SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer. Do they have any successes or measures of efficiency? It seems like science fiction pie in the sky research by a small group of true believers.
Who suffers the most from age-related disease? The rich or the poor? Are novel medical treatments forever only available to the rich, or do they become ever cheaper, more widespread, and more effective over time? How much of your own personal future are you willing to sacrifice to spite rich people who might get access to early, inefficient technologies before you do? How much of everyone else's future are you willing to sacrifice to make yourself feel better? Think about it before answering.
What products has this SENS group ever produced besides a bunch of talk? Have they even produced one research result paper in a top journal? Or is it just a bunch of talk.
I guess maybe you can argue that funding people to advocate for anti-aging research can encourage more people to engage in it? Is that your argument on why this is a useful charity to fund?
There's a website out there you can go look at, you know. With annual reports, links to published research papers, explanations of the research programs they conduct in collaboration with noted laboratories around the world, records from the scientific conferences held, news and press, and so on. It's no big secret - you don't have to ask me.
Reading and research is something wealthy people try to guilt you into doing! We want you to spell it out here so we don't have to spend any of our own effort discrediting our preconceived notions.
> SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer.
Ignoring the fact that you're pulling statements out of a hat, and assuming what you said is true, which one of the following two scenarios would you rather be in:
- A world where fundamental research on aging hasn't been done and people get sick and start to die between the ages of 60-90.
- A world where, as a result of some secretive research and development of medical technology, a handful of people (the rich ones) seem to be living a healthy life all the way up to 180-210, and the public starts demanding that such research be made available to everyone.
I see no reason to believe the second scenario is anywhere close to occurring. The gains we've seen in life expectancy over the past century or so have been due to things like reducing child mortality and better treatments for disease so less people die younger. The maximum life expectancy of a human is about the same now as it was several thousand years ago.
That's actually a very interesting question. And it's actually not clear that the second scenario would be better. A lot of problems would come along with people living twice as long. And who's to say that the other people would be able to afford that tech, even if it were freely available?
Actually, SENS-like repair therapies would be mass-produced infusions for the most part. They'd be the same for everyone, a mix of small molecule drugs targeting metabolic waste (amyloids, cross-links, lipofuscin, etc) and gene therapies (allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes). Some replacement of stem cell populations most likely, which would be a tissue sample, send to the clinic, get back cells for injection.
If you look at comparable technologies today, autologous stem cell transplant is the most expensive, and you can get that for a few tens of thousands of dollars via medical tourism. Other points of comparison are, say, biologics for autoimmune conditions, which are enormously finicky to mass-produce at the moment and presently run to a few thousand dollars per shot or infusion. They'll get cheaper. Generic drugs, widely produced and past their legal protections, on the other hand cost a few cents to a few dollars for a dose.
For SENS-like repair technologies you're looking at one treatment every few decades if it's very efficient at clearing damage, or perhaps every few years if it isn't.
That sounds nice, but there are a few problems with it. 1) You can't predict the future, so you don't know that those treatments will work or will actually be inexpensive. 2) Patents, greed, lawyers, etc. 3) Since the treatments don't exist yet, you don't know how often they would need to be done.
Bottom line is that you seem to be awfully confident about predicting the future of things that don't exist yet.
