Sorry for not providing my thoughts on this more promptly - been travelling as usual. I'd like to add my voice to the praise for Jay and his colleagues for this potentially ground-breaking piece. I say "potentially" because, as others have stated, there are many prior examples where people made what everyone here would consider an unassailable case for seriously funding life extension research and no traction resulted. However, the Scientist piece is a model of political correctness (even including the ridiculing of SENS - I sympathise with Dan Perry for having to put his name to that, since I was in the same sort of position with the Position Statement), so it has as good a chance of swaying public policy as any. (Was the citation of the Position Statement a mistake, by the way? - it said that only by postponing aging will we extend healthy lifespan much, but I don't recall any mention of the feasibility of doing so.)
I would caution only that before taking this to Congress the authors prepare rather solid answers to questions comparing the present day with the late 1960s, when both total and healthy life expectancy in the West were about seven years less than now and evidence against the "dividend" argument might thus be adduced. The spin with which the extrapolation from rodent life extension is laced, and for which I have criticised Rich Miller in the past, is another weakness, as has already been mentioned by John Schloendorn: if Congress were to ask Rich the straight question whether (and why) he really thinks biogerontologists could add seven years to the healthy lifespan of baby-boomers given the funds, he'd better have a convincing reply, or this paper may ultimately do more harm than good. A similar problem surrounds the discussion of compression of morbidity, for which the evidence (either in humans or in rodents) is very limited and for which the evidence that it can be achieved by intervening in aging is overwhelmingly negative. But I mention these points only as risks that people should anticipate - I don't say that those with political skill and experience can't finesse them.
I'm a little surprised that Jay says I've failed to make the Dividend case in the past. I'm sure he and his coauthors all agree with me that (a) after seven years have been achieved, the argument for another seven will be just as strong as the argument for the first seven is now, and that (b) the faster we achieve a given amount of progress the better. The dispute within gerontology is thus 100% about the feasibility and, given that, the political palatability of doing better than Jay and colleagues suggest, and not at all about the desirability of doing so. Both the talks of mine that Jay mentions were restricted to feasibility and political palatability, but he's seen masses of my talks and papers in which I make the very same points that he and his coauthors make in the Scientist (though perhaps not so succinctly). Perhaps he has been distracted by the fact that I then rapidly move on to discuss why these arguments have so abjectly failed to stimulate public funding and to offer somewhat more radical suggestions for changing that - in particular, the role of philanthropy - than are presented in Jay et al's piece.
In short: the more mainstream biogerontologists come out and make the case that aging is bad for us, the harder it will be for others to continue to defend it, so any high-profile effort, however politically correct, is a substantial contribution to progress and I again congratulate Jay et al and wish them luck. Meanwhile, those of us who appreciate that dismissing a new idea out of hand because it sounds too good to be true is just the kind of "thought experiment" that some experimental biologists are so inclined to scorn will proceed with laying the groundwork for a much more rapid defeat of aging than these political initiatives contemplate.
LongeCityAdvocacy & Research for Unlimited Lifespans
