What visionary project would you fund?

Richard_Kennaway

I have just received a survey questionnaire regarding future directions in EU (European Union) research funding, and thought it would be interesting to see how LessWrong would answer the main question:

Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020.

What kind of research challenges should such a project address in your area?
What would be the most urgent research tasks?

Imagine that EU funding is available for one ambitious, visionary project extending beyond 2020.

What kind of research challenges should such a project address in your area?
What would be the most urgent research tasks?

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.

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.

4[anonymous]15y

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).

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What visionary project would you fund?

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What visionary project would you fund?

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