[extropy-chat] SENS challenge on Tech Review

[Chris Hibbert]

Most of you are familiar with Aubrey de Grey and his SENS [1] 
(Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project.  Many of you 
probably also read about Technology Review's cover article on SENS a 
year ago, and TR's ensuing challenge[2] to find someone who would write 
a convincing argument that the proposal was "so wrong that it was 
unworthy of learned debate."  TR appointed a committee (including, among 
others, Craig Ventner, Rod Brooks, and Nathan Myhrvold) which reported 
last week that none of the submissions they received was convincing.

TR received 5 submissions, of which 3 were determined to be worth 
evaluation by the committee.  de Grey wrote responses to each, and the 
original authors wrote rebuttals.  The committee identified one of the 
submissions as "the most eloquent", but declared than none of them were 
convincing.  I read that one [3] in detail, along with de Grey's 
response[4] and the rebuttal[5], and posted a review on my blog.[6]

As in early disputes like this (e.g. Sci Am vs. Nanotechnology) the 
initial critiques didn't score many points, instead spending most of its 
time saying that SENS looks like pseudo-science, and is composed of 
fantasy and outright fraud.  de Grey did a fine job of insisting that 
the attacks have to be more substantive to show that SENS isn't worth 
pursuing.  We'll have to wait a bit longer to see serious attacks on 
feasibility, I fear.

Chris

[1] http://www.sens.org/
[2] http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/index.aspx
[3] http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf
[4] http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal_rebuttal.pdf
[5] http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal_response.pdf
[6] http://pancrit.blogspot.com/2006/07/sens-debate-continued.html

-- 
It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so
easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium.
-- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy.

Chris Hibbert
hibbert at mydruthers.com
Blog:   http://pancrit.org