Time to Talk SENS: Critiquing the Immutability of Human Aging

Abstract

Aging is a three-stage process: metabolism, damage, and pathology. The biochemical processes that sustain life generate toxins as an intrinsic side effect. These toxins cause damage, of which a small proportion cannot be removed by any endogenous repair process and thus accumulates. This accumulating damage ultimately drives age-related degeneration. Interventions can be designed at all three stages. However, intervention in metabolism can only modestly postpone pathology, because production of toxins is so intrinsic a property of metabolic processes that greatly reducing that production would entail fundamental redesign of those processes. Similarly, intervention in pathology is a "losing battle" if the damage that drives it is accumulating unabated. By contrast, intervention to remove the accumulating damage would sever the link between metabolism and pathology, and so has the potential to postpone aging indefinitely. We survey the major categories of such damage and the ways in which, with current or foreseeable biotechnology, they could be reversed. Such ways exist in all cases, implying that indefinite postponement of aging-which we term "engineered negligible senescence"-may be within sight. Given the major demographic consequences if it came about, this possibility merits urgent debate.

Normal brain ageing: models and mechanisms

“…Calment raises an important question to which there is not yet an agreed answer. Was she the exception, a living example of the maximal life span of the human beings, as would be sustained by the gerontologists such as S. J. Olshansky (Carnes et al 2003), or was she just a pioneer on the road to an everexpanding life-expectancy, as would be argued by gerontologists such as Vaupel and Carey (Vaupel et al 1998), with further prospects of immortality in the shape of various strategies for engineering negligible senescence, as coined by deGrey (de Grey et al 2002)? Disentangling reality from wishfulness is sometimes difficult, especially in the case of processes as multifactorial and multi-layered as ageing. As a result, sometime significant paradigm shifts takes place.…”

Technology, Trust, and Religion : Roles of Religions in Controversies on Ecology and the Modification of Life

“…Talking about engineering arrested senescence may sound as if we have entered the field of quackery, pseudoscience, or science fiction. However, one of the strongest defenders of the scientific credibility of Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence (SENS), Aubrey de Grey (De Grey 2003;De Grey et al 2002), forcefully argues that humanity needs to set aside massive sums of money for a War on Aging. He has also, together with relevant specialists, outlined and embarked on detailing a set of biotechnological measures we could use to beat the 'seven deadly things' that accumulate with age as side effects of metabolism.…”

A model of aging as accumulated damage matches observed mortality patterns and predicts the life-extending effects of prospective interventions

“…stiffening of extracellular collagen, mutations in the DNA of long-lived cells), and loss of functional components (e.g. the death and non-replacement of cells in the heart and in some parts of the brain) (de Grey et al 2002;de Grey 2005). These progressive changes can appropriately be grouped under the single term "damage", because they antagonise the efforts of our metabolic network to keep the body fully functional.…”