Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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From the text of the article kindly submitted here: "Karl Albrecht established the Elisen Foundation to support cultural causes, and his Oertel trust, which controlled a portion of Aldi Sued, also donates to medical research."

Any working scientist who is actively involved in anti-aging research can tell you that Aubrey de Grey is not going to deliver with his approach. The current Wikipedia article on de Grey is largely written by de Grey and his close friends, and the article there about his approach to anti-aging research is written mostly by fans of his research. Wikipedia is currently a biased source. But I have been going to the complete journal subscriptions of a large research university with a medical school, with updating Wikipedia in mind. The general approach advocated by de Grey (and pursued by other researchers) is interesting, and was worth looking at when it was first mentioned, but it is not panning out as a general approach to reduce risk of aging-related health problems. I think the billionaire mentioned in the article kindly submitted here, who lived into his nineties, knew more on a practical level about how not to age too soon than de Grey does. (Aubrey de Grey has no medical training, after all.)

Mea culpa. I didn't read the article. Glad to hear he was supporting medical research.

And I didn't really mean to say de Grey had all the answers - I'm by no means a fanboy. But I think his approach deserves a lot more attention and research dollars than it's getting. It's far too premature to write it off as "not panning out" - with respect, the medical establishment's efforts aren't "panning out" either, with orders of magnitude more budget.

I am not a doctor either, but I am a student of history, and history is replete with established fields of study resisting disruptive (and correct) new ideas until the very last. I'm not saying this is the case, but it is something we need to consider when you write of the dismissal of all these "working scientists", with their educations and investment in the status quo. It seems extremely plausible to me that a maintenance-based approach will win in the end, and de Grey's work, while not perfect, is at least a decent first effort.

And I doubt this 94-yr-old had any specific knowledge. 94 is on the upper end of a normal lifespan, given healthy lifestyle and the best medicine money can by. It's a little disingenuous to claim that by pure dint of that longevity he knows more than de Grey, who has spent years studying the matter, doctor or not.

> Mea culpa. I didn't read the article

But then you commented anyway, with a lot of conviction and assumptions and no mention of you not having read the article. Why?

Well, because it's 1am, and as you say, assumptions. My bad.

But less assumption than you might imagine. If there had been massive investment by billionaires in "alternative" approaches to anti-aging like deGrey espouses, I probably would have heard about it. Of course it's possible that it's happening in secret, but unlikely.

I guess I also just have a different mindset. Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire, but it just seems so conservative. I mean, forget anti-aging if you like. A team in Japan reckons they can build a space elevator for $8B. You're dying, you've got $20b, fuckin' give it to them! If they succeed, you go down in history as the man who enabled the space elevator. If they don't - well who cares, you're dead. Whose kids need $20b?

Like I said, maybe this mindset changes, but shit, at age 90 and with that much money, I'd certainly be prowling the VIP section of kickstarter for some big ideas to make a dent in the universe.

I don't mean any disrespect by all of this. He seems a very decent man. But I think the reason Elon Musk gets so much love around here is that he's a billionaire who's actually willing to make some crazy bets, and that's so very, very rare.

> Maybe that mindset changes when you're a multi-billionaire,

I've always thought the rich man who doesn't want to die and is desperate to beat it with wealth as a cliché actually, a sign of the ultimate hubris of being wealthy. Desperate to forestall death while others are having a hard time living. Death is the great equalizer, rich and and poor die alike, but in the future I guess the rich will even escape death while some of us cheer them on.

Are you talking about yourself? Living in a first world country, access to first rate medical care, not dying of malaria in sub saharan africa?

Because you could be.

If wanting to live a very long time makes me hubristic then hell yes I'm hubristic. But I think your definition is way off. What's hubristic about wanting to live? Are thousand-year old trees "hubristic"?

You are overly dismissive of de Grey's approach, and if you're going to Wikipedia for the details of SENS then you are in the wrong place. It is documented in far more detail elsewhere.

The standard response to your viewpoint is to point to the SENS Research Foundation advisory board, which includes George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, Maria Blasco, and so on and so forth for a list of luminaries in subfields of medical research relevant to aging:

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

It is also worth looking at the ongoing research collaborations, which involve noted labs at institutions such as Wake Forest, the Buck Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cambridge University, and so on and so forth.

http://www.sens.org/research/extramural

I'm not sure why you think this research work is not panning out when it has barely even started. This is early stage work, creating the building blocks and foundations. The most advanced of the necessary lines of research is ablation of senescent cells, which has been shown to work in accelerated aging mice and is current in studies in normal mice. That is a few years away from technical possibility in humans, further once you add in the regulatory issues, and everything else is further into the future.

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