Immorta, I want to congratulate you and your partners for putting this together: it's a remarkably wide-ranging layout of things that contribute to aging and age-related diseases, or that might illuminate our understanding of either or their relationship.
However, while I'm really quite impressed with it as a compilation, I think that as a plan to cure aging, it's actually
too comprehensive. In fact, in one sense (and I feel a bit silly in saying this), it's actually
too ambitious a proposal.
What you've laid out here is a proposal to tackle almost every area of science relating to aging and age-related disease -- which, ultimately, amounts to almost everything in biomedical research today -- public and private, basic to translational to clinical, epidemiological and interventional -- plus much public health research. If the path toward a cure for aging necessarily involves a major ramping-up of this entire scope of research, what we're ultimately saying is that we have to gather the political will, market pressure, and financial and intellectual resources to essentially multiply the combined efforts of all of the world's biomedical research by some multiple.
And, much of this is focused on what Aubrey terms
the "gerontological" school of anti-aging biomedicine: the identification and teasing-apart of the metabolic origins of the cellular and molecular damage that underlies aging, following which we would then modulate those pathways in youth to make them less damaging, so that the rate of damage generation is reduced, lowering the rate of its accumulation and ultimately leading to slower aging. As Aubrey has emphasized, this suffers from several pretty serious limitations. For one thing, it will take a very long time to develop treatments, because at present, our understanding of these pathways -- which are only described in the most general terms in your impressive document, which is none the less already a visibly elaborate and highly complex network -- is "woefully incomplete," and is likely to remain so for a very, very long time. For another, precisely because metabolism
is so incredibly complexly interrelated, tinkering with one aspect inevitably ripples in unexpected ways through the entire system; thus, such perturbations of the body's normal metabolic regulatory systems pose an inherent risk of unanticipated consequences: our bodies are designed to operate as finely-balanced homeostatic systems, and interfering with the basic pathways underlying our normal functionality (especially in our current state of relative ignorance) inevitably causes undesired side-effects. And third, such an approach, since it can only
slow the rate of accumulation of aging damage, can only be of very modest benefit to those whose bodies have already suffered significant amounts of aging damage, while the benefits and long-term risks of treatment will take many decades to become clear in the young.
A core advantage of the
SENS platform for biomedical gerontology is that it is based on an
"engineering" heuristic to the development of age-reversing biotechnologiges. The "engineering" approach, opts to bypass the complexity and gulf of ignorance surrounding the metabolic basis of aging, by tackling aging damage
directly, as a therapeutic target in and of itself. By removing, repairing, replacing, or rendering harmless the inert cellular and molecular damage whose accumulation underlies the slide into frailty that is aging, we can regenerate a structurally old body into a structurally young one -- and the metabolic derangements that flow from impairments of those structures can normalize.
This offers several advantages over the 'gerontological' approach, including reduced risk of side-effects (as it minimizes interference with essential metabolic processes) and the ability to benefit persons who have already undergone substantial aging (because it will actually
reverse the structural decay of aging rather than merely
retard it).
In addition, while still ambitious and requiring the launching of a substantial leap forward in research, the fact that the SENS platform requires only the targeting of a limited range of well-characterized therapeutic targets, using only existing or foreseeable biotechnology, ironically makes it both dramatically less expensive, and its fruits considerably nearer-term, than one based on deciphering so massive a range of biological knowledge and unguessed-at therapies embraced in the "Science for Life" documents. This kind of ramp-up is ambitious, but achievable, and in time for many of us now living; I fear that attempting to move beyond the
relatively narrow range of research necessary to achieve the first iteration of the SENS platform and thus initiate "longevity escape velocity" into the much broader agenda of the SfL proposals would trade a carefully-targeted set of clear and concrete proposals into an everything-and-nothing cry for 'more research!' on
everything, diffusing political will, draining and diverting resources, and necessitating an extended political and scientific timeframe that would (yes) cost lives.
I admire the power of the authors of these documents to dream big; I ask you all to awake, and focus your eyes on the road at our feet instead of locking your gaze in a beautiful but ultimately hyperopic sweep of far horizons.
Live long -- live young!
-Michael
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SCIENCE_AGAINST_AGING_POSTER.pdf (133.57K)
