SENS

SENS stands for
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence
scientific initiative

See also:
What is Aging? Anti-Aging Is Immortality Possible?

To Read comments on this topic and post your own thoughts, click here


Greetings,

Recently Steve Connor, the science editor of 'The Independent' has published an interesting review of a new popular book "How to Live Forever or Die Trying", by Bryan Appleyard.

The review is critical, which is understandable for evaluations of a popular book, but I am struck by the following comment about the life-extension researcher, Dr. Aubrey de Grey:

"... de Grey's belief in immortality - or "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" - are something of a laughing-stock among mainstream gerontologists"

Well, all you need to do is just to take a look at this scientific book below, which contains research publications by over a hundred of mainstream gerontologists, with Dr. Aubrey de Grey being a Scientific Editor (!):

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence:
Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable
(Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)



Obviously, the "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) are not a laughing-stock any longer among mainstream gerontologists, and many of them do participate in this scientific initiative.

Also read the relevant consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" signed by seven experts and published in Science, which acknowledges the legitimacy of anti-aging studies and cites the list of these anti-aging scientific publications. Please note that the first author of this published consensus letter is Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
This Science letter was later cited in a prestigious 2003 Macmillan Encyclopedia of Population, USA with a comment: "...the possibility should not be excluded that current intensive biomedical anti-aging studies may help to extend the healthy and productive period of human life in the future (de Grey et al., 2002)."

My personal attitude to the SENS scientific initiative could be best characterized with a quote by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950):

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;

the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

"Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

See also: New Books Discussing SENS

Disclaimer for a potential conflict of interest

We have published three articles in this SENS book, so we do know what we are talking about:

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Early-Life Programming of Aging and Longevity: The Idea of High Initial Damage Load (the HIDL Hypothesis). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 496-501.

Gavrilova NS, Gavrilov LA, Semyonova VG, Evdokushkina GN. Does Exceptional Human Longevity Come With High Cost of Infertility? Testing the Evolutionary Theories of Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 513-517.

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. The Reliability-Engineering Approach to the Problem of Biological Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004,
1019: 509-512.

Also I have to admit that I am one of seven coauthors of the above mentioned consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" published in Science.

See also:
What is Aging? Theories of Aging Anti-Aging Population Aging

Read further comments, and post your own thoughts here