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Mercurial comments on What visionary project would you fund? - Less Wrong
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Comments (71)
I daresay that most reasonably well-funded medical research would become almost entirely obsolete if SENS were to work. It's hard to justify researching more effective heart attack medication when no one gets biologically old enough for heart attacks to be a serious problem anymore.
You are certainly right that a lot of big pharma research would become obsolete if "robust rejuvenation" (i.e. 30 years extended life with treatment starting in middle age) is achieved but we don't want to stop doing basic medical research even if SENS works, You might not be that interested in producing more efficient calcium channel blockers, but you are probably still interested in calcium channels in smooth muscle. Aside from the aspect of treating non-age related diseases, we need to understand biology in order to make SENS work long term; one of Aubrey De Grey's key claims is that we know (in principal) enough about the aging we see today in order to know what to treat, but that probably isn't true for the kind of aging we would see in a 150-year-old. (This is not something De Grey is disputing).
I totally agree with you. What I mean is that most of the money currently being poured into, say, repairing heart disease damage could instead be poured into researching the nature of metabolism in general. Trying to manage the symptoms for heart disease, morbid obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, and all the other diseases associated with aging just doesn't seem nearly as efficient as fixing the common problem causing all of these. We would still want to explore the nature of biology once something like SENS succeeds, true, but we wouldn't need to do so by dumping tons of money into repairing people who are dying right now of those diseases. It becomes "How does this work?" research instead of "How do we keep these people from dying tomorrow?" research.
I do agree that medical research focuses too much on managing age related disease - sweeping under the carpet strategy - rather than curing (might just be a too bit fastidious about this, we might mean the same thing) but viewing aging as unitary process - that can be cured in a single stroke "fixing the common problem" - is probably not an accurate description. Aging is a number of different processes from miss-folded protein build up to an increase in number of mutations, that have in common that they build up over time and have a negative effect on our health. SENS aims to solve each of these problems separately.
I agree. Any impression I give otherwise is an artifact of my brevity.
Doesn't that depend on heart attacks being a function of age rather than a function of time? Anti-aging doesn't necessarily mean anti-arterial-plaque-buildup. I do agree that entire classes of problems might go away though, which would be amazing.
Arteriosclerosis is a condition that is considered a part of aging/age related disease. Since it arise probably partly due to macrophages inability to break down extracellular aggregates (oxidised cholesterol) and lipids reacting with calcium that build up over time, as well as loss of elasticity of the arterial wall.