SENS Research Foundation Receives $2.4M Ethereum Donation from Vitalik Buterin
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Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.
Death is very healthy at the species level.
(Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)
Many different areas of research, such as cancer research, could fit under the umbrella of "life extension."
Then bear in mind that most aging research is still purely investigational, not aimed at producing any sort of intervention. Calico falls into this category, more is the pity.
Then bear in mind that of the interventional research, most of that is focused on calorie restriction mimetic or similar stress response tinkering that can't possibly significantly extend human life span.
Then at the far bottom of this funnel, with a tiny amount of funding, is rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort advocated by the SRF, repair the damage that causes aging in order to reverse aging.
So, yes. Very underfunded.
Then if we look at cancer research, there is a different problem and effort to change the split of research strategy and allocation of dollars. Cancer research has progressed very slowly because there are hundreds of subtypes of cancer and researchers have been pursuing strategies that only tackle one, or only tackle a mechanism that cancers can evolve away from. What is needed for progress in cancer research is greater funding and attention for strategies that are general to many or all cancers, and which cancers cannot evolve away from. Such as CAR-T therapies, or a few other types of immunotherapy that are comparatively general, or have low costs of adaptation to different cancers, or interdiction of telomerase and ALT to prevent cancers lengthening their telomeres, or the like. The latter of those is a SENS Research Foundation initiative.
I wonder, if the idea were more mainstream, if life extension funding on a large scale would be opposed by similar arguments: 'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.'
Which is silly, because ending aging would save huge amounts of money. Compare the health care expenses of the average person at 30 and 80.
This seems like a very weird thing to be opposed to. I can see a personal disagreement with life extension, usually rooted in religion, but to oppose research in this area?
I guess there's all sorts of people.
In Bostrom's "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant", note the line spoken by the aged king at the end: "Today we are like children again."
When the dragon is vanquished, the old are children again – but they're also the last children.
How much do you think it would cost to halt aging? Unless it’s essentially magic like “Booster Spice” from Larry Niven, this tech would almost certainly be an ongoing series of treatments and modifications, probably not cheap either. What do you think would be the reaction of the world at large when faced with the prospect of some fraction of the “1%” becoming functionally immortal while they’re still dirt poor and mortal? I don’t think humans would accept that particular inequality.
We live in a world full of nuclear weapons and other horrors, and I can’t think of anything more calculated to lead to them being used than the ultra-rich cheating death and aging. Aside from the sense of unfairness, you’d be faced with the practical horrors of immortal oligarchs and plutocrats. Control over who gets to be ageless would also be an obvious way to create a permanent ruling class.
An end to aging only starts to seem like something other than them prelude to our own destruction if we’ve solved a number of other problems first. If you just throw functional immortality into the world as it is, and has been to date, the outcome would be apocalyptic.
Freedom from aging only sounds paradisical if everyone has equal access to it, otherwise it’s just how the world ends.
I doubt very much that any viable longevity treatment will not also increase neuroplasticity like when you were young and idealistic. As such, I'm no longer convinced of the same conclusion you reached.
The end of aging will lead to extermination/genocide in one form of another. There is no way around it.
Except that won't happen, because population growth or plateau or start falling within the next century die to spreading affluence. Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative.
The end of aging is probably inevitable, but it won't necessarily a yield a continuously growing population.
No, it's not; the US is, notably, among the first world nations with a positive rate of natural growth.
Not really. Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research primarily because it's a hard problem, with no breakthrough in sight.
> Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components. Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are entirely composed of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will nevertheless deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are redundant in irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct consequence of systems redundancy. Reliability theory also predicts the late-life mortality deceleration with subsequent leveling-off, as well as the late-life mortality plateaus, as an inevitable consequence of redundancy exhaustion at extreme old ages. The theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems
In a parallel universe, Buterin is doing something way worse for humanity with his genius and his resolve, so I'll take the Buterin we have today.
Right now, Ethereum's promised "global supercomputer" is more like a 1960s IBM mainframe that you can access through wildly expensive dial-up links. What kind of world-changing networked software would you have built on that?
It doesn't seem to actually work for any applications other than escrow (ICOs) – and even that has a strong pyramidic sniff to it, because it's used to collect investments into Ethereum-based protocols that can't really result in functional applications on Ethereum unless it's radically redesigned.
Maybe they'll pull it off and Ethereum will be useful a few years from now. I'm not making any bets.
Ten years ago that kind of adoption would have been considered impossible.
Anything beyond that is moving the goalposts. I'm happy to be along for the ride rather than commenting about the "this is not the likely implementation of this technology" / "it's used for scams" / "it doesn't scale."
I am aware of all that and I agree with most of it. But the financial adoption of this technology is itself incredibly amazing, and something I think people overlook so they can make a technically-correct point about the tech in its infancy. Which is not to say you are doing it, but it's pretty close, especially since I didn't advocate for Ethereum as genius (it's pretty interesting, if you ask me; and smart contracts do a great job of exposing how stupid people are and how terrible of developers we are).
And a comparatively microscopic proportion of those billions are used to purchase goods or services.
However I'm not convinced that Ethereum's "jack of all trades" approach has long-term potential – it looks a lot like an initial vague research prototype that needs to be pared down to specific verticals before you have a product. (Exposing the stupidity of everyone who tries to use it for anything may not be the best way to build a long-term community?)
Personally I like to imagine Ethereum as a 1969 mainframe occupying a giant office floor, and then ask the question: ARPANET was just around the corner in 1969, so what would that change look like this time? In other words, what's the "TCP/IP" for Ethereum's "mainframe on dial-up"?
https://about.me/vitalik_buterin
"I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
And a brief mention on Wikipedia on the other point:
"Ethereum was first described in Buterin's white paper, in late 2013. Buterin argued that bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. But when he failed to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language."
This is satire.
Probably because he didn't realize bitcoin already had Bitcoin script. It's mostly ethereum people who disbelieve in the existence of bitcoin scripting... but go look at the source code, it's right there.
OP_RETURN is the greatest turning point in cryptocurrency history
Needless to say everyone in the SENS community is very pleased by this unexpected generosity. These funds will go a long way towards helping to push allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes (remove the contribution of damaged mitochondria to aging) and cross-link breakers (remove stiffening of arteries and loss of elasticity in other tissues) to completion over the next couple of years, not to mention a range of other important projects in rejuvenation research.
It makes us think that we're somewhere crucial in the tipping point for support and understanding of rejuvenation biotechnology as field.
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On this topic, I have a pet theory regarding wealth and its use to change the world. Historically, people who became extraordinarily wealthy have done so only after many years of work on projects that they were deeply invested in for the sake of the work, not for the sake of financial reward. Consequently they had no real idea regarding what to do with that wealth, other than to keep on moving forward in the shape that they had carved out for their lives prior to that enrichment. They became one with the process that brought them to where they were. Further, these were usually older people by that point, come to terms with the human condition, more comfortable with the world as it is, not as a younger and more fiery individual would have it be. Not everyone is worn down to acceptance - look at the large-scale, results-oriented philanthropy of Bill Gates, for example - but I think it is definitely the case that vision is often one of the early casualties of aging, and the advent of personal wealth doesn't change that situation for any given individual. For every Bill Gates there are another twenty billionaires who fail to change the world in any significant way beyond the ventures that earned them their fortunes.
Cryptocurrencies, the first application of blockchain technologies, have resulted in a sizable number of people who have become enormously wealthy in a much shorter period of time, and at younger ages, than has typically been the case in the past. Even the dotcom bubble era and its immediate sequels didn't reach these levels of youthful enrichment, and that produced a fair number of people young enough and wealthy enough to set forth to remake sections of the world in the service of loftier agendas. They escaped being shaped by the processes of their enrichment to a great enough degree to retain fire and vision. Consider the willingness to put capital towards world-changing futurist ideals exhibited by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, to pick a few. But while that generation of high net worth individuals have certainly supported the life sciences, and in Peter Thiel's case SENS rejuvenation research, they largely haven't followed Thiel's support for the goal of treating aging as a medical condition, and Thiel himself has certainly not gone all-in. He hasn't followed the logic further towards its end, in that the only rational use for excess capital in this age is to develop viable treatments to reverse aging. When you can buy time with money, and not just for yourself, but for everyone, then that is the rational thing to do.
The wealthy of the blockchain community may well proceed differently. The times are different, for one, as rejuvenation research after the SENS model of damage repair is more broadly known and accepted nowadays. The technology industry of the Bay Area, still in many ways the spiritual center of modern software engineering and invention, includes a great many supporters of SENS, the Methuselah Foundation, and the SENS Research Foundation, and that number has grown considerably over the past fifteen years. Aging is an engineering problem, SENS is a set of repairs and a set of outlines for repair technologies, and engineers grasp that readily. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many engineers, software and otherwise, to be found participating in the past fifteen years of philanthropy to support progress in rejuvenation research, work based on periodic repair of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Now it is the case that many of those engineers in the cryptocurrency space are both young and suddenly wealthy, people who have not been worn down to an acceptance of the world as it is, have not become one with their process of enrichment. They are still willing to consider radical change to the status quo, full of the fire of success, and equipped with sufficient resources to push forward the research and development that they would like to see happen. Exciting times.
As an ignorant observer... is the SENS foundation viewed as alegitimate research org, or is it, to borrow a phrase coined by Djikstra..."something that could only have been invented in southern california".
http://www.sens.org/research/publications
Also, see their research advisory board, which includes numerous respected researchers, leaders in their areas of work.
http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board
You might be familiar with senolytics, the clearance of senescent cells as a way to treat aging that is presently taking off in a big way in the research and development communities. Aubrey de Grey, cofounder of the SRF, called for that back in 2002, and the SENS programs have advocated for it since then:
http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf
The SRF and original parent organization Methuselah Foundation seed funded Oisin Biotechnologies to work on gene therapy for senolytics a few years ago. Other lines of development have also spun off into companies in the SRF network.
The lucky few, with some in tech reading HN, work on what they're intrinsically excited by and get paid to do it. Most don't.
You retire when you can for however long you can afford, then eventually go back to school and start again. That's the whole point of multiple lifetimes. If that doesn't interest you, then you can live your one full life, retire and die like all of your ancestors.
If you come up with a satisfying answer to that question, it probably won't be far from Vitalik's reason for donating to anti-aging research.
I guess the difference is: in a company an investor can look at a cap table and say "that's a reasonable number of shares for the founders to keep" whereas the coin "investors" can't know how much of outstanding equity belongs to the founders.
What about crypto currencies? Obviously there's nothing immoral about the founders holding equity in their own currency. In fact, as an investor I'd prefer to know that the founders had some skin in the game! But, the idea that I don't have any transparency or accountability to protect my interest is unsettling. Further, the notion that a founder could just liquidate and walk one day with no recourse doesn't leave me with very much assurance that my investment is safe.
I think coming to terms with the morality is a fun thought experiment but not entirely useful. We should be thinking about how to apply the right amounts of transparency and regulation to keep the public safe.
Personally, I would rather have an optimal life - one where I don't have any diseases or ailments, so I can live life to the fullest, all the way up until death. So IMO, currently incurable or intractable things like cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson's, dementia, are more important.
If fixing 'aging' can fix these issues, or if an aging fix is a side-effect of these issues (please enlighten me since I know nothing about aging research) then I would be fine with that - but would still be worried about overpopulation, whether it's the rich or both the rich and poor.
If people are able to live 'forever', may be there's more incentive to invest in these technologies.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170323141340.h...
The only plausible near-future way to remove age-related disease is to periodically repair the damage that causes aging. Nothing else is going to work.
Consider this when thinking about living life to the fullest all the way up until death: if you are so healthy (meaning lacking in damage) that you don't suffer age-related disease, what are you going to die from? Your mortality risk is a function of the load of cell and tissue damage you currently bear. The only way to prevent age-related disease is to have a low load of damage, and consequently a low rate of mortality.
Given today's accident and murder rates, an ageless human undergoing comprehensive damage repair every decade or so would live for 1000 years or more before encountering a fatal happenstance. If you live much past a century from now, I'd have to imagine other technological options opening up that make that number seems small.
On overpopulation, it seems pretty clear from the research carried out on this topic that agelessness will not result in problematically large populations. Wealthy regions are already declining in population growth, and poor regions decline as they become wealthier. The poor are being lifted up rapidly.
See, for example, Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/
It also seems fairly clear that what people call overpopulation now would be better described as some mix of kleptocracy, war, other bad governance, and endemic poverty that in many cases is being addressed at a fast rate in comparison to past history. Given the long list of regions that have lifted themselves up from peasant farming to technology industries and wealth since the 1950s, one has to look at those that haven't succeeded in this, and ask why: it certainly doesn't correlate with number of people.
For example, the Methuselah Foundation and Methuselah Fund are working with Leucadia (https://www.leucadiatx.com/), which has a credible cure for Alzheimer's in progress. SENS and Methuselah are also working with Oisin Biotechnologies, which has technology to carefully target specific cells; in addition to working for senescent cell clearing, it can also serve as a component of a cancer treatment, precisely targeting cancerous cells.
So yes, anti-aging research can and will be comprehensive, covering aging itself, age-related degeneration, and the conditions that become increasingly prevalent if you manage to avoid dying of something else before they strike.
As for overpopulation, that's been specifically researched and considered too. Among many other things, if you compare birth rates to life expectancy and mortality rates, you'll find them inversely proportional; people have more children when life feels more fleeting (to improve their chances), and vice versa. And even if that weren't the case, we'd deal with it.
Meanwhile, 150,000 people die every day. That needs to stop. That's not a price worth paying for anything.
what if 150,000 people dying per day is the cost of mankind's ability to progress with each generation? especially in science, progress occurs as the old guard dies...
Look at it this way: if we were currently in the state where nobody died, ever, who would choose to start murdering a hundred and fifty thousand people every day in the name of "progress", or in the name of anything?
And in any case, who's to say we wouldn't gain massively in progress by not losing the most experienced minds, and instead benefiting from their experience? Or by letting people study longer because they have all the time in the world?
And would we do so not by painlessly euthanizing people after 100 years of healthy life, but instead by infecting everyone with a plague that cripples our bodies and minds over several decades?
Classic false dilemma fallacy. Those diseases already receive far more funding than generalized anti-aging research. There's no reason we can't work on both in earnest.
Moreover, barring any sort of miracle cures or quick-fix hacks—any scenario where humanity realizes technological progress sufficient to master the human body, is one where we can probably make short work of any overpopulation concerns.
That's not getting into the non-morbid negative effects of aging: reduced mobility, slower cognition, memory problems, etc.
Concerning overpopulation, in all major Western countries, we currently have fertility rates below replacement - if it weren't for immigration, our population would be declining. With immortality,
That's true practically be definition. A "cure" for aging would mean that people who are 60 years old would have the same health profiles as people who are 20. Which means much less susceptibility to serious diseases and much improved quality of life. (And saving trillions in medical expenses as a side effect).
It’s impossible to solve aging without solving these age related diseases, does that help?
Citation needed.
On a very short timeline, aka a few days. In the past say, oh, I dunno, 3 months (which apparently is long-term), it hasn't been at all.
And do you think Buterin just donated $2.4mm fiat value overnight after it crashed this past week? It's probably been talked about for weeks if not months, or years.