13 replies to this topic

[niner]

Oh xEva!  You're assuming that I'm trying to keep up.  How could I, with all that SENS propaganda I have to plow through?  I don't pretend to know but an infinitesimal fraction of the life sciences.   I'm sorry, I really should have at least looked that up before I questioned it, but it was labeled a "guess".
 

Incidentally, were not you the one who came up with idea for a therapy that would preferentially kill "useless T-cells" that specialize in "non-dangerous viruses"? This craziness is still actively promoted by Reason; and this is precisely what makes one question the education of SENS leaders and their supporters.

 

You obviously "haven't been keeping up".  This is about T-cells that are filling up the available recognition space with far too many of them uselessly specialized to CMV.  Clearing some of those out makes room for new T-cells that can specialize in more important threats.  See this for a better explanation.  When you insult people like Aubrey and Michael, whose knowledge in this area exceeds your own by vast amounts, it's really off-putting.  I'm not bothered one bit that you don't understand this CMV thing, but when it's the basis for insulting a bunch of people, that's when you really need to have your facts straight.

[xEva]

Oh xEva!  You're assuming that I'm trying to keep up.  How could I, with all that SENS propaganda I have to plow through?  I don't pretend to know but an infinitesimal fraction of the life sciences.   I'm sorry, I really should have at least looked that up before I questioned it, but it was labeled a "guess".

Incidentally, were not you the one who came up with idea for a therapy that would preferentially kill "useless T-cells" that specialize in "non-dangerous viruses"? This craziness is still actively promoted by Reason; and this is precisely what makes one question the education of SENS leaders and their supporters.

 
You obviously "haven't been keeping up".  This is about T-cells that are filling up the available recognition space with far too many of them uselessly specialized to CMV.  Clearing some of those out makes room for new T-cells that can specialize in more important threats.  See this for a better explanation.  When you insult people like Aubrey and Michael, whose knowledge in this area exceeds your own by vast amounts, it's really off-putting.  I'm not bothered one bit that you don't understand this CMV thing, but when it's the basis for insulting a bunch of people, that's when you really need to have your facts straight.

Where exactly did I "insult people like Aubrey and Michael"? And since you "don't pretend to know but an infinitesimal fraction of the life sciences", how do you know that their "knowledge in this area exceeds [mine] by vast amounts"? Or is it also a guess?

I don't see where I insulted anyone. I see only that I stated the problems with SENS straight, as is. Perhaps my directness is what you found insulting?


And then, after all that was said, you still send me to Reason's site -?! Now it looks to me that it was he who came up with this "preferentially killing useless T-cells" idea -? But, regardless of who the author is, it's sad that you still don't understand the problem, though it was already discussed in another thread:
 

If you'd look it up on CDC, wiki or Mayo sites, you'd see something like this:

Most healthy people do not experience any symptoms when infected with CMV. However, in those with a weakened immune system, CMV can cause serious disease (blindness, hepatitis, encephalitis, etc.)

I find it shocking that SENS apparently do not understand that the reason CMV does not cause symptoms in healthy people is because their immune system keeps it under control -- NOT BECAUSE THE VIRUS ITSELF IS HARMLESS. Again: it is the immune sys relentless patrol --accomplished via all those "useless T-cells"-- what renders CMV 'harmless'. When you remove those "useless T-cells" is when CMV will go into overdrive and cause serious disease.

I don't know what else to say, other than reiterate that suppression of the immunity (by destroying specialized T-cells) is not a good treatment option here. But maybe it could help you if you ask Reason where he dug up the idea -- I mean, there is no references to it; it looks like his own ingenious babe

Edited by xEva, 09 June 2015 - 05:18 AM.

[corb]

When it comes to something like abeta even if it has some upsides the downsides are so grievous that we will have to suppress it to get a mean increase in health and lifespan, whichever reason it exists is correct. Immunotheraputic options for abeta continue to be developed every year and at least in the animal models work amazing - as in they work - which is not something the other options can boast about. The only trial I know has been canceled for abeta immunotherapies showed improvement in the patients but caused an unrelated infection (though I'm sure you have another idea about that) in a small number of the participants.

 

SENS as far as I know, aims to rejuvenate the immune system by regenerating or replacing the organs manufacturing your immune cells like the thymus - which by the way is the subject which most of the research has gone into in fact. So, xEva, SENS wants you to have MORE T Cells by having a working thymus, not the other way around. So this is not a problem with SENS you are unraveling.

Edited by corb, 09 June 2015 - 11:06 PM.

[niner]

Where exactly did I "insult people like Aubrey and Michael"? And since you "don't pretend to know but an infinitesimal fraction of the life sciences", how do you know that their "knowledge in this area exceeds [mine] by vast amounts"? Or is it also a guess?

I don't see where I insulted anyone. I see only that I stated the problems with SENS straight, as is. Perhaps my directness is what you found insulting?

And then, after all that was said, you still send me to Reason's site -?! Now it looks to me that it was he who came up with this "preferentially killing useless T-cells" idea -? But, regardless of who the author is, it's sad that you still don't understand the problem, though it was already discussed in another thread:

 

You've repeatedly said or implied that Aubrey, Michael, and SENS supporters are unqualified.  That's incorrect, and rude.  Perhaps what you consider "directness" is coming across as insulting. 

 

Did you read Reason's rationale or are you just dismissing it?  Having 80% of your T-cell population specialized to one specific virus isn't leaving much space for all the other threats you might encounter.  I think the point is that you don't need all of them, and the fact that they're there is hurting you more than it helps.  So do you think that they are all necessary to keep us safe from CMV, despite the fact that we could deal with CMV just fine with far few such cells all the way up to late life?  The proposal is to revert the T-cell population back to a youthful state, not destroy it.

[xEva]

You've repeatedly said or implied that Aubrey, Michael, and SENS supporters are unqualified.  That's incorrect, and rude.  Perhaps what you consider "directness" is coming across as insulting.

Repeatedly said or implied? Once in this thread I stated the fact that de Grey's formal education in biology amounts to a BS in computer science. You seem overly touchy about this fact.

Did you read Reason's rationale or are you just dismissing it?  Having 80% of your T-cell population specialized to one specific virus isn't leaving much space for all the other threats you might encounter.  I think the point is that you don't need all of them, and the fact that they're there is hurting you more than it helps.  So do you think that they are all necessary to keep us safe from CMV, despite the fact that we could deal with CMV just fine with far few such cells all the way up to late life?  The proposal is to revert the T-cell population back to a youthful state, not destroy it.

 
Yes I did. And now I read it again, only out of respect for you, niner. You asked and here it comes. I'll tell it to you straight, only the facts, and I sure hope you won't find them insulting.

Ready?



This is wrong:
 

"Having 80% of your T-cell population specialized to one specific virus ..".

It looked wrong off the bat but just for you I checked the references. The 80% number comes from this quote from this mouse study:
 

A frequent and drastic hallmark of age-related TCR diversity reduction is the appearance of CD8 T cell clonal expansions (TCE), which in some instances can comprise >80% of the total CD8 compartment (6, 7, 9, 12).

 
As you see, the number refers NOT to the percentage of CMV-specialized T-cells out of the whole T-cell population, but the percentage of the its CD8 compartment displaced by CD8 T-cell clonal expansions. Again: it's the percentage of the CD8 compartment of the whole T-cell pool that is displaced by TCE.

Then, of the 4 refs supporting that 80% number, only (7) and (12) apply to humans (and the other two are the studies of mice; the 80% number belongs to them). The two human refs give different numbers: 37.5% and 50%. The smaller number applies to "normal people over 65". The 50% is based on a mixed cohort, half "normal" and half recruited from a methadone clinic of substance abusers, who were HIV, HVB or HVC sero-positive -- this explains the higher number in (12) vs (7) -- 50% vs 37.5% -- but not 80% !

These clonal CD8 expansions normally occur in any viral infection --not just CMV-- and they usually resolve some time after the infection is gone, but naturally they persist as long the virus persists. As (12) sais, "The in vivo persistence of expanded CD8 clones in old subjects suggests chronic antigen exposure."


So, to wrap up this part, the fact is that Reason misrepresented the problem. He took the data from a mouse CMV study, exaggerated it and sold as human data. The part he got right was about the clones persisting because of the persisting virus

But then he totally messed up the part about CMV being 'harmless' -- but this was discussed already ad nauseam.


Now the rest of your statement:

the point is that you don't need all of them, and the fact that they're there is hurting you more than it helps. So do you think that they are all necessary to keep us safe from CMV, despite the fact that we could deal with CMV just fine with far few such cells all the way up to late life? The proposal is to revert the T-cell population back to a youthful state, not destroy it.

The fact? Can you please cite a ref for this fact, 'cause all I saw just now was a couple of loose hypotheses based on mouse studies plus a conjecture. And how do you know how many if them you need, if you don't know the viral load -- or do you presume that it remains static? What if it grows and the clones expand in response to this growth?
 
The point is, the cells are there because the virus is there. It is the fact of life that a persistent infection taxes the immune system and renders it less effective against other pathogens -- and this applies to all chronic infections, not just CMV and not just viral (and btw I just saw that some cancers also cause CD8 clonal expansions). It is also a fact that persistent infections are caused by pathogens that manage to misdirect or disrupt the immune response rendering it ineffective. Still, the only right thing to do is to get rid of the underlying problem -- but the problem here is not the immune system. It is the virus. Get rid of the virus and in a while the clones will be gone.

Edited by xEva, 10 June 2015 - 09:42 AM.

[Steve H]

I agree that the best thing would be to remove the CMV ideally from an early age to avoid too many specialized T-Cells. How to do it perhaps using a modified virus to specifically hunt it down which appears to be a technology being investigated currently, using a virus to kill another virus seems to be gaining interest. Perhaps a repurposed system like T-VEC might be a viable way to do this?

 

http://www.telegraph...11631626/v.html

 

 

[Steve H]

Also FOXN1 has been shown to rejuvenate the Thymus in rodents and is likely to do the same in the human body so if you want to restore the Thymus to a younger phenotype that would do it most probably. 

 

This 2014 paper demonstrates how the Thymus can be returned to function and reasonably easily and that enforced gene expression and 1TEC cells (artificially created cells made in-vitro) could be used to rejuvenate too by converting Fibroblasts into Thymic cells. As the paper shows both methods result in rejuvenation approaches for the Thymus and both produce a diverse T-Cell population meaning it could well work in people too. This suggests to me that 1TEC is a very viable approach to effectivly rebooting the immune system:

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/25150981

 

Useful info about Thymic regulation:

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/23874334

 

However I often read that SENS does not like "messing about with metabolism" but even ADG recently stated in reference to funding Irina Conboy's study of blood factors that some key pathways might be useful. I was somewhat confused about how that fitted in with SENS and questioned why they supported her work and how it was part of SENS and he said:

 

 Hello everyone - my attention was just drawn to this thread. Quite right - the relationship to SENS is not obvious. It is as follows:

1) Changes with age to the circulation occur as a result of changes that are within the seven SENS strands, because the circulation is after all only a highway between places.

2) The beneficial effects of heterochronic parabiosis, plasma exchange and also transplant experiments show that some parts of the body transmit aging effects to other parts that would not otherwise age so severely.

3) Therefore, we may end up having less work to do with SENS than one might think (not fewer strands, but fewer examples within some of the strands, especially cell loss) if we can elucidate which tissues are the key culprits, and rejuvenate those, and thus rejuvenate the blood stream.

4) More exploration using parabiosis etc is a really promising way to achieve that elucidation. We don't propose that parabiosis (or even plasma exchange) would be a SENS therapy in the long run.

I hope this clarifies the matter somewhat.

Posted by: Aubrey de Grey at May 21, 2015 5:42 AM

 

Thread here: https://www.fightagi...ng.php#comments

 

I happen to agree with ADG that targeting some key pathways (not trying to work out the entire metabolic system) may make SENS more manageable.FOXN1 appears to be one such pathway that would reap benefits and make at least one part of SENS considerably easier if the Thymus can be reverse involuted without any invasive treatments. 

Edited by Steve H, 10 June 2015 - 11:30 AM.

[xEva]

However I often read that SENS does not like "messing about with metabolism" but even ADG recently stated in reference to funding Irina Conboy's study of blood factors that some key pathways might be useful. I was somewhat confused about how that fitted in with SENS and questioned why they supported her work and how it was part of SENS and he said:

Hello everyone - my attention was just drawn to this thread. Quite right - the relationship to SENS is not obvious. It is as follows:

1) Changes with age to the circulation occur as a result of changes that are within the seven SENS strands, because the circulation is after all only a highway between places.
2) The beneficial effects of heterochronic parabiosis, plasma exchange and also transplant experiments show that some parts of the body transmit aging effects to other parts that would not otherwise age so severely.
3) Therefore, we may end up having less work to do with SENS than one might think (not fewer strands, but fewer examples within some of the strands, especially cell loss) if we can elucidate which tissues are the key culprits, and rejuvenate those, and thus rejuvenate the blood stream.
4) More exploration using parabiosis etc is a really promising way to achieve that elucidation. We don't propose that parabiosis (or even plasma exchange) would be a SENS therapy in the long run.
I hope this clarifies the matter somewhat.

Posted by: Aubrey de Grey at May 21, 2015 5:42 AM

Thread here: https://www.fightagi...ng.php#comments

 

It's good to see de Grey being flexible about SENS and I'm glad they are supporting Conboy research. I find her work most fascinating.

It would be good if SENS supporters would also show the same flexibility. Otherwise, the impression I get from my exchanges with niner starts making this community appear sorta sect-like. I mean, the smallest criticism is promptly countered with and-wtf-are-you adhoms -- as if SENS is infallible commandments cast in stone.

But I always thought that it was just an approximate plan. I mean, it's naïve to expect such am ambitious proposal, created years ago amid vastly insufficient data, to work out to the t. To the contrary, I expected that, as soon as evidence for a better plan will appear, this community will gladly embrace it and adjust their plans accordingly. After all, what's the goal here? (personally, I don't believe in living forever but simply don't like the idea of getting old and decrepit, and whatever works is fine with me ) So what's all this ideology? I mean, look, even your question to de Grey that you quote above sounds like but what about the party line?

I once had an experience with a community that later turned out cult-like. The goal there was to study some extraordinary human functions and initially it was all science and all good. But after some years it began to acquire very troubling characteristics, slowly and insidiously, and it was the ardent supporters of the idea who made it so, without even realizing it -- they meant well and thought they protected it. Ever since all forms of activism make me uneasy. I very much hope this community will not suffer the same fate.


 

I agree that the best thing would be to remove the CMV ideally from an early age to avoid too many specialized T-Cells. How to do it perhaps using a modified virus to specifically hunt it down which appears to be a technology being investigated currently, using a virus to kill another virus seems to be gaining interest. Perhaps a repurposed system like T-VEC might be a viable way to do this?

 
That certainly sounds cool and all that, but why go such roundabout ways if an antiviral will do just fine? Lately, tremendous advances were made in this field. Take hepatitis C virus for example. For decades it was almost incurable and required year-long, difficult treatment with horrid side effects. In the last couple of years at least half a dozen antivirals came out (more? I lost the count already) that successfully treat 95% in a matter of weeks. I anticipate the same progress with other viruses in the very near future.

Edited by xEva, 10 June 2015 - 09:30 PM.

[niner]

 

You've repeatedly said or implied that Aubrey, Michael, and SENS supporters are unqualified.  That's incorrect, and rude.  Perhaps what you consider "directness" is coming across as insulting.

Repeatedly said or implied? Once in this thread I stated the fact that de Grey's formal education in biology amounts to a BS in computer science. You seem overly touchy about this fact.

Yes, one time you said that, once you said Reason's being crazy, once you questioned the education of SENS supporters, once you implied that all I read is SENS propaganda.  Maybe I'm touchy, but there seems to be a lot of this.  In your last post you seem to have dialed it back, and that's good, because lately it seems like you've been intent on convincing people that SENS is some sort of idiotic cult run by clowns.   There is not a thing wrong with questioning SENS ideas-- Did you notice me agreeing with you back there about allotopic expression of mitochondrial proteins?  But the way you've been hammering at SENS lately, I have to ask-- What would you have them do?  Stop all that they are doing, and just leave curing aging up to the likes of Calico? 
 
 

This is wrong:
 

"Having 80% of your T-cell population specialized to one specific virus ..".

 

It looked wrong off the bat but just for you I checked the references. The 80% number comes from this quote from this mouse study:
 

A frequent and drastic hallmark of age-related TCR diversity reduction is the appearance of CD8 T cell clonal expansions (TCE), which in some instances can comprise >80% of the total CD8 compartment (6, 7, 9, 12).

 
As you see, the number refers NOT to the percentage of CMV-specialized T-cells out of the whole T-cell population, but the percentage of the its CD8 compartment displaced by CD8 T-cell clonal expansions. Again: it's the percentage of the CD8 compartment of the whole T-cell pool that is displaced by TCE.

Then, of the 4 refs supporting that 80% number, only (7) and (12) apply to humans (and the other two are the studies of mice; the 80% number belongs to them). The two human refs give different numbers: 37.5% and 50%. The smaller number applies to "normal people over 65". The 50% is based on a mixed cohort, half "normal" and half recruited from a methadone clinic of substance abusers, who were HIV, HVB or HVC sero-positive -- this explains the higher number in (12) vs (7) -- 50% vs 37.5% -- but not 80% !

These clonal CD8 expansions normally occur in any viral infection --not just CMV-- and they usually resolve some time after the infection is gone, but naturally they persist as long the virus persists. As (12) sais, "The in vivo persistence of expanded CD8 clones in old subjects suggests chronic antigen exposure."

So, to wrap up this part, the fact is that Reason misrepresented the problem. He took the data from a mouse CMV study, exaggerated it and sold as human data. The part he got right was about the clones persisting because of the persisting virus

But then he totally messed up the part about CMV being 'harmless' -- but this was discussed already ad nauseam.

Now the rest of your statement:

the point is that you don't need all of them, and the fact that they're there is hurting you more than it helps. So do you think that they are all necessary to keep us safe from CMV, despite the fact that we could deal with CMV just fine with far few such cells all the way up to late life? The proposal is to revert the T-cell population back to a youthful state, not destroy it.

The fact? Can you please cite a ref for this fact, 'cause all I saw just now was a couple of loose hypotheses based on mouse studies plus a conjecture. And how do you know how many if them you need, if you don't know the viral load -- or do you presume that it remains static? What if it grows and the clones expand in response to this growth?
 
The point is, the cells are there because the virus is there. It is the fact of life that a persistent infection taxes the immune system and renders it less effective against other pathogens -- and this applies to all chronic infections, not just CMV and not just viral (and btw I just saw that some cancers also cause CD8 clonal expansions). It is also a fact that persistent infections are caused by pathogens that manage to misdirect or disrupt the immune response rendering it ineffective. Still, the only right thing to do is to get rid of the underlying problem -- but the problem here is not the immune system. It is the virus. Get rid of the virus and in a while the clones will be gone.

Thank you for going into this level of detail.  When you earlier said in reply to Michael

 

 

Incidentally, were not you the one who came up with idea for a therapy that would preferentially kill "useless T-cells" that specialize in "non-dangerous viruses"? This craziness is still actively promoted by Reason; and this is precisely what makes one question the education of SENS leaders and their supporters.

 

...and later quoted an earlier post where you said "When you remove those "useless T-cells" is when CMV will go into overdrive and cause serious disease."  I have to admit that I thought you didn't at all understand what Reason had said.  The source of this idea is neither Michael nor Reason, but rather a report from a 2005 meeting about immunity and aging.  It talks about the human case, and has some quantification that you may not have seen.  If deletion of dysfunctional cells is crazy, this group of immunologists apparently doesn't agree.

[xEva]

Yes, one time you said that, once you said Reason's being crazy, once you questioned the education of SENS supporters, once you implied that all I read is SENS propaganda.  Maybe I'm touchy, but there seems to be a lot of this.  In your last post you seem to have dialed it back, and that's good, because lately it seems like you've been intent on convincing people that SENS is some sort of idiotic cult run by clowns.   There is not a thing wrong with questioning SENS ideas-- Did you notice me agreeing with you back there about allotopic expression of mitochondrial proteins?  But the way you've been hammering at SENS lately, I have to ask-- What would you have them do?  Stop all that they are doing, and just leave curing aging up to the likes of Calico?

 
Well, though it's thoroughly off topic, this SENS discussion has been going on for a while, so we may as well wrap it up here. Funny that it started with the very same "useless T-cells specializing in harmless CMV" back in this thread. There I dared say that to "kill the specialized immune cells, while the infection for which they are generated is still present, is the typical nonsense spewed by an ardent, testosterone-driven SENS supporter" -- following which you seemed to go out of your way to step all over my toes with wtf-are-you adhoms, which naturally only added oil to the fire.

And now in their defense you made me read this paper on aging and immunity, 'cause that's what you got when you googled CMV deletion of dysfunctional cells. To me this paper only confirmed that CMV is a very dangerous virus. About it you wrote:
 

...and later quoted an earlier post where you said "When you remove those "useless T-cells" is when CMV will go into overdrive and cause serious disease."  I have to admit that I thought you didn't at all understand what Reason had said.  The source of this idea is neither Michael nor Reason, but rather a report from a 2005 meeting about immunity and aging.  It talks about the human case, and has some quantification that you may not have seen.  If deletion of dysfunctional cells is crazy, this group of immunologists apparently doesn't agree.

 
First, that one and only mention of deletion of dysfunctional cells you took out of the context, which is this:
 

A novel approach to [it] was suggested by Hirokawa who proposed banking peripheral T cells from younger individuals, depleting their dysfunctional cells in later life, and replenishing from the frozen bank of young T cells.

 
IOW the idea is to deplete the dysfunctional cells and then replenish them, which is very different from Reason's idea to simply get rid of them for no use, 'cause the virus is "harmless". Incidentally, in the same paper (I bet you have not read it yourself, but you really should have) they say:

...the ability of our immune system is progressively worn down by the need to maintain immunosurveillance against persistent pathogens or other sources of antigen, such as cancer.

...cytomegalovirus infection at any stage in life adds more age to the ageing process with respect to the naïve compartment. Indeed, the immune response to CMV can account for around 25% of all the clonal CD8+ T cell populations that are known to accumulate with ageing. Concomitantly, the absolute T cell count is increased by 20% in elderly donors who are CMV-positive compared with CMV seronegative. This correlates with the absolute count of CD8+ T cells doubling in the CMV-seropositive cohort and with the CD8+CD28- subset dramatically increased 5-fold.

 
IOW that's the cost of having a persistent infection. That's what it takes to keep it "harmless" -- and that's why one has to be in good health to have "almost no symptoms" (and well-fed I may add).
 
Second, it's not me but you who does not understand. ..which is fine, considering that you claim "to know but an infinitesimal fraction of the life sciences," which I don't buy. I suspect you'd say just about anything only to defend SENS and Reason. You seem to have complete trust in them. I don't know what to say.. ..other than such loyalty and dogged attempts at 'damage control' does the movement more harm than good by making it look sect-like.
 
Third, I don't wanna hear about these "useless T-cells" ever again
 
 
 
Re SENS and "what would I have them do" I very much agree with what alc said here and also in the parallel thread in Supplements, which I just saw today. Considering the number of green buttons under his posts, it's good to know I'm not the only one having these thoughts. You too may wanna chill, niner

[Steve H]

The mark of a good scientist is to modify their approach as new information comes in and this should include SENS. ADG has confirmed they are revising their approach on manipulating key pathways (Conboy lab) as ultimately it could reduce the complexity of SENS (same seven damages but less per strand). This IMO is totally the right way to research and present workable solutions. 

 

CMV is most certainly not harmless in the long term as it takes up immune space better used for other diseases so it's removal should be given serious consideration as part of SENS or any other strategy, I would be interested to hear ADG or Michael Rae's take on CMV and it's relation to SENS. I think I will contact them and get their POV directly and ask them to comment here or forward their response, it would be nice to settle the matter if we can and move onto more productive collaboration.

 

Edited by Steve H, 15 June 2015 - 10:04 AM.

[Steve H]

Further clarification of SENS regarding pathways from Michael on FA!:

 

He is emphatically not now saying that we should take the results of parabiosis experiments as a route to developing ways to outwit metabolism by replacing what declines with age and inhibiting what rises. He is saying that the parabiosis experiments give us clues as to what we need to focus on in terms of repairing the primary damage underlying those changes, as they tell us the effects we will get "for free" once the original damage is repaired.

 

 

I see I had the wrong end of the stick here and that SENS interest in pathways and Irina Conboy's work is to asses the primary damage focus rather than actually using some key pathways to repair damage. 

 

I am trying to get an official response regards CMV if possible although from what I have read of SENS and my understanding (probably wrong) it would suggest CMV takes up immune "space" that could be better used for other functions. 

 

If so would this suggest a common ground between both camps that CMV is bad and it's removal is probably a good idea either way?

[Steve H]

So no official stance from SENS regarding CMV perhaps Michael Rae can comment?

[Michael]

Sorry, Steve (and others): as I said when I split the topic, "It's going to take me a while to disentangle all of th[ese] ... specific to questions around CMV, anergic T-cells, and thymic rejuvenation, ... [and]  Dr. de Grey's and/or SENS Research Foundation's views and proposals on these subjects ... but I will weigh in to clarify several points and (yes) offer a scientific argument for why we're doing what we're (actually) doing."