An Aubrey de Grey Interview from the Melbourne Humanity+ Conference
SENS Foundation cofounder Aubrey de Grey presented last month at the humanity+ conference in Melbourne, Australia. Adam Ford, the conference coordinator, interviewed de Grey after the event, and later uploaded a slew of video segments from that interview to YouTube. You might take a look at the playlist of a dozen or so videos, divided by topic.
The longest of the segments is embedded below; it covers SENS, the research program that aims to repair the root biochemical causes of aging. Those of you who have heard this material before, and who are familiar with the recent updates on work in progress at the SENS Foundation, might choose to browse through the rest of the material instead.
The research program that takes us from where we are today, at the dawn of a revolution in biotechnology, to the point at which aging can be controlled through medicine just like any chronic disease is just about as straightforward as scientific research can ever be. The goals are known, the forms of damage to our biology that need to be fixed are known, a list of potential ways to fix them are known. The devil is ever in the details, but this isn't a case of speculative research that has yet to even find the problem it needs to solve.
At this point more money means more progress: there is a well defined list of things to work on and too little funding in this field of medical technology to work on them all to the degree that they merit.
As such, one might argue that the most important goal for the present is to explain all of this to the world at large, to grow the community of supporters and thus raise more funding. Most people still see aging as a mystery, set in stone, a thing that lies outside the bounds of medicine. Nothing could be further from the truth, but a much larger fraction of the populace must become educated and persuaded that rejuvenation biotechnology is a real, plausible, possible near term goal. Their support is needed in order to build the massive funding institutions and large research communities needed to make rapid progress towards the defeat of aging as the greatest cause of human death and suffering.