Fight Aging!

There's a foolish fellow who thinks science is basically over and done with, or at least fairly close to that point, and has been parlaying this silliness into a career of sorts. He has an article in a recent Discover. It's entertainment, I suppose, only he'd rather like you to take his nonsense seriously:

Argument: We are on the verge of a breakthrough in applied biology that will allow people to live essentially forever. The potential applications of biology are certainly more exciting these days than those of physics. The completion of the Human Genome Project and recent advances in cloning, stem cells, and other fields have emboldened some scientists to predict that we will soon conquer not only disease but aging itself. "The first person to live to 1,000 may have been born by 1945," declares computer scientist-turned-gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a leader in the immortality movement (who was born in 1963).

Many of de Grey's colleagues beg to differ, however. His view "commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community," 28 senescence researchers declared in a 2005 journal article. Indeed, evolutionary biologists warn that immortality may be impossible to achieve because natural selection designed us to live only long enough to reproduce and raise our children. As a result, senescence does not result from any single cause or even a suite of causes; it is woven inextricably into the fabric of our bodies. The track record of two fields of medical research - gene therapy and the war on cancer - should also give the immortalists pause.

This is pretty sloppy science journalism, and makes no sense at all from a scientific point of view. Is the end result of natural selection naturally immune to human intervention? I don't think you have to look too far at all to be able to pitch that idea out with the trash. Does making the treatment of aging sound hard have anything to do with how hard it actually is, or how much scientists know about how to go about it, or how much work has already been accomplished, or how widespread present work is? Of course not; it's just the foolishness of one journalist with - it seems - little knowledge of the field he is discussing.

As I understand the principle thrust of his argument, he is claiming that the slow rate of past progress towards specific goals of manipulating human biochemistry in manner X (rearranging the expression of your genes reliably and safely) make it unlikely we will ever be able to manipulate human biochemistry in manner Y (repairing the known cellular damage that lies at the root of aging). Amongst many problems with this argument is that manner Y - and manner X for that matter - are both perfectly compatible with the laws of physics as we know them. To deny the possibility of radical life extension by means of ongoing damage repair - via technologies presently under early investigation and development in laboratories around the world - is to deny physics. There is no middle ground: either you accept modern physics and all its consequences with regard to the plausibility of deliberately arranging atoms and molecules by design, or you don't.

The fellow's point of view with regard to ongoing work in biotechnology and aging research is slipshod and distant from the action. I have to assume that the rest of his work on other fields - which in many cases I am unqualified to judge - are just as shallow, slippery and ultimately vapid. I leave it as an exercise for the audience to pick at the errors; if entertainer this fellow is to be, you may as well get your money's worth.

The world is full of comedians, fools and dangerous people willing to stand up and tell us that black is white - looking for laughs, other fools, or a means to an end. Don't fall for it.

Technorati tags: aging research, life extension, SENS