[quote]roybot wrote:
He personally can’t reduce aging. He’s just proposing a theoretical argument that, in his mind, would make it more acceptable if such a therapy was discovered.
He totally dismisses fear of death as an excuse when everybody fears death, even he does. That why he’s looking to cure it with semantics:
[/quote]
Website seems to have a bit of doublespeak, but from what I can tell, he actually IS working on the research, or at least directing it… not just arguing for it.
Work is being done at:
SENS Foundation Research Center in Mountain View, California
University of Texas - Houston (why does everything come back to houston anyway?)
Department of Immunobiology at University of Arizona
Buck Institute
SUNY at Plattsburg
Arizona State University
French National Institute of Health and Medical Research
Cambridge University
Institut de la Vision at Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris
It’s not just talk.[/quote]
We’ll have to wait and see if he comes up with anything. Until then, it is all talk. At the moment it seems he’s spending most of his lecture time trying to remove the ethical barriers that would stop him actually making any significant breakthroughs by challenging people to re-think the denotation of the words death and natural (words which were coined for a reason) - and that’s a far more complicated matter than he makes it out to be…
People are generally distrusting of anything that appears ‘unnatural’: look at the reactions to the lab-grown steaks, and that pales in comparison to what Aubrey de Grey is proposing, he knows it and that’s why he refers to genetic engineering as therapies. That’s just the tip of the idiomatic iceberg…
Oh, and the irony of a scientist leading the way to a prolonged life with the implied goal of immortality while looking like a cult leader was not lost on me.
[quote]roybot wrote:
Oh, and the irony of a scientist leading the way to a prolonged life with the implied goal of immortality while looking like a cult leader was not lost on me.
P.S. Is he related to Gandalf the Grey?[/quote]
Lol, he started out in computer science. I think he wanted to look like a unix nerd because the beard made him feel somewhat more hardcore or something: Kernighan, Ritchie, Stallman, Gosling, etc.
Guy’s crazy spastic too. Not sure that’s healthy.
If he comes up with something useful, sure, I’ll be glad to have that knowledge out there. But until then, I’m just a passive observer; I just find it interesting more than anything.
[quote]roybot wrote:
Oh, and the irony of a scientist leading the way to a prolonged life with the implied goal of immortality while looking like a cult leader was not lost on me.
P.S. Is he related to Gandalf the Grey?[/quote]
Lol, he started out in computer science. I think he wanted to look like a unix nerd because the beard made him feel somewhat more hardcore or something: Kernighan, Ritchie, Stallman, Gosling, etc.
Guy’s crazy spastic too. Not sure that’s healthy.
If he comes up with something useful, sure, I’ll be glad to have that knowledge out there. But until then, I’m just a passive observer; I just find it interesting more than anything.[/quote]
It is interesting, but I can’t take it seriously because part of his foundation argument in the TED talk is that we have somehow submitted to our fate, worn the idea like a pair of slippers and become comfortable in it.
I believe the opposite is true: we have been obsessed with death throughout our recorded history. We’ve glorified it, personified it, told stories about it, written songs about it, made movies about it and deified those who’ve conquered it. People have a morbid fascination with death, but it’s because we don’t want to die.