction instead of an application direction. If a person is too much committed to an application direction (towards anti-aging) they might not persue valuable research directions.
Similar things go when seeking jobs. I would expect that average person who works at DeepMind on protein folding to have a larger impact on ending aging then the average person at a biotech companies which has fighting aging as it’s mission statement.
In the large scale of funding, SENS budget is at the moment a rounding error, so I don’t think that the extend towards which it’s currently funded is a problem. I think it would be reasonable for SENS to have 10X the money it has but I’m doubtful 100X would currently be justified.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I’ll add a couple of points:
I completely agree with you that technology from other areas (AI, platform technologies etc.) will benefit aging research. But that’s not the point − 100,000 people per day are dying of aging and we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test (AKG, Gemfibrozil, rapamycin, spermidine, etc.) but we don’t have the funding to do it. So, donating to SENS is important to pick the lowest hanging fruit i.e. testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging. To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized. Remember that anti-aging almost certainly will happen eventually if society doesn’t collapse, and what the field is fighting for is for this to happen sooner rather than later, so that many more people alive today will benefit.
The above is actually an additional criticism I had of the OpenPhil. It’s not that Aubrey de Grey and and others in the field don’t think advances in other areas will help (AI, etc.), it’s that there are so many feasible projects that should be funded that could potentially have a huge impact on populations today, that are not being funded. The neglectedness of the field is the primary reason SENS needs more funding, - think of SENS as funding a locus of research that has among the highest probability of progressing the field in the near future, given this research is working directly on the problem.
So yes, I agree that increasing SENS’ budget by 10-20X would probably be sufficient and that once this point has been reached, the marginal ROI would fall. However, it’s also worth considering that the type of research funded by SENS could also drastically change as the field grows, which may still make SENS donations above the 20X point remain cost-effective. Either way, SENS needs more money today.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test [...] testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging
And we have a very profit oriented industry that makes money with making good calls on judging which possible drugs as worth testing.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
The term valley of death is about drugs where we are not pretty sure that they have a clinically useful effect.
To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized.
There’s no reason to believe that material science progresses in a way that makes building starship 10X cheaper within a decade unless people are working on the technology.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
Will do.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
If it works (slows aging) then it will be profitable.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
If by ‘tooling improvements’ you mean, biomarkers of aging then I completely agree with you. This is also research within the aging field that requires more funding. Besides that, I’m not sure what kind of tools you think we need. The bottom line is that we have a bunch of drugs, and we need a measuring stick (accurate biological age test) to tell us whether the drugs slow aging or not. What other platform technologies would be needed to expedite this process?
Sorry, I don’t quite follow—what’s the point here? That funding SENS alone is unwise? If so, I don’t think that’s the major concern, as SENS has a tiny budget (~$5 million) and have a good track record funding some of the best work in the field.
By ‘approaches’ I meant, ‘therapeutic approaches’, not ‘perspectives on aging’.
What I tried to emphasize in the OP is we have a good-enough model (or, ‘perspective’) on aging which is the hallmarks of aging, and that the limiting factor now is funding to (1) develop new approaches to therapeutically addressing these hallmarks and (2) translate these findings into humans through the financing of longevity biotech startups, though (1) is the more important than (2).
I have two motivations here:
(1) Having that argument between tool-spending and more application focused spending. Arguing that clash in detail is good for giving people an overview over it.
The OpenPhil report on Mechanism for Aging asks here “How likely is it that general-application tools and basic research areas that might not be thought of as part of “aging research” (analogous to epigenetics, stem cells, neuroscience, and drug delivery) will be bottlenecks to accomplishing the core objectives described above? ”
(2) On average I think that tool research is not emphasied enough in biomedicine. It frequently happens that better tools make important new research possible.
Thomas Kuhn argued that focusing to much on application usually leads to an academic field being very unproductive.
When doing academic research you never know beforehand what you will find. Sometimes reserarch can evolve into a tool direction instead of an application direction. If a person is too much committed to an application direction (towards anti-aging) they might not persue valuable research directions.
Similar things go when seeking jobs. I would expect that average person who works at DeepMind on protein folding to have a larger impact on ending aging then the average person at a biotech companies which has fighting aging as it’s mission statement.
In the large scale of funding, SENS budget is at the moment a rounding error, so I don’t think that the extend towards which it’s currently funded is a problem. I think it would be reasonable for SENS to have 10X the money it has but I’m doubtful 100X would currently be justified.
I gave a more thorough analysis of why OpenPhil missed the mark somewhat in their ‘medium-depth’ inquiry of anti-aging research in response to your comment lower in this thread, which is relevant to this point.
I’ll add a couple of points:
I completely agree with you that technology from other areas (AI, platform technologies etc.) will benefit aging research. But that’s not the point − 100,000 people per day are dying of aging and we have the tools to test a bunch of drugs, and a huge laundry list of possible drugs to test (AKG, Gemfibrozil, rapamycin, spermidine, etc.) but we don’t have the funding to do it. So, donating to SENS is important to pick the lowest hanging fruit i.e. testing drugs we are already pretty sure do slow aging. To give an analogy—you could say that given advances in materials engineering would help us get to Mars, but you also need Elon Musk (or equivalent) to put the pieces together and do the thing. Anti-aging is the same—although today’s platform technologies are not perfect (just like today’s material science is not perfect) there are so many experiments we can perform now that would save potentially millions of lives, and should be prioritized. Remember that anti-aging almost certainly will happen eventually if society doesn’t collapse, and what the field is fighting for is for this to happen sooner rather than later, so that many more people alive today will benefit.
The above is actually an additional criticism I had of the OpenPhil. It’s not that Aubrey de Grey and and others in the field don’t think advances in other areas will help (AI, etc.), it’s that there are so many feasible projects that should be funded that could potentially have a huge impact on populations today, that are not being funded. The neglectedness of the field is the primary reason SENS needs more funding, - think of SENS as funding a locus of research that has among the highest probability of progressing the field in the near future, given this research is working directly on the problem.
So yes, I agree that increasing SENS’ budget by 10-20X would probably be sufficient and that once this point has been reached, the marginal ROI would fall. However, it’s also worth considering that the type of research funded by SENS could also drastically change as the field grows, which may still make SENS donations above the 20X point remain cost-effective. Either way, SENS needs more money today.
I think it’s worth putting such a critique into it’s own top-level post sooner or later. It more likely engage OpenPhil.
And we have a very profit oriented industry that makes money with making good calls on judging which possible drugs as worth testing.
It’s relatively easy to make an argument that certain basic research that’s valuable but not directly profitable are underfunded.
The term valley of death is about drugs where we are not pretty sure that they have a clinically useful effect.
There’s no reason to believe that material science progresses in a way that makes building starship 10X cheaper within a decade unless people are working on the technology.
On the hand there are plenty of experiments that are run in antiaging that plausibly could get 10X cheaper through tooling improvements.
Will do.
If it works (slows aging) then it will be profitable.
If by ‘tooling improvements’ you mean, biomarkers of aging then I completely agree with you. This is also research within the aging field that requires more funding. Besides that, I’m not sure what kind of tools you think we need. The bottom line is that we have a bunch of drugs, and we need a measuring stick (accurate biological age test) to tell us whether the drugs slow aging or not. What other platform technologies would be needed to expedite this process?