Fight Aging! Reports From the Front Line in the Fight Against Aging Reported by Reason
Fight Aging! exists to help ensure that initiatives with a good shot at greatly extending healthy human longevity become well known, supported, and accepted throughout the world. To this end, Fight Aging! publishes material intended to publicize, educate, and raise awareness of progress in longevity science, as well as the potential offered by future research. These are activities that form a vital step on the road towards far healthier, far longer lives for all. To start off this new section in Cryonics magazine, we asked Reason, the writer of Fight Aging!, a number of questions. 1. Can you tell us about your recent personal involvement in advancing parts of the SENS program? I founded a company, Repair Biotechnologies, with Bill Cherman earlier this year, on the grounds that there are too few entrepreneurs looking at low-hanging fruit in the SENS portfolio, so why not pitch in to help? There is so much that should be done and isn’t being done, there is room for another hundred companies to fit themselves in here. We’re currently working on one gene therapy to rejuvenate the thymus and another that offers the possibility of reversing atherosclerosis. With success we hope to take on other projects, but of course getting anything done in biotechnology takes much longer than anyone would like. As an industry, it is in the same sort of position that computing hardware and software were thirty or forty years ago: all the promise, things are accelerating, but you still have to build every new product from scratch, and the failure rate for any given experiment or vendor product, even the ones used day in and day out throughout the industry, is high enough to be uncomfortable. We hope to be able to share news of our progress in 2019. 2. You have been a consistent critic of the commercial anti-aging market. Are there any interventions besides caloric restriction and exercise you think are credible now? Now that human trials have started to show interesting results, it seems that mitochondrially targeted antioxidants and some NAD+ enhancers are worth trying. Modest results, but achieved at low cost for the consumer. These items are still not worth the level of investment in research needed to produce them. That attention could have been far more profitably applied elsewhere, such as on further development of SENS. I am bullish on senolytics. The publication of results from the first
www.alcor.org
human trials should be very interesting. These are powerfully beneficial treatments, even in their initial, unvarnished form, which get rid of only a fraction of senescent cells. Combination therapies should do much more, attacking these cells through multiple different mechanisms concurrently. It is a terrible thing that it will take a lot of effort to educate people following the trial results, to show them that they can improve the quality of their lives significantly with a low-cost infrequent dose of easily available senolytic compounds. So very many people are suffering unnecessarily right now. 3. In 2016 you announced signing up for cryonics after promoting it for a considerable time. What was the specific reason for this delay? Procrastination coupled with a willingness to accept the risk of delay. The on-ramp is too hard and signing up requires too much organization to fall into the impulsive category of “I should get this chore off my to-do list today.” Cryonics providers could learn from the life insurance providers, who have similar issues, and a whole industry devoted to getting people on board despite the hurdles. 4. What is the biggest obstacle to a wider acceptance of cryonics? That signing up is not easy. The network effect of incremental growth is muted by the fact that it does require a sustained effort and many discrete tasks to sign up successfully. It is a product that must be sold and hand-held and then maintained over the years, and that makes grassroots persuasion ineffective. No-one likes to take on another burden, and cryonics has that look of a burden when you actually investigate what needs doing. A service that de-burdened the product for a 5%-10% premium over the usual cost would go a long way. A more extensive recent interview with Reason can be found here: https://www.leafscience.org/an-interview-with-reasonnear-term-life-extension-therapies/
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