Life Extension is Gaining Acceptance

By | December 3, 2006
4 Comments

The blogger Reason at Fight Aging is giving reasons why he thinks that life extension is gaining acceptance from an important group – the scientists that will deliver it.

Exhibit A: Interview of Mark Hamalainen, PhD student working in the mitochondrion lab at Cambridge University:

Mark Hamalainen: …it is good to be alive today, so why not tomorrow? I could write a book on all the things I’d like to do that one lifetime isn’t enough for. I can understand how it is culturally advantageous (or at least inevitable) to come up with justifications for aging being ok when there is no prospect of intervention. But to maintain those beliefs when intervention is foreseeable is irrational. Any pro-death argument is vastly out of proportion with the horrible reality of aging: the gradual decay of your body that culminates in the ceasing of your existence.

Exhibit B: Older researchers lamenting the conservative culture that is holding back life extension research

“The cure for aging” is the instant-death third rail of grantsmanship and we stay away from it.

Note to researchers – I know you guys have already figured this out, but just a reminder – if “the cure for aging” is “instant death” …don’t call it that. Add to everyone’s life expectancy with “sirtuin” research or “mitochondria” research, and let the marketers name it.

Exhibit C: The publication last March of the cover article “The Longevity Dividend” in The Scientists.

Why are we so optimistic now? The primary reason is that science has revealed that aging is not the immutable process it was once thought to be. Interventions at a variety of genetic, cellular, physiological, and behavioral levels not only increase longevity in laboratory organisms, but also dramatically increase the duration of disease-free life. The realization that some humans retain their physical and mental functioning for more than a century suggests that genes associated with the extension of healthy life already exist within the human genome. Biogerontologists have now gone from merely describing cellular aging and cell death to manipulating the mechanisms responsible for these phenomena.

I’d add an Exhibit D, the resveratrol/SIRT1 developments Randall Parker has been writing about:

There will probably be a distinguished but elderly scientist professing that life extension isn’t possible even as the first treatments become available. But the cumulative effect of all these developments is already convincing enough scientists that improvement of the status quo is not only possible, but imminent. As this process goes on, gerontologists will rush to deliver “the cure for aging.”

  • D. Vision

    “The cure for aging” is the instant-death third rail of grantsmanship and we stay away from it.

    I don’t think you quite got the full meaning of that comment. The person was talking about the grant application process for federal funding. Such a process is a small part science, a large part reputation, and a larger part marketeering. The trouble is that the marketeering part _is_ done by the scientists. I have seen this process unfold before my eyes; these things are reviewed by panels of scientists and non-scientists and the money is, in part, pre-binned.

    This person is stating that, basically, putting “the cure for aging” or “anti-aging” on a grant proposal is dooming it to instantaneous rejection.

    The equivalent in computer science is saying you want work on P vs NP or some other such nonsense. These things tend not to be funded, because they are big, red, blinking lights that scream “I’m a crock and have no idea what I am talking about, so please waste money on me!”

  • Gramarye

    D.Vision:

    I think Stephen did actually understand the comment. That’s why his advice was to use different titles for grant proposals; it is, exactly as you called it, marketeering.

    The problem I see is that most grantors are, in truth, not such simpletons that they would be truly unlikely to see through the facade. I think Stephen’s advice would work about as well as a celebrity trying to hit a trendy nightclub incognito.

    This is not to say that I disagree with the general notion that scientists could do more to sell healthy life extension research proposals to grantors. However, I don’t think that trying to hide the motives behind any proposal in this field is going to fool too many onlookers. I lean more towards a strategem that lawyers sometimes use: narrow the issue. After all, it’s inconceivable that anyone is really trying to propose a “comprehensive” cure for aging right now. Most proposals today are going to be focusing on a tiny piece of the puzzle. The basic move in the argument would be for each individual researcher or team to make sure the mission statement of the proposal never strays outside its own boundaries. This makes proposals sound more modest and reasonable: “no, we’re not talking about a cure for ‘aging,’ just for this one specified condition that tends to be correlated with age.”

    Of course, this would almost certainly be the complete truth for any individual research proposal. It would only be over the course of hundreds of such projects that the shape of the larger puzzle would begin to reveal itself.

    The problem with this is that the majority of life extension researchers that buy into the maximum life extension vision, and an even greater portion of proselytizers like Reason, want to talk about the big picture first and foremost. They want to talk about how this proposal or that fits into the oeuvre of projects that will vanquish the devil of aging at last. (I’m known to be risk-averse, but in my opinion, the Big Picture prophets dramatically underestimate the risk of backlash as these lines of research start developing a more conspicuous presence in mainstream culture.) Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, those are my two cents: anti-aging research proposals can be made more attractive to generally conservative funding groups by emphasizing the bite sized piece that is the specific scope of each individual project, not the big picture where one would face the choice of either saying “cure for aging” or leaving it unsaid and assuming that grantors are such unsophisticates as to be incapable of reading between the lines.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Gramarye:

    “Narrow the issue” – that’s exactly right, and I think that’s exactly the way this is playing out in the scientific community. But certainly sirtuin research and mitochondria research are narrow enough to be let in the club – indeed both are already inside dancing away at taxpayer expense.

    You don’t go in saying you’ll deliver “a cure for aging.” D. Vision is right about that – it makes that scientist look like a crackpot. And, as you suggested, it’s factually inaccurate anyway. Any single research project will only address small parts of the problem.

    But, I think that the big picture guys like Reason and Aubrey de Grey are performing a valuable function. They are continually pointing out that this tree and that tree and all these other trees eventually add up to a forest.

    And this message is getting through to younger researchers coming up – guys like Mark Hamalainen.

  • Karl Hallowell

    I’m not sure I see a problem here with the “third rail” of anti-aging. Stay away from extravagant claims and it appears funding is available.