A New—and Reversible—Cause of Aging

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

The SENS Research Foundation has a yearly budget about a tenth of that of one of the largest aging research labs, the Buck Institute. The Foundation funds work in a range of laboratories around in the US and Europe, and has collaborations with Oxford, Wake Forest, and so forth.

Insofar as controversy exists, you might look on it as a facet of the present dispute over modern theories of aging: camps for aging as accumulated damage versus aging as evolved programming. The accumulated damage side is much bigger but split into several factions, one of which is centered around SENS.

It exists because you are dealing with humans. Genuinely new ideas tend to not get adopted until the old guard literally dies. They have turf to protect and it is an active disincentive to adopt new ideas, especially new ideas where you can fix things relatively cheaply and easily. There is money to be made in keeping problems alive. And people who don't understand how to fix it themselves tend to look to experts and trust their word rather than being skeptical that maybe the experts have a conflict of interest.

There is a lot that can be done currently and more simply than even your post suggests. A lot of it is "basic common sense." Studies often back up things like just eating right and exercising regularly -- which, really, people mostly don't want to do. They want a magic bullet that lets them do whatever they feel like and then magically fix the problems it creates. But Hollywood stars often already look 20 years younger than they really are and a lot of that is due to diet and exercise because their income depends in large part on their looks.

Another aspect of that is that people tend to discount damage that never occurred. So Hollywood actors and actresses who have successfully slowed the aging process instead of dramatically reversing the aging process are dismissed as not counting somehow. People tend to have a very hard time mentally counting something that was averted. It's just a very hard concept to even explain to most people. So we try to find more fuel efficient cars instead of promoting walking and public transit in part because it is easier to quantify the fuel savings and the difference in how the environment is impacted etc than if we just don't drive in the first place.

The factors involved are complex and do not boil down to regulation.

But thank you for your thought provoking comment.

However, I'm concerned about implications of potentially high-price anti-aging treatments. Till now, death has been the great equalizer. Life is inherently unfair. If you are born in poverty there is high chances you'll stay there, but at least you always count on everyone dying at the end.

With high-price anti-aging treatments people who have wealth can live longer (maybe one day indefinitely) and accumulate more wealth and those without money will just dye twice or three times as fast with no way out of the cycle. You can argue historically we always had this type of divides, for example in early stages of invention of antibiotics or vaccines or ability to buy them in black market in areas where they were scarce. However, we're moving from preventing premature deaths to extending life beyond its natural extension and that brings a whole new set of issues.

Will there be enough retirement funds? If we do democratize anti-aging treatments, lets say increasing the average life span to 100 or 120. Will there be enough funding? As is, the social security is feeling the pressures of increased average life-span. So if we are able to make a 60 year olds be 20 (in some aspects of aging) or 90 year old to 30 and as the article alluded to, decrease the risk of cancers (perhaps). Then, who will pay to cover the retirement funding gap?

We're heading toward a world were you can choose to live longer and have the wealth to support your life for extended time, and those who will only live 1/2 or 1/3 as much just because they were born in a different household.

Among all the technological breakthroughs, anti-aging will probably have the biggest social impact and as a society we're not even thinking about it or are even preparing for it yet. But then again, if you have the money, why should you care.

To pick one example from the SENS portfolio - by which I mean the list of techniques developed in the scientific community for other reasons and adopted as useful by the SENS proponents - allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes is absolutely a way to fix protein expression issues. It is the delivery of proteins to rescue mitochondrial function. It has been demonstrated to work in mice with no side effects for a gene associated with LHON by two separate research groups now, neither of which were affiliated with the SENS Research Foundation when they started out.

This is serious science. You might not like it or be familiar with it, but you're missing out.

SENS is supported by a number of noted figures in the life sciences, including George Church, Anthony Atala, Judith Campisi, and so forth:

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

There are detailed proposals for the development of therapies involved in SENS. These can be critiqued on their details. For example, allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes can be critiqued based on what has been done, the plans for the other genes, and how it is going so far.

You are behind the times on calorie restriction research. It works very well on all measures of health in primates except for longevity. That is the big puzzle in calorie restriction: how to explain this disparity, which ties in to explaining why humans live for an unusually long time. See this paper by Fontana:

http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html

In general calorie restriction seems better than exercise if you are going to pick one or the other, which would be foolish of course. Do both. But don't expect it will help you be one of the 25% who survive past age 90, because the only thing likely to get you there is an early implementation of SENS. Unless the programmed aging camp is right, in which case there is nothing that can be produced in time to greatly help us. But given that implementing SENS is cheap in comparison to drug development - $1 billion and 20 years to get it working in mice - what's there to lose?