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 d...
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.