Serious Unconventional De Grey
Wednesday’s Washington Post:
Aubrey de Grey may be wrong but, evidence suggests, he’s not nuts. This is a no small assertion. De Grey argues that some people alive today will live in a robust and youthful fashion for 1,000 years. … [he] advocates not myth but "strategies for engineering negligible senescence," or SENS. It means curing aging. With adequate funding, de Grey thinks scientists may, within a decade, triple the remaining life span of late-middle-age mice. …
By 2005 … De Grey was being pilloried as a full-blown heretic. "The idea that a research programme organized around the SENS agenda will not only retard ageing, but also reverse it — creating young people from old ones and do so within our lifetime, is so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community," wrote 28 biogerontologists in the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization.
I enthusiastically support de Grey’s goal of greatly extending life, and his engineering approach would be right, if his project were feasible. And even a small chance of success could justify the effort he proposes. I also feel some social pressure to support him, as many of my associates do. Nevertheless, I feel my that declaring "support" for his project would reasonably be interpreted as my claiming some relevant expertise suggesting his project is feasible enough to have this chance. Yet I simply cannot claim such expertise. And given the expert opposition voiced I cannot uncritically accept de Grey’s judgment.
I take particular exception to this line of reasoning:
… De Grey’s original academic field is computer science and artificial intelligence. He has become the darling of some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who think changing the world is all in a day’s work. Peter Thiel, the co-founder and former CEO of PayPal — who sold it in 2002 for $1.5 billion, pocketing $55 million himself — has dropped $3.5 million on de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation.
"I thought he had this rare combination — a serious thinker who had enough courage to break with the crowd," Thiel says. "A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible."
[The article ends with a 1903 quote from the New York Times saying flying machines were a million years off.]
We cannot better promote science simply by better funding people who are "not conventional." As I’ve said before:
Contrary to their self-image, undiscriminating freethinkers are our main obstacle to innovation
I don’t see how it helps if we focus on people who are "not conventional but serious." Sure it works if "serious" just means "good." But we should fund "good" people regardless of whether they are conventional. If "serious" means "unplayful" or "using great effort," I don’t see evidence that unconventional people with these characteristics are much more productive than average unconventional folks.
What I really want, of course, are betting markets telling the chance de Grey would achieve his goals, given the funding he requests.
Nick,
Yes, that's a problem, they probably don't want to deal with the legal hassles of accepting contributions. However, if you wanted to take advantage of their expertise, you could contact them to find out what research they are funding, so as to mimic their strategy/provide matching funds.
On other funding targets, it's plausible that political lobbying is the most effective place to expend funds at this time. California's Proposition 71 allocated $300 million per annum to the stem cell research over 10 years. The total cost of the campaign (acquiring signatures, ads, etc) was approximately $34.7 million, but the initial sponsor and creator of the initiative, Robert Klein, spent only ~$3 million. With a three year delay between the bulk of campaign spending (2004) and the disbursement of funds (2007), the 2004 NPV of the resulting funding stream was $1.071 billion using even a 25% interest rate (to reflect opportunities for private philanthropists to direct funding better than a state institution, the compounding effects of earlier research funding, etc). If we halve that value to reflect the risk of failure (the initiative won 59:41, but polls were less favorable when it was launched), and reduce it again to reflect the fact that political contributions are not tax-deductible (with the effect depending on one's state and proportion of capital gains to ordinary taxable income), Klein might still have expected a hundredfold improvement in the effectiveness of his donations in funding stem cell research.
A similar initiative ($3 billion for cancer research) will be put to the voters on November 6th in Texas with very bright prospects. Financially backing such initiatives in other wealthy states with accessible initiative processes (e.g. Florida, Ohio, and Michigan) might be a rather effective way of mobilizing funding.http://news.google.com/news...
The Alliance for Aging Research, possibly the leading advocacy group for federal funding for aging research and backer of the Longevity Dividend effort, spent $1.7 million in 2006, less than 10% directly on 'Public Policy' (although some overhead and fundraising costs should be attributed to this), and much of that advocacy was directed to issues other than funding for basic research on aging. Given the limited scale of federal lobbying, the marginal return on further investment may still be rather high.http://www.agingresearch.or...
However, it may be that the most effective way to influence funding is by demonstrating the potential of promising new approaches via selection of particular good unconventional projects with high expected value. Or one might invest in a for-profit startup to try to get at least one anti-aging therapy in broad use, enhancing public support and interest. Unfortunately, such efforts require greater than average ability to evaluate scientific approaches and researchers (not just biologically, but also from economic and probabilistic viewpoints). The advantage of the M-Prize is that it evades the need for such evaluative capacity (or the ability to identify such capacity in others), while promoting good novel approaches and drawing media attention to aging research.
Carl wrote "...or passing the money through the Glenn Foundation...". It appears from the Foundation's website that it does "not solicit or accept charitable contributions".
I would like to know what the best funding target would be for somebody who wants to promote life-extension through biogerontology, because I sometimes get asked this question. My current guess is that the M-Prize is a good option, but I haven't spent much effort trying to evaluate the alternatives.