Fight Aging!

Following on from yesterday's post, I notice that Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation will be speaking at the Singularity Summit in October of this year. The study of aging is, as he explains, a field on the cusp between the era in which all you can do is study and learn, and the era in which tools have advanced to the point at which you can apply that knowledge - here towards engineering greater human longevity. As with all times of transition, there are those members of the community who look forward in anticipation, and those who resist change:

Technologists, including those in medicine, are paid to turn knowledge into products. Scientists, by contrast, are paid to turn knowledge into more knowledge. Above all, this is because this hands-off, "curiosity-driven" approach to deciding what to study has proven remarkably successful, throughout the history of scientific endeavour, at giving rise to knowledge that technologists can duly take forward into means of improving humanity's quality of life. However, as funding for science has become ever more competitive, this happy state of affairs has begun to decay. Scientists are driven into ever greater specialisation, applying for funding only in the narrow area in which they are already acknowledged world leaders; this hinders the cross-fertilisation that is so essential for efficient progress.

Biogerontology, arguably alone among the biological sciences, has an additional problem: it is a field being transformed from a basic science into an applied, translational one as a result of advances made with other goals (mostly in regenerative medicine), and thus made predominantly by non-biogerontologists. Biogerontologists are thus faced with the particularly painful dilemma of either defending the field against the encroachment of these other specialities of which they are not the leading experts, or embracing the modernisation of their discipline at what may be at least short-term risk to their careers. Unfortunately, the former option is seductively easy, but it delays the advent of effective therapies against aging and thus potentially costs huge numbers of lives. I argue that biogerontologists have a duty to recognise, without further delay, that the fate of countless individuals rests on whether they make the courageous choice to embrace new approaches to aging with an open mind.

The broader summit looks to be an interesting event; there are certainly a wealth of leading lights from the transhumanist community listed on the program. Take a look and see what you think.