Free Republic

Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city’s soaring skyline, Peter Thiel was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical. It was 2004 and Thiel had recently made a tidy fortune selling PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay. He had spent what he wanted on himself — a posh penthouse suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and a silver Ferrari — and was now soliciting ideas to do good with his money. The Human Upgrade: (snip) Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist...

Do You Want to Live Forever? By Sherwin Nuland Febuary 2005 Wandering through the quadrangles and medieval bastions of learning at the University of Cambridge one overcast Sunday afternoon a few months ago, I found myself ruminating on how this venerable place had been a crucible for the scientific revolution that changed humankind’s perceptions of itself and of the world. The notion of Cambridge as a source of grand transformative concepts was very much on my mind that day, because I had traveled to England to meet a contemporary Cantabrigian who aspires to a historical role similar to those...

The curious case of the catatonic biogerontologists The SENS strategy as described here purports to have all the characteristics that should make it persuasive: it's detailed, it's thorough and it's all firmly based on established experimental work in the various relevant areas of biology. So, you may well ask, where's the catch? Why, on all the many documentaries on aging that remain so popular, don't my colleagues come out and advocate the work that I advocate? There are three main reasons why most mainstream gerontologists remain so conspicuously absent from the growing band of vocal advocates of the SENS approach...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links and visual aids; please visit it in order to access those links.) SENS is a practical, foreseeable approach to curing aging because all the types of metabolic side-effect whose accumulation is (or is even hypothesised to be) eventually pathogenic are amenable to repair (or in some cases obviation, i.e. disruption of the mechanism by which they become pathogenic) by techniques that, according to the experimentalists who have performed the key work on which those techniques build, can (with adequate funding) probably be implemented in mice within a decade or so. There...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links; please visit it in order to access those links.) What is Engineered Negligible Sensecence? "It's not a very catchy name, is it?" you may be thinking. Yes, I know -- "Engineered Negligible Senescence" has ten syllables and is not the world's most memorable, or indeed self-explanatory, phrase. But it is a good name for our ultimate goal, honest -- as well as SENS being a catchy acronym. Here's an explanation. I'm afraid it starts with a rather long preamble, but trust me, it's worth it. First, let's be precise: our ultimate...