I have seen him speak a couple of times and he addressed many of these criticisms in the talks. You might want to read his response to these criticisms before assuming they are valid.
A lot of this comes from a lack of appreciation of the difference between science and engineering. In engineering you just have to find something that works. You don’t need to understand everything.
Some debate here and you can easily find his talks online:
In his talks I did not get the sense that he is positioning himself as a great misunderstood maverick. He does say that in his opinion much ageing research is unproductive because it is aimed at understanding the problem rather than fixing it.
For example, rather than tweak metabolic processes to produce slightly smaller amounts of toxic substances, remove those substances by various means, or replace the cells grown old from said toxic substances.
His solution to cancer is to remove the telomerase genes. This way cancer cells will die after X divisions. Of course this creates the problem that stem cells will not work. So we will need to replenish germ lines in the immune system, stomach walls, skin etc.
These are “dumb” strategies and rarely of interest to scientists perhaps for that reason.
There is a similar issue in nanotechology discussed in Drexler’s book “Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization”. For example you do not need to solve the protein folding problem in generality in order to design proteins that have specific shapes. You just need to find a set of patterns that allow you to build proteins of specific shapes.
I have seen him speak a couple of times and he addressed many of these criticisms in the talks. You might want to read his response to these criticisms before assuming they are valid.
A lot of this comes from a lack of appreciation of the difference between science and engineering. In engineering you just have to find something that works. You don’t need to understand everything.
Some debate here and you can easily find his talks online:
http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/
In his talks I did not get the sense that he is positioning himself as a great misunderstood maverick. He does say that in his opinion much ageing research is unproductive because it is aimed at understanding the problem rather than fixing it.
For example, rather than tweak metabolic processes to produce slightly smaller amounts of toxic substances, remove those substances by various means, or replace the cells grown old from said toxic substances.
His solution to cancer is to remove the telomerase genes. This way cancer cells will die after X divisions. Of course this creates the problem that stem cells will not work. So we will need to replenish germ lines in the immune system, stomach walls, skin etc.
These are “dumb” strategies and rarely of interest to scientists perhaps for that reason.
There is a similar issue in nanotechology discussed in Drexler’s book “Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization”. For example you do not need to solve the protein folding problem in generality in order to design proteins that have specific shapes. You just need to find a set of patterns that allow you to build proteins of specific shapes.
(edited for typos)
I will definitely be going over this, it looks very helpful. Thank you for making this.