SENS is fundamentally in competition with dozens or hundreds of profit seeking organizations in the world. Donations to SENS are like donations to a charity researching better plastic surgery techniques. They will get invented no matter what, and the amount of money you can throw at it is trivial compared to the potential customer base of said techniques. If you cure aging, billionaires everywhere will fall over themselves to give you money.
The things that SENS is working on right now are not ready for investment. I’m going to call you out on this one: please name something SENS is or has researched which is or was the subject of private industry or taxpayer research at the time that SENS was working on it. I think you’ll find that such examples, if they exist at all, are isolated. It is nevertheless the goal of SENS to create a vibrant rejuvenation industry with the private sector eventually taking the reins. But until then, there is a real need for a non-profit to fund research that is too speculative and/or too far from clinical trials to achieve return-on-investment on a typical funding horizon.
I generally quite agree with you here. I really enormously appreciate the effort SENS is putting into addressing this horror, and there does seem to be a hyperbolic discounting style problem with most of the serious anti-aging tech that SENS is trying to address.
But I think you might be stating your case too strongly:
please name something SENS is or has researched which is or was the subject of private industry or taxpayer research at the time that SENS was working on it. I think you’ll find that such examples, if they exist at all, are isolated.
If I recall correctly, one of Aubrey’s Seven Deadly Things is cancer, and correspondingly one of the seven main branches of SENS is an effort to eliminate cancer via an idea Aubrey came up with via inspiration. (I honestly don’t remember the strategy anymore. It has been about six years since I’ve read Ending Aging.)
If you want to claim that no one else was working on Aubrey’s approach to ending all cancers or that anyone else doing it was isolated, I think that’s fair, but kind of silly. And obviously there’s a ton of money going into cancer research in general, albeit I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it was dedicated to solving specific cancers rather than all cancer at once.
But I want to emphasize that this is more of a nitpick on the strength of your claim. I agree with the spirit of it.
What I’m saying is the actual research project being funded by SENS are those which are not being adequately funded elsewhere. For example, stem cell therapy is one of the seven pillars of the SENS research agenda, but SENS does almost no work on this whatsoever because it is being adequately funded elsewhere. Likewise, cancer forms another pillar of SENS research, but to my knowledge SENS has only worked on avenues of early-stage research that is not being pursued elsewhere, like the case you mentioned.
I interpreted drethelin’s comment as saying that donating to SENS was a waste of money since it’s a drop in the bucket compared to for-profit and government research programs. My counter-point is that for-profit and public programs are not pursuing the same research as SENS is doing.
And obviously there’s a ton of money going into cancer research in general, albeit I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it was dedicated to solving specific cancers rather than all cancer at once.
I think the consensus in the field is at the moment that cancer isn’t a single thing. Therefore “solve all cancer at once” unfortunately doesn’t make a good goal.
That’s my vague impression too. But if I remember correctly, the original idea of OncoSENS (the part of SENS addressing cancer) was something that in theory would address all cancer regardless of type.
I also seem to recall that most experimental biologists thought that many of Aubrey’s ideas about SENS, including OncoSENS, were impractical and that they betrayed a lack of familiarity with working in a lab. (Although I should note, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. I, too, lack familiarity with working in a lab!)
But if I remember correctly, the original idea of OncoSENS (the part of SENS addressing cancer) was something that in theory would address all cancer regardless of type.
I just reread the OncoSENS page.
The idea was to nuke the gene for telomerase from every cell in the body and also nuke a gene for alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT).
Nuking out telomerase in every cell doesn’t need further cancer research but gene therapy research. Albeit most gene therapy is about adding gene’s instead of deleting them.
SENS is fundamentally in competition with dozens or hundreds of profit seeking organizations in the world.
Sort of. It might be nice if, say, a cure for diabetes was owned by a non-profit that released it into the public domain rather than by a corporation that would charge for it. (Obviously forcing corporations to be non-profits has predictably terrible side effects, and so the only proper way to do this is by funding participants in the race yourself.) From the perspective of the for-profits, a single non-profit competitor only slightly adjusts their environment, and so may not significantly adjust their incentive structure.
They will get invented no matter what
It would seem that the sooner a treatment is developed / cure found, the less people will suffer or die from the disease. Moving that sooner seems like a valuable activity.
SENS is fundamentally in competition with dozens or hundreds of profit seeking organizations in the world. Donations to SENS are like donations to a charity researching better plastic surgery techniques. They will get invented no matter what, and the amount of money you can throw at it is trivial compared to the potential customer base of said techniques. If you cure aging, billionaires everywhere will fall over themselves to give you money.
The things that SENS is working on right now are not ready for investment. I’m going to call you out on this one: please name something SENS is or has researched which is or was the subject of private industry or taxpayer research at the time that SENS was working on it. I think you’ll find that such examples, if they exist at all, are isolated. It is nevertheless the goal of SENS to create a vibrant rejuvenation industry with the private sector eventually taking the reins. But until then, there is a real need for a non-profit to fund research that is too speculative and/or too far from clinical trials to achieve return-on-investment on a typical funding horizon.
I generally quite agree with you here. I really enormously appreciate the effort SENS is putting into addressing this horror, and there does seem to be a hyperbolic discounting style problem with most of the serious anti-aging tech that SENS is trying to address.
But I think you might be stating your case too strongly:
If I recall correctly, one of Aubrey’s Seven Deadly Things is cancer, and correspondingly one of the seven main branches of SENS is an effort to eliminate cancer via an idea Aubrey came up with via inspiration. (I honestly don’t remember the strategy anymore. It has been about six years since I’ve read Ending Aging.)
If you want to claim that no one else was working on Aubrey’s approach to ending all cancers or that anyone else doing it was isolated, I think that’s fair, but kind of silly. And obviously there’s a ton of money going into cancer research in general, albeit I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it was dedicated to solving specific cancers rather than all cancer at once.
But I want to emphasize that this is more of a nitpick on the strength of your claim. I agree with the spirit of it.
What I’m saying is the actual research project being funded by SENS are those which are not being adequately funded elsewhere. For example, stem cell therapy is one of the seven pillars of the SENS research agenda, but SENS does almost no work on this whatsoever because it is being adequately funded elsewhere. Likewise, cancer forms another pillar of SENS research, but to my knowledge SENS has only worked on avenues of early-stage research that is not being pursued elsewhere, like the case you mentioned.
I interpreted drethelin’s comment as saying that donating to SENS was a waste of money since it’s a drop in the bucket compared to for-profit and government research programs. My counter-point is that for-profit and public programs are not pursuing the same research as SENS is doing.
I think the consensus in the field is at the moment that cancer isn’t a single thing. Therefore “solve all cancer at once” unfortunately doesn’t make a good goal.
That’s my vague impression too. But if I remember correctly, the original idea of OncoSENS (the part of SENS addressing cancer) was something that in theory would address all cancer regardless of type.
I also seem to recall that most experimental biologists thought that many of Aubrey’s ideas about SENS, including OncoSENS, were impractical and that they betrayed a lack of familiarity with working in a lab. (Although I should note, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. I, too, lack familiarity with working in a lab!)
I just reread the OncoSENS page.
The idea was to nuke the gene for telomerase from every cell in the body and also nuke a gene for alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT).
Nuking out telomerase in every cell doesn’t need further cancer research but gene therapy research. Albeit most gene therapy is about adding gene’s instead of deleting them.
As far as research funding goes SENS seems to be currently funding research into ALT (http://www.sens.org/research/intramural/the-alt-mechanism). I think it’s plausible that ALT research is otherwise underfunded but I don’t know the details.
Sort of. It might be nice if, say, a cure for diabetes was owned by a non-profit that released it into the public domain rather than by a corporation that would charge for it. (Obviously forcing corporations to be non-profits has predictably terrible side effects, and so the only proper way to do this is by funding participants in the race yourself.) From the perspective of the for-profits, a single non-profit competitor only slightly adjusts their environment, and so may not significantly adjust their incentive structure.
It would seem that the sooner a treatment is developed / cure found, the less people will suffer or die from the disease. Moving that sooner seems like a valuable activity.