Why Prioritize SENS Research for Human Longevity?

Really? I think it has been in the press for a couple of decades now. At any rate, it's probably wise to spread the research money around. The war on cancer started with Nixon is about 40 years old, and we still have a long way to go? My hope is that crowd sourcing and funding really catches for science on in the next few years. Wouldn't it be great to have a lot more resources, both money and people, working on interesting science problems?

Telomeres exist to prevent out of control cell reproduction, ie cancer. Turn them off and you get a very high cancer rate.

That's not to say we can't end aging by extending them, but it's not that simple.

Telomeres are not immortality. They are "ulimit" for cells. Maximum number of forked processes. Set the limit to unlimited, oops cancer.

Also, they are only one of the factors that combine to cause of ageing.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

It stands for Strategies for Engineered Negliable Senescence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negli...

Also, the "chief science officer" is a computer scientist turned biogerontologist.

SENS is a detailed research plan focused on reversing and repairing age-related frailty, disease and degeneration. It is built on a broad range of research results from the past decades of research into aging and human biochemistry. An introduction to SENS for laypeople is here:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2004/11/strategies-for-en...

Ending Aging, the book, is essentially a crash course in the scientific backing for SENS; if you're up for reading at the boundary of popular science and actual science (i.e. harder stuff than A Brief History of Time) then you should check it out.

The SENS Research Foundation has a pretty stellar advisory board, including George Church, Anthony Atala, etc - noted figures in their fields:

http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board

The reason why SENS is accompanied by advocacy is that we're inching into a revolution in aging science; the old school of drug development and metabolic tinkering is following a path that will go nowhere fast, chewing up a bunch of money to achieve next to nothing of consequence other than knowledge. Meanwhile there is a demonstrably better and disruptive road to producing much better outcomes for intervening in the aging process. SENS is one expression of that road, but by no means the only one: anything that focuses on repair of existing metabolism over changing metabolism or understanding the progression of damage is far better.

The crucial points are made in the quote below, and these are the essence of the disruption of aging research that is coming - the speed with which it arrives determined by the pace at which SENS and similar programs stop being the underdogs and become the mainstream:

"Present arguments within the mainstream of aging research are largely over the relative importance of damage type A versus damage type B, and how exactly the extremely complex interaction of damage with metabolism progresses - but not what that damage actually is. A large fraction of modern funding for aging research goes towards building a greater understanding this progression; certainly more than goes towards actually doing anything about it. Here is the thing, however: while understanding the dynamics of damage in aging is very much a work in progress, the damage itself is well known. The research community can accurately enumerate the differences between old tissue and young tissue, or an old cell and a young cell - and it has been a good number of years since anything new was added to that list.

"If you can repair the cellular damage that causes aging, it doesn't matter how it happens or how it affects the organism when it's there. This is the important realization for SENS - that much of the ongoing work of the aging research community is largely irrelevant if the goal is to get to human rejuvenation as rapidly as possible. Enough is already known of the likely causes of aging to have a reasonable expectation of being able to produce laboratory demonstrations of rejuvenation in animal models within a decade or two, given large-scale funding."

Exactly. Once a method to significantly lengthen human lifespan is found, the challenge then becomes: where do the natural resources come from to support such an expanding world population. When that day of great scientific discovery arrives, we may all be on a calorie restricted diet, whether we choose to or not.

> I also wonder if he is on calorie restriction [5], i think it's quite possible

He was at least a decade or so ago. I remember it as a factoid in a piece Discover magazine did about him and his research.

It will help the averages by bringing up the bottom and middle, but I think anyone seriously going after SENS doesn't care about that as much as he cares about the outliers (ie himself) who presumably do all that stuff already.

You need to learn the concept of the limiting factor. Drop sugar a bit, longevity goes up. Drop it a lot, longevity doesn't go above the maximum of eighty-ish. Hey, what's up, it looked so promising? Well, you solved the worst problem, but now there's all the other problems.

That's essentially what SENS is: having categorized all the problems that cause age related death, it's possible to attack them all at once. Or more accurately, attack the damage they cause, switching from either a "don't cause damage" (what you're advocating here) or a "cope with damage" (conventional geriatrics) model to a "periodically, repair the damage" one.

Calorie restriction diets are not a viable method for combatting aging; they make for absolutely miserable patients.