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Valentine comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong Discussion
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I generally quite agree with you here. I really enormously appreciate the effort SENS is putting into addressing this horror, and there does seem to be a hyperbolic discounting style problem with most of the serious anti-aging tech that SENS is trying to address.
But I think you might be stating your case too strongly:
If I recall correctly, one of Aubrey's Seven Deadly Things is cancer, and correspondingly one of the seven main branches of SENS is an effort to eliminate cancer via an idea Aubrey came up with via inspiration. (I honestly don't remember the strategy anymore. It has been about six years since I've read Ending Aging.)
If you want to claim that no one else was working on Aubrey's approach to ending all cancers or that anyone else doing it was isolated, I think that's fair, but kind of silly. And obviously there's a ton of money going into cancer research in general, albeit I wouldn't be surprised if most of it was dedicated to solving specific cancers rather than all cancer at once.
But I want to emphasize that this is more of a nitpick on the strength of your claim. I agree with the spirit of it.
What I'm saying is the actual research project being funded by SENS are those which are not being adequately funded elsewhere. For example, stem cell therapy is one of the seven pillars of the SENS research agenda, but SENS does almost no work on this whatsoever because it is being adequately funded elsewhere. Likewise, cancer forms another pillar of SENS research, but to my knowledge SENS has only worked on avenues of early-stage research that is not being pursued elsewhere, like the case you mentioned.
I interpreted drethelin's comment as saying that donating to SENS was a waste of money since it's a drop in the bucket compared to for-profit and government research programs. My counter-point is that for-profit and public programs are not pursuing the same research as SENS is doing.
I think the consensus in the field is at the moment that cancer isn't a single thing. Therefore "solve all cancer at once" unfortunately doesn't make a good goal.
That's my vague impression too. But if I remember correctly, the original idea of OncoSENS (the part of SENS addressing cancer) was something that in theory would address all cancer regardless of type.
I also seem to recall that most experimental biologists thought that many of Aubrey's ideas about SENS, including OncoSENS, were impractical and that they betrayed a lack of familiarity with working in a lab. (Although I should note, I don't really know what they're talking about. I, too, lack familiarity with working in a lab!)
I just reread the OncoSENS page.
The idea was to nuke the gene for telomerase from every cell in the body and also nuke a gene for alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT).
Nuking out telomerase in every cell doesn't need further cancer research but gene therapy research. Albeit most gene therapy is about adding gene's instead of deleting them.
As far as research funding goes SENS seems to be currently funding research into ALT (http://www.sens.org/research/intramural/the-alt-mechanism). I think it's plausible that ALT research is otherwise underfunded but I don't know the details.