4 ms·
This guy is the classic quack, and I had the "pleasure" of knowing him in person at the Department of Genetics in Cambridge while I was doing my PhD. The depar
by pierrefar 16y ago
This guy is the classic quack, and I had the "pleasure" of knowing him in person at the Department of Genetics in Cambridge while I was doing my PhD.
The department's name and Cambridge lent him a ton of credence he doesn't deserve. Sure what he says he wants to do is noble and good to aspire to (fundamentally, medicine is about helping people live better and longer lives), but he's not the man to do it.
He was invited to give a talk, to make his case, to the whole department which he did. To put it mildly, his science to back up his theory was more about piecing together buzzwords rather than have scientific rigour with properly controlled experiments.
It seems we weren't the only ones not convinced. The closing remarks in his Wikipedia profile say this: "A debate over the legitimacy of de Grey's proposals for combating ageing was published in MIT's Technology Review. In the end, none of the challengers to de Grey were able to convince the judges that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate," though the judges noted that "the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for SENS.""
(Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey )
- crystalis 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
- pierrefar 16y agoWhat do mean? Honestly, I don't get it.
- crystalis 16y agoSome people have exacting morals and loose standards that fail to permit unhappy conclusions. Not every lack of consensus is the same. Incidentally, global warming and SENS are both cases where "failure" leads to better health (for the environment, or for people).
- quickpost 16y agoPeter Thiel doesn't think so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Philanthropy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Philanthropy
- seiji 16y agoWhat if you think Peter is a quack too?
- pierrefar 16y agoSpinning a story about something that is noble (as I said), does not make it good science.
- quickpost 16y agoI don't think his goal is to solve the scientific problems surrounding aging, so his science doesn't matter that much to me. Everything he does seems to be an effort to increase awareness and generate interest in a subject (reversing the effects of aging), that shockingly few people think is remotely realistic. In my mind, he views himself as the heretic leading the charge against the established views of the rest of the world (that age related death is a necessary thing). And, THAT is what Peter Thiel is investing in, because getting people to start caring about the problem is the first step to solving it. The organizers of the X-Prize didn't build rockets - they setup a prize that motivated other people to build them. And, thus he's created the Methuselah Mouse prize to try to fund a similar distributed effort. Calling him a quack is inaccurate, regardless of if it's true or not. He's not a scientist. Instead, he's an entrepreneurial spirit who's trying to motivate people to believe that we can change the world in completely new and powerful ways. Just like we always have.