My point is that there has been mainstream attention before now and that that hasn't gotten very far. So the outside view is something to the effect that every few decades scientists become much more interested in life-extension, it doesn't go very far, and then they go do other things.
That's not even remotely valid. The interest in actual, honest anti-agapic research ongoing now (and for the last five or six years which in terms of medical research is "now") has never before occurred. It is exactly a new thing.
It certainly has never had widespread mainstream acceptance within the medical research community. (And by the way; inducing clinical immortality in lineages of cells has been going on for several decades. It's nothing new, and it is not related to antiagapics research in the slightest. If it were, you would have been in the rights to bring up the story of "The Immortal Woman" Henrietta Lacks. Keeping lineages of cells alive is easy. Preventing aging in multicellular organisms is not. They also aren't related fields of endeavor.
Understanding that keeping cell cultures alive doesn't have anything to do with preventing aging is a modern understanding that arose after scientists tried to see if they were connected and failed. Contemporary scientists of Carrel for example certainly thought they were related. It is only in hindsight that we've realized that that wasn't the case. The discovery of the Hayflick limit was a major step in realizing that. In fact, that discovery killed off further anti-aging research in the 1960s and it took a while for it to recover.
...That's not even remo
In a comment on his skeptical post about Ray Kurzweil, he writes,
I wonder how people on Less Wrong would respond to that poll?
Edit: (Tried to) fix formatting and typo in title.