An Interview with Aubrey de Grey at Next Big Future

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A recent Q&A session with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, driving force behind the SENS Foundation can be found over at Next Big Future. A few excerpts:

Question: Tell us about the SENS foundation. What is its budget? How many research projects does it currently have underway?
Answer: SENS Foundation was created in April 2009 and took over the SENS research activities of the Methuselah Foundation (MF). We have a very limited budget at this point, initially consisting of the funds that had been donated to the MF for SENS research and had not already been spent. In essence we currently have a freeze on funding anything new right now. However, we are of course working extremely hard to change that!

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Question: Is the mainstream scientific establishment becoming more receptive to your research and arguments?

Answer: Definitely. The derision that they previously met within most of the biogerontology community has become very much a minority view, as it's become more obvious that there is no scientific basis for dismissing SENS. The process has also been aided by the enthusiastic acceptance of the various SENS concepts by those whose work is most relevant to their development - researchers who are mostly not biogerontologists.

Question: What institutions currently fund your research? To what extent is your research constrained by insufficient funding?

Answer: Our research is not funded by any institutions (such as NIH), only by philanthropy. Its rate is massively constrained by insufficient funding: we could certainly spend 50 times what we currently have before we came close to running out of important projects to support.

You might link the budgetary constraints with de Grey's comments in the latest issue of Rejuvenation Research. When constraints on progress are primarily financial rather than technical, and when you have interested researchers and projects ready to go, then it's time to direct more effort towards persuading a broader audience that your goals are worthwhile and plausible.

Having watched this space of ideas fairly closely for a decade now, I can say that support for engineered longevity is far, far advanced from where it was when I was first trying to figure it all out. Yet in the bigger picture we're all still just getting started on the process of education, outreach, and the persuasion that leads to fundraising success.