16 replies to this topic

[justinb]

I scanned the article for ImmInst's reading pleasure.

Download link for article provided by Caliban.

Article written by Tom Kirkwood.


Near the end he basically says that SENS is bollocks, since the BBC program he referred to was on SENS. Note that he doesn't mention SENS nor Aubrey, he only mentions a qoute made by Aubrey. I would love for him to take up the challenge offered by Tech Review and the Methuselah Foundation.


Original pictures provided by me... (The link above is far better, thanks Caliban!)

You will have to zoom on the first 3 images to be able to read them efficiently.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4

Edited by justinb, 29 August 2005 - 06:39 AM.

[ag24]

prometheus - have another look. The first person to live to 1000, or indeed to any given age, is quite likely to be someone who would live to 110 given only today's medical technology. Supercentenarians get that way because they stay healthy longer - cf Perls's famous aphorism "the older you get, the healthier you've been". Thus, we're talking about someone aged chronologically 85 and biologically more like 60-65 in 2030. Since 2030 is my 50% mark (subject to funding soon) for the achievement of robust human rejuvenation (addition of 30 extra healthy years to people who are biologically 60ish), and since RHR is very probably enough for escape velocity, that person has a respectable chance of achieving escape velocity. QED. Of course I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your post regarding lack of effort and consequent delay and loss of life. (Actually 60-year-olds in the UK have a remaining life expectancy of at least 25 years, not 15, but that doesn't alter your point.)

The internal political context of Tom' comments is probably more interesting. Tom knows me and my views extremely well -- far too well to call anything I say laughable without checking very carefully first. But he also knows that one of my strongest and most legitimate complaints is that my colleagues refuse to take me on in public -- as recently highlighted by the SENS Challenge, but much more prominently so within the scientific community by my recent EMBO Reports paper, which I gather has riled quite a lot of people. I suspect that Tom knew exactly how much of a favour he was doing me by breaking the senior biogerontologists' vow of silence on SENS and thus giving me something to which to respond in my typical robust fashion -- I have of course sent a letter to Nature, and if they don't print it (which is of course likely) I can of course still get it out in other ways.

[signifier]

In 15 years?

Damn, in 15 years the singularity could've happened. I think the 60 year olds of today have a good chance... Although the 20 year olds obviously have a better one.

[caliban]

One has a tendency to regard any publicity as good publicity, but I would agree that it is a positive step.

Kirkwood complains about the hype -- but there has always been hype.

the practice of some on the fringes of scientific ageing research who have upped the ante by making wholly unsupported extrapolations from work in cells and in simple animal models [...] There is a media hunger, as yet unchecked by widespread general knowledge of what is or is not scientifically plausible, for fountain-of-youth stories that titillate the public.

That has always been done. (And as if Mr.K was not a very proficient titilator himself.)


So when he 'complains' that

A buzz is in the air that significant life extension is just a few years away.

it is presumably in recognition of the

misleading and ultimately unhelpful nonsense uttered by the fantasists in the life-extension lobby

The challenge for us is to impress on Kirkwoods and colleagues, on policy makers, and on the
the maligned media, that there IS such a lobby, and that this lobby is vibrant and growing -- and quite a world apart from monkey testicles and wrinkle cream.

[Da55id]

Prometheus: The realm of PR is where the real things happen. Polio was cured by PR. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't totally real and unbelievably effective when done right/well. It IS hard to measure. But that's a failure of available measurement methods.

Smoking was made pandemic through: hollywood popularization and cigarette vendors giving the cigs away to soldiers in WWII

The proverbial American breakfast of bacon and eggs was a child of PR pure and simple. The "father of modern PR" was commissioned by sausage meat packers who were loosing market share to cereals and toast.

J Lo, Brittney, Jessica - creatures of PR...whom techniods dismiss with a sniff - but would you like one of them to publicly proclaim the benefits of curing aging?

What makes PR effecitve? Credibility, attractiveness and manifest momentum. Prometheus - wanna become a member of The Three Hundred :-)

[Lazarus Long]

The realm of PR is where the real things happen. Polio was cured by PR. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't totally real and unbelievably effective when done right/well. It IS hard to measure. But that's a failure of available measurement methods.

I really have to take exception to this sentiment, more so since I lived through the last of the great polio scares in the US. Saying PR created the vaccine denigrates the reality of socially driven demand when people were first hand witnessing the dead and surviving. That isn't a function of PR alone. PR is a function of human social interaction for the very purpose of information sharing. I think you have horse and cart reversed.

Yes society is manipulable but presuming that it requires the manipulative aspects of PR when the message of mass death speaks for itself is self defeating.

Everyone still dies.

The framing the message is crucial and there is no argument that it must be gotten out there (what I consider the point of any publicity is good publicity) but we can still only lead the herd to water though maybe soon we can also make them think. )

[jaydfox]

Laz, I think the examples of the Britney and Simpson—"blonde teenie boppers", or however one might refer to them, a category to which we might add a half dozen other names—offers a nice countercase to consider. In a vacuum, without the dire conditions of death, people can be made to think they "just need" some crap or some other crap. That tens of millions of albums can be sold on the basis of a contrived need is powerful.

And consider that examples of death push in on us from all sides seemingly constantly. The need may have been created by Polio, and its effectiveness hence much better than a contrived need, but I think the effect of PR should not be underestimated. Look how much money was poured into the Space program because of the contrived need to beat the Soviets (mixed with a little bit of real need to stay ahead technologically, viz. warfare technology). PR is a very powerful thing, whether it takes advantage of contrived needs or real needs. I think you may have been considering PR in the negative light of contrived needs, but it's just as important in cases of real, indeed dire, needs.

[Lazarus Long]

I suppose at our present trajectory it may well be laughable. I think it may well be a fantasy to consider that a person who is 60 today would have a chance at escape velocity. I find this realization very distressing because it means I am going to lose many people close to me.

The reason for this is, of course, is our dismal rate of progress. If there were an international effort the scale of the human genome project to determine how the biological processes underlying aging could be perturbed to extend lifespan then a 60 year old would have a chance. Instead we have a hodge-podge of studies that emerge on a periodic basis in an immeasurably complex mosaic that is constantly changing. Many will proclaim that this is the nature of science. They are right with some famous exceptions - the human genome project, the space program and the atomic bomb.

BTW Prometheus now you are making my argument on why I think cyber (bio-mechanical combined with other medtech) offers my generation more likely benefit over the immediate decades we are looking at but I agree that true genetech is the real answer.

I do not see these as in any kind of a dichotomy as I already said elsewhere but I also don't think expecting the Singularity to arrive out of this time frame is likely either. On that point I agree there is too much fantasizing at work.

Furthermore whenever we have seen governments and private organizations stand side by side and become feverishly mobilized - providing the technology base is reasonably mature we have a paradigm shift. A notable failure is a cure for cancer - but having recently achieved the technology base (the ability to monitor and modulate gene expression with fine precision) we should be very close to achieving this feat.

The story of the A-bomb is not a fair comparison IMHO, nor the space race to put a man on the moon. We apparently were a lot closer technologically in the period prior to WWII than the general public perceived but much of what was going on was held as top secret due to the impending war.

The theoretical aspects of nuclear weapons really begin to be seriously modeled in the 1920's and the basic tech dated back years earlier almost to the late 19th century. As for the moon race again there was a political drive that coincides with tech that in many cases dates back to the mid 19th century.

We would be in good shape today in our quest if al Qaeda were in a race to develop immortality but alas humans tend to be too stupid to engage in constructive competition and prefer the simpler easier sell of killing to saving life.

On the bright side the Asian communities are going to engage Stem Cell research in full vigor and they are likely to advance sooner than we are in the West and this could be the Sputnik that might help us reach *escape velocity*.

[jaydfox]

We apparently were a lot closer techologiocally in the period prior to WWII than the general public perceived

SENS-like platforms would indicate that we may be a lot closer to radically intervening in the aging process than the general public perceives.

The theoretical aspects of nuclear weapons really begin to be seriously modeled in the 1920's and the basic tech dated back years earlier almost to the late 19th century. As for the moon race again there was a political drive that coincides with tech that in many cases dates back to the mid 19th century.

SENS, as outlined by de Grey's proposals from a couple years ago, depended on technology either already available or in the pipeline and foreseen to be completed (in a rough, but functional version) before the timeframe for RMR, i.e. a decade or so. The possible exception, WILT, seems to me to be a human-only intervention anyway, thus allowing 20-25 years for development of the underlying technologies of the WILT scaffolding. While FDA-approvable, market-ready versions of all these technologies would require years of refinements, this as well is acceptable, because it would take years to translate results in mice to humans anyway.

The technology is there, or it will be. But we need the research, the "deliverables" to match the delivery mechanisms that will be developed well within the 25-year window de Grey proposes.

All that's missing is the will to try, and the subsequent funding. In a word (an acronym, really), PR.

[justinb]

All that's missing is the will to try, and the subsequent funding. In a word (an acronym, really), PR.

I completely agree. We must get the PR ball rolling ASAP.

I had a recent idea of how we could reach the masses. How about an Imax feature on curing aging? Just an idea, and if it became a reality would greatly help our cause.

[Da55id]

Definition:
Public Relations - Planning, designing, distributing, propogating and maximizing the targeted dispersion of memes that collimate awareness, opinon and actions to drive the accomplishment of a planned end.

Perhaps some take exception to the term PR iteself?

PR remains powerful and relevent whether or not the general populace becomes aware of a topic. Key populations (even just one key person) targeted well can move the immovable and precipitate the impossible. The NRA and AARP know this well.

Note how once competition came to the genome project it caught fire. As you point out, the resulting PR DID drive funding...and the main complaint I hear about biogerontology etc is the dire lack of funding. If you've seen the movie "The Right Stuff", you'll recall that the X15 fell out of the sky because of loss of funding...directly as a result of a competing PR meme - "astronauts more famous than movie stars". Mr. Glenn is still in the Senate as a result of that PR convulsion.

re: the atomic bomb. I predict you will disagree what I'm about to say and dismiss it as mere semantics. The NAZI and fascist movements were born of a PR machine such as the world had rarely if ever seen. I submit that war PR - otherwise known as propaganda - by uniting the world into just 2 extremely polarized factions fighting a global war was the *entire* cause of the atomic bomb.

Many underestimate or misunderstand the power of PR's ability to move one person who turns out to be THE key person. For instance my involvement with Stephen Spielberg resulted when he read an article about our kid's multimedia company on a transatlantic flight - the direct fruit of our PR effort. This lead directly to his joining our board of directors, investing and helping found the Starbright Foundation.

The Mprize IS absolutely working. And there's another couple decades of work ahead of us.

[ag24]

I heard back from Nature, declining to print my response to Tom's review, so I have posted it at the SAGE KE bulletin board:

http://sageke.scienc...t/sageke_el;324

[darauch]

What was their reason for declining? What a xxxxxxx joke of a magazine.

[darauch]

Oops, I just realized nature is a scientific journal (rather than a pop sci magazine). That makes me even angrier, as science is supposed to encourage debate.