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Mercurial comments on What visionary project would you fund? - Less Wrong
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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.