Aubrey de Grey has responded to his IAMA - Now with Transcript!

Part 2

(7:01) Around what principles have you organized your current diet?

I believe that there’s only really one general principle that one can use when it comes to diet or indeed supplements or anything that we can do today to postpone age-related ill health. And that principle is simply to pay attention to your body. The reason I say that is just because people differ from each other so much. So any specific generalization that one might make, like you can have more of this particular vitamin or whatever, is bound to have a variable effect on different people and in some cases it may actually do harm, in some cases it will be no good, and so on. I do want to emphasize though, that unless you’re an unlucky person who’s aging unusually rapidly, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing that we have around today that can substantially postpone the ill health of old age. And therefore that what we must rely on in order to maximize our chances of having a healthy old age, is simply to hasten the development of therapies that don’t yet exist. Which is exactly what SENS foundation does.

(8:14) In a choice between cybernetic enhancements and technological body modification versus a series of drug supplements and pill as a means of enhancing lifespan, which do you see as being the better option down the road as research and development continues on each?

Well first of all I want to emphasize that really that’s not the right choice, because I’m sure that the ways in which we will really succeed in substantially postponing the ill health of old age, is not by pills and supplements really, or at least not mainly, it will mainly be by regenerative medicine, repairing the molecular and cellular damage that accumulates throughout life. But if we ask a slightly more general question, about the contrast between the promise of biomedical, biological based approaches to combating aging, and shall we say, non-biological approaches, then I think we can predict with some confidence that there will be a progressive improvement, an increase, in the contribution from the non-biological side. What we see at the moment are things like glasses and cochlear implants and moving towards things like artificial hearts, but I think as we see more and more miniaturization, there’s going to be more and more scope for other applications of non-biological technologies to medical problems in general and aging in particular.

(9:31) If you could offer some advice to an upcoming aging researcher, what would it be? Keep in mind that many of us also focus on psycho-social and policy-based aspects of aging as well.

The advice I give to up-and-coming researchers depends very much on what stage one is at. So at the undergraduate level, my advice is to do as general a biology education as possible. The idea here is that aging affects the biology of human beings and other organisms at every level of organization, and therefore it’s no good to just be a biochemist or just a geneticist, you really got to know about all aspects of biology. At the PhD level, I think the critical thing is one’s learning how to cope with the frustration of research, the fact that there will almost always be long periods of time when one’s experiments just aren’t working, or when one finds that one’s last six months of work have been useless or whatever, and so the key thing is to work on something you find really really fascinating, that is going to help you just psychologically to get through those low points in the process. At the postdoctoral level, I think that actually what matters most is to have as much autonomy and to be able to do something that you’re going to get credit for. And so I actually favor going into relatively young labs with a young starting-up professor, who perhaps doesn’t have many other people in their entourage yet. That’s probably the place to get the most done. In terms of the psychosocial and policy aspects, I think what I would say, especially at these more senior levels, at the postdoctoral level especially, that the key thing to do – and this is true on the biology side as well – is to minimize the extent to which one is duplicating or just you know reinforcing and confirming other people’s work. And to focus on areas that tend to be neglected. So in the case of social policy and psychosocial stuff, I think a lot of this revolves around looking at the longer term, looking at how the world is likely to manage with a greater ability to intervene against aging, what the implications are socially and politically and so on. Of course that’s not to say that the current problems of the elderly are in any way unimportant, but I think we already have a great deal of research in that area and perhaps the more forward-looking stuff is more neglected.

(11:58) One of the key concepts you discuss in your talks is escape velocity (that we will reach a stage when life expectancy comes to increase by more than one year for every year that passes). How do you square this with the suggestion that the current generation will enjoy significantly extended lifetimes?

I think it’s a really good example of how extrapolation just doesn’t always work. You know, if you asked someone in 1900 how long it would take to cross the Atlantic in 1950 and they looked at the rates of progress in the increasing speed of ocean-going liners, they wouldn’t have come to an answer of less than a day. Right? So yes, it’s all about new technologies. The thing is, that at the moment when all we have against the ill health and consequent of course mortality of old age is piecemeal one-disease-at-a-time approaches that address the symptoms of aging rather than the causes, it’s inevitable that progress is going to be rather slow. Even though, let’s be clear, progress has been a lot faster than it was a few hundred years ago, we certainly weren’t managing one year per decade back then. But once we can not only slow down but repair the accumulating molecular and cellular damage that we incur throughout life, and that only causes ill health late in life, then we’ll be actually turning back the clock. And turning back the clock buys time to improve therapy so that we can turn back the clock more thoroughly in due course and so on. And this is how I ended up realizing that we were very likely to move pretty much instantaneously – well almost instantaneously – from a point of where we are now, of going up by a couple of years per decade, to a point where we are pushing ill health of old age into the future faster that time is passing. It’s all about new technology and the nature of that new technology.

Part 3

Good Guy Greg:

Posts something that brings a lot of karma
Uses a throwaway account

Thank you! It feels good to know that other people appreciate the work I put into this. I don't have a main account on lesswrong, so this karma is as sweet as ever.

Transcribing this 25 min video took about 2 hours over the course of a plane flight, which isn't that long and I feel is a good use of time.

That said, I was disheartened by the response back on /r/IAMA - it seems that people were not nearly as interested in the response as the chance to ask questions. I would say that if people are seriously about advocacy (which you should be, it's the best way to funnel funding to critically important projects like this), we find a way to do it that is far sweeter and more consumable than a 25 minute video.

Biostatistician with undergraduate degree in biochemistry here. The mere fact that words like "verify" and "confirm" are being used ought not to set off BS alarms in this context -- biologists talk like this all the time*. I can also tell you that the proposed theory (that mitochondria are targeted for recycling based on signals present in their membranes) is pretty plausible a priori -- in fact, more plausible than the theory that mitochondria are recycled without biological discrimination. (Notice that the theory is a massive disjunction, since it doesn't specify the signaling molecules.) A claim like this ought to be evaluated on its merits, not on the word choice of its proponents.

To me, the BS seems like it might actually be in calling this theory "heretical" or "unorthodox" -- this seems like a post facto play for outsider status. Were mainstream biologists definitively against the theory for substantive reasons, or was the mainstream position merely "there's no evidence justifying that claim"?

* Biologists are lousy at statistical thinking when it's required, i.e., when data are noisy. They are very sharp about what causal inferences are warranted by data with high signal-to-noise -- that's what they're trained to do.

This piece gives off a bad vibe. My BS alarm bells are ringing. It uses words like verifying and confirming instead of falsifying and testing. It proclaims how he was right all along, long before his theory was tested. Even for a sales pitch, this is pushing it a bit.

Do physicists really speak differently?