The mainstream biogerontology perspective is that there’s an evolutionarily conserved “survival program”, probably developed for surviving famines, that can slow the aging process somewhat. This is the stuff you’ll find in Cynthia Kenyon’s research, for instance. The hope is that you can find drugs that stimulate these pathways, and thereby slow down the incidence of age-related diseases. This is the approach LRI is taking.
The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won’t work. As you go up from yeast to nematodes to flies to mice, “long-lived” mutants live less long, and perhaps by the time we get to humans these genetic alterations (or drugs that simulate them) won’t be long-lived at all. SENS instead wants to work on reversing the damage caused by aging.
I don’t know with high confidence whether SENS’s skepticism is right; but even if they are, their research program seems to involve a lot of open questions in basic science that would take a long time to resolve.
Give to SENS if you want to invest in basic research that might one day reverse aging altogether; give to LRI to accelerate translational research into treatments that might lead to modest healthspan extension in the next decade or two. (Or give to both!) They’re complementary strategies.
As far as I understood SENS position, it’s: Approaches like getting a few substances that act on a few pathways might add a few years of life but they won’t provide long-term immortality.
Do you think it’s different and that you actually have different assumptions about the amount of life-years that can be gained by a few of the substances that you might test?
Don’t know what Sarah’s take is, but I can easily see a position like “if you want to keep as many people alive as are currently alive, you want both long-term immortality getting researched, and short-term immortality getting researched (esp if the latter is easier), to keep more people around until the longterm immortality”
Sarah wrote “The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won’t work.” and sounds to me like the disagreement isn’t just about short-term and long-term solutions where it makes sense to fund both.
I asked Sarah this a while ago, and her answer (as I recall it) was that SENS is targeting more basic science stuff that’s on the left side of the ‘valley of death,’ and so is orthogonal (and complementary to) the sort of work LRI is doing, and will also likely take longer to result in treatments in humans.
By the way, what is this “valley of death”? Googling only turns up information about Death Valley and the Bible quote, and refinement to “longevity research” just leads to this valley where people supposedly live longer. It seems like an interesting concept.
The “valley of death” in scientific contexts is research that is not profitable to do that is in between research that is profitable to do (and thus is where good ideas go to die). In this particular context, it’s feasible to do preliminary studies of whether or not drugs will help with particular biomarkers of aging in old mice, and it’s feasible to do final studies of whether or not drugs are safe and effective in humans, but it’s not profitable to give those drugs to mice as they age and see how long they live (because you can’t immediately turn that into a drug, and everyone will know if it works, so it doesn’t advantage you relative to other companies, and it’s the sort of thing that normal grantmakers won’t fund academics to do).
Hence, nonprofit work to do the science that everyone wishes someone else would pay for.
How, if at all, do you see LRI comparing to SENS Research Foundation?
Vaniver is right.
The mainstream biogerontology perspective is that there’s an evolutionarily conserved “survival program”, probably developed for surviving famines, that can slow the aging process somewhat. This is the stuff you’ll find in Cynthia Kenyon’s research, for instance. The hope is that you can find drugs that stimulate these pathways, and thereby slow down the incidence of age-related diseases. This is the approach LRI is taking.
The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won’t work. As you go up from yeast to nematodes to flies to mice, “long-lived” mutants live less long, and perhaps by the time we get to humans these genetic alterations (or drugs that simulate them) won’t be long-lived at all. SENS instead wants to work on reversing the damage caused by aging.
I don’t know with high confidence whether SENS’s skepticism is right; but even if they are, their research program seems to involve a lot of open questions in basic science that would take a long time to resolve.
Give to SENS if you want to invest in basic research that might one day reverse aging altogether; give to LRI to accelerate translational research into treatments that might lead to modest healthspan extension in the next decade or two. (Or give to both!) They’re complementary strategies.
As far as I understood SENS position, it’s: Approaches like getting a few substances that act on a few pathways might add a few years of life but they won’t provide long-term immortality.
Do you think it’s different and that you actually have different assumptions about the amount of life-years that can be gained by a few of the substances that you might test?
Don’t know what Sarah’s take is, but I can easily see a position like “if you want to keep as many people alive as are currently alive, you want both long-term immortality getting researched, and short-term immortality getting researched (esp if the latter is easier), to keep more people around until the longterm immortality”
Yep, that is my position.
(I’ve talked a bunch with Aubrey de Grey and he is very much supportive of the LRI’s program. We’re complements, not substitutes.)
Sarah wrote “The SENS position, as I understand, is that this won’t work.” and sounds to me like the disagreement isn’t just about short-term and long-term solutions where it makes sense to fund both.
I’m a little more optimistic about calorie restriction mimetics than Aubrey, but I think everybody sensible has pretty low confidence about this.
I asked Sarah this a while ago, and her answer (as I recall it) was that SENS is targeting more basic science stuff that’s on the left side of the ‘valley of death,’ and so is orthogonal (and complementary to) the sort of work LRI is doing, and will also likely take longer to result in treatments in humans.
By the way, what is this “valley of death”? Googling only turns up information about Death Valley and the Bible quote, and refinement to “longevity research” just leads to this valley where people supposedly live longer. It seems like an interesting concept.
The “valley of death” in scientific contexts is research that is not profitable to do that is in between research that is profitable to do (and thus is where good ideas go to die). In this particular context, it’s feasible to do preliminary studies of whether or not drugs will help with particular biomarkers of aging in old mice, and it’s feasible to do final studies of whether or not drugs are safe and effective in humans, but it’s not profitable to give those drugs to mice as they age and see how long they live (because you can’t immediately turn that into a drug, and everyone will know if it works, so it doesn’t advantage you relative to other companies, and it’s the sort of thing that normal grantmakers won’t fund academics to do).
Hence, nonprofit work to do the science that everyone wishes someone else would pay for.
Was “left side” an arbitrary choice in your comment above, or is there a conventional meaning to left vs right for this valley of death?
Arbitrary, inspired by reading left to right.