Last time in 2012 I had 3 questions, now I have 5. I hope I'm not to late with it, but I've read about this possibility just recently:
1. Time frame
Last April I read an interiew with Aubrey de Grey, that the first central step of the SENS project, the robust rejuvenation of a mouse (RMR), shall not longer last ten years - as it was proclaimed for so long - but only „six to eight years from now":
a) Especially six years would be fantastic good news, but what are the deeper reasons for this improvement?
b) Does this affect the funding area too? Doesn't he need one billion dollars, 100 millions a year for ten years, any longer but „only" 600-800 millions? Or is it the same sum which has to be spend only in a shorter time frame?
2. Research plan
Was the constantly demanded original sum of one billion dollars for the robust mouse rejuvenation really the result of a worked out research plan, in analogy to a business plan, with detailed expenses, budgets, milestones and the like for an upcoming „Institute of Biomedical Gerontology" (IBG) how it was discussed for instance here already more than ten years ago, with his participation?:
How many researchers and other staff should be hired, what about the costs for a building, the equipment for the laboratories, the administration and so on? Or was the one billion just a metaphor for „very very much money" for a „very very challenging goal"? I don't think that one can expect to get so much money at least from wealthy business people or super rich investors and the like without being able to offer a concrete and systematic and written down conception of how exactly(!) all this money should finance and structure the research work to reach the intended goal. Millions of small donations by every day people may be different. Now, does there exist such a research plan?
3. Numbers of (potential) SENS researchers
According to two big mayor institutions of biogerontology here in Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne and the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena, which both expanded in the last years and therefore got some publicity in the german media, I now have a good impression what one could afford with one billion (or 600-800 million) dollars. In these two institutes there are working about 500 age researchers and together the have an annual budget of about 50 million dollars. So with one billion dollars one could hire at least also 500-1000 age researchers or even more which could work on the seven causes of aging for a lot of years.
Question now: is he confident that he will get very quick, within one or two years or so, so many researchers, that have the right scientific qualifications - and are willing! - to do an effective work within the SENS agenda, if he would got the sufficient funding? Has he ever thought about the practical challenges on an organizational level in general and how they affect the timelines of his predictions? Google Calico for example was founded already more than two years ago, got their money - 1.5 billion dollars - already more than one year ago and I'm not sure that they really have already begun with the scientific work!??
4. Ray Kurzweil
Is there really still no cooperation at all between Google Calico and the SENS foundation? And what about Ray Kurzweil himself, who works at Google in a leading science position? Does he - another „one of the most iconic life extension personalities" - not support the SENS project, in which way ever?? Is there a philosophical or even a personal conflict between the two??? Are they at least in contact????
5. Health focus
Does he really think that the collective motivations for the overcoming of aging could derive from the normal area, the normal definitions and the normal medical self-conceptions of health and disease?
a) I cannot identify any relevant target group within this perspective for his donation campaigns. The overwhelming majority of all people below 60 years are not suffering of age related diseases. On the other hand most people beyond 70 are too old for the hopefully coming breakthroughs which need at least 20 years from this point where sufficient funding come in, as he himself has explained so often in the past. And the real young ones below 30 could even just trust in the normal scientific and medical progress instead of getting active or donating in substantial numbers. So the health focus aims at no one on a motivational level, in my opinion, it aims at the old people the day after the day after tomorrow - or the younger ones of today which should imagine that they are becoming old but only in ten, in 25, or even only in 40 years!?
b) On a more philosophical level or in a perspective of biological anthropology regarding the nature of man the health focus implies, that an ageless condition would be the normal healthy state of the human nature what obviously would be an absurd claim. It's just the other way around that aging is a fundamental part of all higher life forms and so of man too which has evolved within millions of years! So, if aging is a central part of our biological nature or inheritage we have to transcendend this part of the human nature, what is a much bigger task than just „to heal a disease". For me the health focus therefore trivializes the problem because it is not approriate at all to the fundamental challenge we are confronted with - and normal people, normal media, normal critics and so on are much more in resonance with this challenge when they are repeating again and again and again all the objections some of the important ones I've listed already in my post to the last Podcast with Aubrey de Grey in 2012. On the other hand the terms „longevity" and „immortality" respond much better to all the dramatic implications and consequences in an existential perspective, they respond to the natural programm and dark verdict that is still engraved in every single cell of our bodies which is called death. Sure, an ageless human being would not be immortal in an absolute way of indestructible but it would not die any longer by an instrinsic and determinstic and early cause like aging - and it would so really represent a totally new state of human evolution.
