Is Defeating Aging Only a Dream?

Last year, Technology Review announced a $20,000 prize for any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence¹" (SENS) [snip] was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." The purpose of the challenge was to determine whether de Grey's proposals were science or fantasy.

The title of this post links to the result of that challenge: No one has won $20,000 Challenge to disprove Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging proposals but at the same time the judges concluded that de Grey had not convincingly defended SENS and that many of his ideas seemed somewhat fanciful. Please read the article linked to the title.

Whether this generation can reach a technological stage that our lives can be extended indefinitely is a question which the jury is still out. However the implication is that we are also a generation which has the moral obligation to maintain the environment so that it will not be worse than when we started.



¹ SENS is a practical, foreseeable approach to curing aging. See also this video of talk by Aubrey de Grey