Watch the video response here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tsI_28O3Ws
This was posted here on lesswrong a while ago, but they recently uploaded a new version of the video and I took the liberty of typing up a transcript.
The video is fairly long, about 25 minutes. But it's incredibly engaging and I highly recommend watching it. For those who prefer text (because it's faster or because you are a computer), you can read the transcript in this google doc, or below in the comments. Enjoy!
Part 2
(7:01) Around what principles have you organized your current diet?
I believe that there’s only really one general principle that one can use when it comes to diet or indeed supplements or anything that we can do today to postpone age-related ill health. And that principle is simply to pay attention to your body. The reason I say that is just because people differ from each other so much. So any specific generalization that one might make, like you can have more of this particular vitamin or whatever, is bound to have a variable effect on different people and in some cases it may actually do harm, in some cases it will be no good, and so on. I do want to emphasize though, that unless you’re an unlucky person who’s aging unusually rapidly, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing that we have around today that can substantially postpone the ill health of old age. And therefore that what we must rely on in order to maximize our chances of having a healthy old age, is simply to hasten the development of therapies that don’t yet exist. Which is exactly what SENS foundation does.
(8:14) In a choice between cybernetic enhancements and technological body modification versus a series of drug supplements and pill as a means of enhancing lifespan, which do you see as being the better option down the road as research and development continues on each?
Well first of all I want to emphasize that really that’s not the right choice, because I’m sure that the ways in which we will really succeed in substantially postponing the ill health of old age, is not by pills and supplements really, or at least not mainly, it will mainly be by regenerative medicine, repairing the molecular and cellular damage that accumulates throughout life. But if we ask a slightly more general question, about the contrast between the promise of biomedical, biological based approaches to combating aging, and shall we say, non-biological approaches, then I think we can predict with some confidence that there will be a progressive improvement, an increase, in the contribution from the non-biological side. What we see at the moment are things like glasses and cochlear implants and moving towards things like artificial hearts, but I think as we see more and more miniaturization, there’s going to be more and more scope for other applications of non-biological technologies to medical problems in general and aging in particular.
(9:31) If you could offer some advice to an upcoming aging researcher, what would it be? Keep in mind that many of us also focus on psycho-social and policy-based aspects of aging as well.
The advice I give to up-and-coming researchers depends very much on what stage one is at. So at the undergraduate level, my advice is to do as general a biology education as possible. The idea here is that aging affects the biology of human beings and other organisms at every level of organization, and therefore it’s no good to just be a biochemist or just a geneticist, you really got to know about all aspects of biology. At the PhD level, I think the critical thing is one’s learning how to cope with the frustration of research, the fact that there will almost always be long periods of time when one’s experiments just aren’t working, or when one finds that one’s last six months of work have been useless or whatever, and so the key thing is to work on something you find really really fascinating, that is going to help you just psychologically to get through those low points in the process. At the postdoctoral level, I think that actually what matters most is to have as much autonomy and to be able to do something that you’re going to get credit for. And so I actually favor going into relatively young labs with a young starting-up professor, who perhaps doesn’t have many other people in their entourage yet. That’s probably the place to get the most done. In terms of the psychosocial and policy aspects, I think what I would say, especially at these more senior levels, at the postdoctoral level especially, that the key thing to do – and this is true on the biology side as well – is to minimize the extent to which one is duplicating or just you know reinforcing and confirming other people’s work. And to focus on areas that tend to be neglected. So in the case of social policy and psychosocial stuff, I think a lot of this revolves around looking at the longer term, looking at how the world is likely to manage with a greater ability to intervene against aging, what the implications are socially and politically and so on. Of course that’s not to say that the current problems of the elderly are in any way unimportant, but I think we already have a great deal of research in that area and perhaps the more forward-looking stuff is more neglected.
(11:58) One of the key concepts you discuss in your talks is escape velocity (that we will reach a stage when life expectancy comes to increase by more than one year for every year that passes). How do you square this with the suggestion that the current generation will enjoy significantly extended lifetimes?
I think it’s a really good example of how extrapolation just doesn’t always work. You know, if you asked someone in 1900 how long it would take to cross the Atlantic in 1950 and they looked at the rates of progress in the increasing speed of ocean-going liners, they wouldn’t have come to an answer of less than a day. Right? So yes, it’s all about new technologies. The thing is, that at the moment when all we have against the ill health and consequent of course mortality of old age is piecemeal one-disease-at-a-time approaches that address the symptoms of aging rather than the causes, it’s inevitable that progress is going to be rather slow. Even though, let’s be clear, progress has been a lot faster than it was a few hundred years ago, we certainly weren’t managing one year per decade back then. But once we can not only slow down but repair the accumulating molecular and cellular damage that we incur throughout life, and that only causes ill health late in life, then we’ll be actually turning back the clock. And turning back the clock buys time to improve therapy so that we can turn back the clock more thoroughly in due course and so on. And this is how I ended up realizing that we were very likely to move pretty much instantaneously – well almost instantaneously – from a point of where we are now, of going up by a couple of years per decade, to a point where we are pushing ill health of old age into the future faster that time is passing. It’s all about new technology and the nature of that new technology.
Part 3
Part 3
(13:46) Can you address the viability of current cryonics techniques (vitrification) and whether or not companies like Alcor should enjoy continued operations?
So SENS foundation does not work on cryonics, of course, we’re interested in helping people avoid the need to be cryopreserved by fixing them up and repairing their bodies so that they maintain youth while their heart is still beating. However, it’s reasonable to regard resuscitation of a cryopreserved individual as a natural extension of that repair process. Therefore I actually am very posit... (read more)