Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.
I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.
If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?
Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.
I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.
If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?
Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.