Why Prioritize SENS Research for Human Longevity?

SNES appears not to be a technology, it's a research group. http://www.sens.org/

Humorously, I can't find where on their website the acronym is defined.

Also, most of the pages in the research section advise us to read Ending Aging, a book written by the foundation's "Chief Science Officer".

It took me a momemt to realize that retro gaming wasn't part of this research.

SENS is a detailed research plan focused on reversing and repairing age-related frailty, disease and degeneration. It is built on a broad range of research results from the past decades of research into aging and human biochemistry. An introduction to SENS for laypeople is here:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2004/11/strategies-for-en...

Ending Aging, the book, is essentially a crash course in the scientific backing for SENS; if you're up for reading at the boundary of popular science and actual science (i.e. harder stuff than A Brief History of Time) then you should check it out.

The SENS Research Foundation has a pretty stellar advisory board, including George Church, Anthony Atala, etc - noted figures in their fields:

http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board

The reason why SENS is accompanied by advocacy is that we're inching into a revolution in aging science; the old school of drug development and metabolic tinkering is following a path that will go nowhere fast, chewing up a bunch of money to achieve next to nothing of consequence other than knowledge. Meanwhile there is a demonstrably better and disruptive road to producing much better outcomes for intervening in the aging process. SENS is one expression of that road, but by no means the only one: anything that focuses on repair of existing metabolism over changing metabolism or understanding the progression of damage is far better.

The crucial points are made in the quote below, and these are the essence of the disruption of aging research that is coming - the speed with which it arrives determined by the pace at which SENS and similar programs stop being the underdogs and become the mainstream:

"Present arguments within the mainstream of aging research are largely over the relative importance of damage type A versus damage type B, and how exactly the extremely complex interaction of damage with metabolism progresses - but not what that damage actually is. A large fraction of modern funding for aging research goes towards building a greater understanding this progression; certainly more than goes towards actually doing anything about it. Here is the thing, however: while understanding the dynamics of damage in aging is very much a work in progress, the damage itself is well known. The research community can accurately enumerate the differences between old tissue and young tissue, or an old cell and a young cell - and it has been a good number of years since anything new was added to that list.

"If you can repair the cellular damage that causes aging, it doesn't matter how it happens or how it affects the organism when it's there. This is the important realization for SENS - that much of the ongoing work of the aging research community is largely irrelevant if the goal is to get to human rejuvenation as rapidly as possible. Enough is already known of the likely causes of aging to have a reasonable expectation of being able to produce laboratory demonstrations of rejuvenation in animal models within a decade or two, given large-scale funding."

Also worth noting for this audience, I suppose, is that Peter Thiel has provided significant support for SENS research. See, for example:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/09/peter-thiel-giv.p...

The Bay Area is a hub for aging research in general - there are a number of important labs nearby (and more in LA), and the SENS Research Foundation has its research center there. That whole highly networked group of people merges at the edges with the tech entrepreneur community and the life science entrepreneur community in the area. See this grassroots group for example, as representative of the overlap, that runs salons and meetings at Y Combinator HQ:

http://healthextension.co/