[extropy-chat] Glenn Reynolds interviews Aubrey de Grey

[Reason]

Some good quotes in here.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/062304D.html

Aubrey's work is getting more attention, and the few people who are writing
regularly on the topic are slowly but surely converting more journalist-type
folk to the cause. That can only be a good thing.

ExI, Imminst, the Methuselah Mouse Prize (to which you should all donate,
hint, hint), a number of other life extension groups, and Nick Bostrom's
Dragon-Tyrant get a mention too :)

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme

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A few years ago, promised cures for baldness, impotence, and old age shared
a common image as fraudulent and vaguely pathetic, the illusory straws
grasped at by the desperate and gullible. Now, with Rogaine and Viagra
offering relief to the hairless and the limp, it's even starting to look as
if treatments for aging may offer hope to the wrinkled. That has produced
both excitement and, from some, unhappiness.

I've written columns on the subject over the past couple of weeks (you can
read them here and here). Recently I interviewed (via email) the influential
Cambridge University biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. De Grey is working on
what he calls Engineered Negligible Senescence, and has some very
interesting thoughts on what's to come in terms of aging. Or, perhaps I
should say, in terms of not aging.

I think that this subject is on the technological (and political) cusp, and
that we'll be hearing a lot more about it. Following is our Q&A, unedited
except for the removal of a couple of typos.

Q: What reasons are there to be optimistic about efforts to slow or stop
aging?

A: The main reason to be optimistic is in two parts: first, we can be pretty
sure we've identified all the things we need to fix in order to prevent --
and even reverse -- aging, and second, we have either actual therapies or
else at least feasible proposals for therapies to repair each of those
things (not completely, but thoroughly enough to keep us going until we can
fix them better). The confidence that we know everything we need to fix
comes most persuasively from the fact that we haven't identified anything
new for over 20 years.

Q: What do you think is a reasonable expectation of progress in this
department over the next 20-30 years?

A: I think we have a 50/50 chance of effectively completely curing aging by
then. I should explain that I mean something precise by the suspiciously
vague-sounding term "effectively completely". I define an effectively
complete cure for aging as the attainment of "escape velocity" in the
postponement of aging, which is the point when we're postponing aging for
middle-aged people faster than time is passing.

This is a slightly tricky concept, so I'll explain it in more detail. At the
moment, a 50-year-old has roughly a 10% greater chance of dying within the
next year than a 49-year-old, and a 51-year-old has a 10% greater chance
than a 50-year-old, and so on up to at least 85 to 90 (after which more
complicated things happen). But medical progress means that those actual
probabilities are coming down with time. So, since we're 50 only a year
after being 49, and so on, each of us has less than a 10% greater chance of
dying at 50 than at 49 -- it's 10% minus the amount that medical progress
has achieved for 50-year-olds in the year that we were 49. Thus, if we get
to the point where we're bringing down the risk of death at each age faster
than 10% per year, people will be enjoying a progressively diminishing risk
of death in the next year (or, equivalently, a progressively increasing
remaining life expectancy) as time passes. That's what I call "escape
velocity", and I think it's fair to call it the point where aging is
effectively cured.

Q: What sort of research do you think we should be doing that we're not
doing now?

.
.
.

etc