7 ms·

The success of Aubrey de Grey baffles me

37 points by bigbillheck 5y ago

7373737373 5y ago
I think he, like many techno-utopians, provides something more valuable than truth: identity
prepend 5y ago
People want to live forever and there weren’t many people in this space when de Grey started. I don’t think he’s a crank, but it is surprising that people invest in him.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  It's the billionaire's dillema: you can't take it with you, so here's this guy who for a - to you - paltry sum of money claims that he can make you live forever. Since it doesn't harm you in any way you might as well make that bet. See also: Pascals' wager.
zozbot234 5y ago
The actual news in this post: the SENS foundation has placed de Grey on indefinite leave following the allegations in the past few days: https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/11/anti-aging-research-pioneer-aubrey-de-grey-placed-on-leave-over-sexual-harassment-allegations/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/11/anti-aging-research-pion...
christkv 5y ago
The more I read about this guy the more it reads like a cult leader rather than a scientist.
- therowoay 5y ago
  The most amazing thing about him is that he seems to get a majority of his calories from beer, like some kind of Ancient Egyptian diet.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Sounds like a grifter, though uncharacteristically grifting very rich people around the one thing their money can not really buy them. Though it’s a similar grift to many religions, promising eternal life based on random technobabble instead of magic man.
The_rationalist 5y ago
There are many extremely potent geroprotective substances out there, either fixing oxidative damage (Skq1), thymus involution (thymalin), or telomeres shortening (Epitalon), or having state of the art anticarcinogenic potency (PNC-27), etc The issue with Aubrey de Grey and other popular vulgarisator is that they are illiterate of the most potent research and hence do not promote it. However despite their mediocrity, they do more good than harm by attracting more attention to the field with the highest utilitaristic ROI in the world.
blastro 5y ago
Nature hates this one trick which guarantees free unlimited lifetimes! Click here to read.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  I don't want to live forever. I do want to live a good 500+ years while having the option to end it at my pleasure sooner than that if desired.
- cko 5y ago
  I think if you can live long enough in a healthy state, eventually you'd acquire enough wealth to change your circumstances (configuration?) however you want. I think that would add at least 50 years of novelty. I tend to agree it probably would get tiring after a while, but I think the point is being able to go out on your own terms.
rememberdeath 5y ago
He might be a crank but certainly not the usual sort, he solved a longstanding open problem in mathematics: https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yields-to-amateur-mathematician-20180417/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yie...
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I see him as a fraudster rather than a crank and there is no reason why people that are good at mathematics would not be able to commit fraud. In fact, they're probably better at it.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    Being good at mathematics also does not preclude crankery. Quite the opposite really, if you can see the theoretical underpinnings of reality it’s a short step to believing you know everything. Gödel was famously on the far side, suffering from an obsessive fear of being poisoned and starving to death when his wife was hospitalised because he refused to eat anyone else's food.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      That's when you assume that the person involved is ethical, but ethics and intelligence are not necessarily aligned.
    - Trasmatta 5y ago
      Gödel was very mentally unwell (what seems like severe hypochondria and probably other things as well) but he definitely was not a crank.
      - jjgreen 5y ago
        This, crankery (in mathematics) has a rather specific meaning, there's even a book: https://bookstore.ams.org/spec-4 https://bookstore.ams.org/spec-4
nynx 5y ago
Judgement of Aubrey de Grey aside, I constantly find it weird that so many people, even on HN, don’t understand why some would want to live an especially long time.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  You might want to live for a very long time, but I don't want you to live for a very long time (beyond your normal life-span, that is). After all, we already have the problem of those that have been around for a bit longer owning pretty much everything that's worth owning and renting it out at a premium to those that are born later. Besides of course the resource consumption problem, the fact that these treatments - assuming they ever really materialize - will further increase the gap between rich and poor and so on. I honestly believe that the world as we know it would not be able to deal with a bunch of billionaire immortals. We'd be slaves in all but name. And I don't believe that such a medical advance would be made available to all.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    That's not a problem with longevity. Mortality isn't even a solution; it barely qualifies as a workaround, what with dynasties.
  - nynx 5y ago
    Now that’s an interesting take. Aside from the likelihood that aging treatments are likely to be free or subsidized by governments to avoid having increasingly old populations, what do you define as my normal lifespan? Should I avoid cancer treatments if I get it later in life? What about heart disease? Or Alzheimer’s? For better or worse, you cannot make those value judgements on others.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      No, feel free to get all those. But the moment that your life-extension becomes the shortening of someone else's is where the problems really begin. Resources are finite, we are already straining our eco-systems to (and beyond) the breaking point. At some point we will need some limits to avoid losing it all. Quite possibly we are already past the point of no return in that sense. I think the first time when humanity will really be ready for a major boost in longevity is when we go interstellar, until then it would just complicate matters. And whether or not I'm allowed to make those value judgments of others does not bother me, I am happy to apply the same judgments to myself.
JasonFruit 5y ago
I've been hearing a lot about this guy lately, and he does sound like a crank. But if you want to write an article saying that's definitely the case, you should not say, "I wonder what new flaky idea he’s telling audiences of rich old people, but unfortunately I don’t care enough to try and find out..." The light, flakey tone of this article is inappropriate to an attempt to destroy someone's career, no matter how justifiably. That's a matter to take seriously.
jacquesm 5y ago
His success is mostly limited to milking gullible people, as far as I know not a single usable item is the result of this fraudsters activity over the years. That whole field - and the associated cryo preservation proponents / entities - are simply religion warmed over, sell the eternal life in return for your money today. No proof required and never any complaints.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > His success is mostly limited to milking gullible people, as far as I know not a single usable item is the result of this fraudsters activity over the years. Really? SENS research is pretty niche in the broad field of regenerative medicine - that's kind of their schtick after all - but it appears to follow the well-known pattern from medical research where it's amazingly useful for mice, with results on humans being either inconclusive or many years away from practical usefulness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Foundation#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Foundation#Research
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I think you confirmed my point.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Perhaps, but by that standard all basic research in medicine with no short-term application to humans is "just milking gullible people". There's not much in there that's specific to SENS.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Not really, because the bulk of that research is at least based on solid scientific principles whereas what de Grey has been peddling always read as 'made for investors' rather than aiming for specific results. I always figured that Mollers sky car would fly long before de Grey would deliver a result (and I consider Moller to be longest running investor scam in history besides the Catholic church).
hungryforcodes 5y ago
The author sounds just as cranky, ironically.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sebringj 5y ago
From a laymen perspective, I see David Sinclair as the clear leader in this field with actual lab results to back it up. https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/research https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/research I only remember Aubrey de Grey talking and presenting a lot but there wasn't the level of substance that seemed satisfactory to me. Ad hominem alert... Aubrey gives me the sensation of scratching a chalkboard with his strange social life and terrible hygiene but is obviously intelligent. In stark contrast...David has all the admirable hallmarks, socially and academically. Substance really only matters to me but it is worth mentioning Aubrey's oddness as it seems quite extreme and entertaining. I think Aubrey's weirdness actually had the opposite effect of making me give him more credit of a potential mad genius than now seemingly deserved but maybe that will change.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The kind of research Sinclair does is quite plausibly complementary to de Grey's in many ways. Sinclair focuses on epigenetic changes in nuclear DNA as a key factor, which SENS would probably classify more broadly as "senescent cells causing trouble" aka ApoptoSENS. OTOH Sinclair's research does not have many tie-ins to the broader field of regenerative medicine, which is where de Grey's approach might have more value.
javert 5y ago
This article is full of blatantly faulty "logic." Maybe de Grey is guilty as charged, but this article is just irresponsible, reprehensible noise. It's OK up to the cryonics comment, as far as I can tell; after that it just becomes sarcastic. For example, making sarcastic comments about a person's alibi does not mean the alibi is actually false. Another example - the author states that he will judge de Grey based on some moron commenting on his blog - which is obviously faulty and shows that the author has suspect motivations. Adding emotionalistic junk to the Internet puts you into the same kind of camp as, well... the normal people that we complain about (QAnon, etc.). I mean, seriously. Practice intellectual hygiene. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be listened to, you are contributing to the overall problem.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's a fair criticism of the article, it would have been a lot stronger without all the junk.
- stormageddon 5y ago
  I don't think it even starts off that well. Close to the beginning it makes it sound like AdG is telling people he can make them immortal, which is a flat out lie. In podcasts and interviews as recent as a few weeks ago I remember he has corrected questions along those lines, saying nothing will stop a bus from flattening you for example. Ending ageing and ending death are completely different things.
hobofan 5y ago
I don't think Aubrey de Grey is a good guy, and for anyone that is seriously interested in longevity research, it is known that he is mostly an old mascot that has kicked off a lot of (public, though not so much scientific) discourse in that field, but he and his foundation hasn't produced much by themselves. Having said all that, the dismissal of longevity(/rejuvenation) research in general by the author (and many of the comments here) is incredibly shallow. While Aubrey de Grey highlights his mitochondiral research in his book "Ending Aging"[0], he never claims that it is a silver bullet for aging and most off the book revolves around different parts to the puzzle that have all to be solved in order for consistent rejuvenation to succeed. A few years later "The Hallmarks of Aging"[1] (which outlines a similar approach to the book) was published in Cell and is widely recognized as a milestone paper and "roadmap" on what problems need to be tackled on the road to longevity. There are also now many biotech startups tackling exactly those problems outlined, producing real drugs that are currently in trials (e.g. Unity Biotechnology[2]), and the rate of more of them popping up is only accelerating. I could try to write even more here to convince you that longevity research is a worthwile pursuit (and not just vaporware), but it's probably better if you read up on the topic for yourself, for which I can strongly recommend /r/longevity[3] and the resources listed there. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367074 https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroug... [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/ [2]: https://unitybiotechnology.com/pipeline/ https://unitybiotechnology.com/pipeline/ [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/
- xiphias2 5y ago
  One more link that tries to collect current clinical trials: https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ And an example for success for treating mitochondrial disease: https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/gensight-biologics-gs010-lumevoq https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/g... https://www.gensight-biologics.com/product/gs010-for-lhon/ https://www.gensight-biologics.com/product/gs010-for-lhon/ Sure, it's not moving mitochondrial DNA to Nucleus directly, but the vector allows a specific mitochondrial gene to be expressed inside the nucleus. In the future base / prime editing (which didn't exist 10 years ago) can be used to fix mitochondrial DNA damage, which is probably much better solution: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02054-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02054-5 So far the car maintainence metaphore of curing aging seems right.
stormageddon 5y ago
This reads like someone with a personal grudge against AdG, having a tantrum.

37 points by bigbillheck 5y ago

I think he, like many techno-utopians, provides something more valuable than truth: identity

People want to live forever and there weren’t many people in this space when de Grey started. I don’t think he’s a crank, but it is surprising that people invest in him.

jacquesm 5y ago
It's the billionaire's dillema: you can't take it with you, so here's this guy who for a - to you - paltry sum of money claims that he can make you live forever. Since it doesn't harm you in any way you might as well make that bet. See also: Pascals' wager.

zozbot234 5y ago

The actual news in this post: the SENS foundation has placed de Grey on indefinite leave following the allegations in the past few days: https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/11/anti-aging-research-pioneer-aubrey-de-grey-placed-on-leave-over-sexual-harassment-allegations/ https://www.statnews.com/2021/08/11/anti-aging-research-pion...

christkv 5y ago

The more I read about this guy the more it reads like a cult leader rather than a scientist.

therowoay 5y ago
The most amazing thing about him is that he seems to get a majority of his calories from beer, like some kind of Ancient Egyptian diet.
masklinn 5y ago
Sounds like a grifter, though uncharacteristically grifting very rich people around the one thing their money can not really buy them. Though it’s a similar grift to many religions, promising eternal life based on random technobabble instead of magic man.

The_rationalist 5y ago

There are many extremely potent geroprotective substances out there, either fixing oxidative damage (Skq1), thymus involution (thymalin), or telomeres shortening (Epitalon), or having state of the art anticarcinogenic potency (PNC-27), etc The issue with Aubrey de Grey and other popular vulgarisator is that they are illiterate of the most potent research and hence do not promote it. However despite their mediocrity, they do more good than harm by attracting more attention to the field with the highest utilitaristic ROI in the world.

blastro 5y ago

Nature hates this one trick which guarantees free unlimited lifetimes! Click here to read.

fighterpilot 5y ago
I don't want to live forever. I do want to live a good 500+ years while having the option to end it at my pleasure sooner than that if desired.
cko 5y ago
I think if you can live long enough in a healthy state, eventually you'd acquire enough wealth to change your circumstances (configuration?) however you want. I think that would add at least 50 years of novelty. I tend to agree it probably would get tiring after a while, but I think the point is being able to go out on your own terms.

rememberdeath 5y ago

He might be a crank but certainly not the usual sort, he solved a longstanding open problem in mathematics: https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yields-to-amateur-mathematician-20180417/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/decades-old-graph-problem-yie...

jacquesm 5y ago
I see him as a fraudster rather than a crank and there is no reason why people that are good at mathematics would not be able to commit fraud. In fact, they're probably better at it.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Being good at mathematics also does not preclude crankery. Quite the opposite really, if you can see the theoretical underpinnings of reality it’s a short step to believing you know everything. Gödel was famously on the far side, suffering from an obsessive fear of being poisoned and starving to death when his wife was hospitalised because he refused to eat anyone else's food.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's when you assume that the person involved is ethical, but ethics and intelligence are not necessarily aligned.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    Gödel was very mentally unwell (what seems like severe hypochondria and probably other things as well) but he definitely was not a crank.
    - jjgreen 5y ago
      This, crankery (in mathematics) has a rather specific meaning, there's even a book: https://bookstore.ams.org/spec-4 https://bookstore.ams.org/spec-4

nynx 5y ago

Judgement of Aubrey de Grey aside, I constantly find it weird that so many people, even on HN, don’t understand why some would want to live an especially long time.

jacquesm 5y ago
You might want to live for a very long time, but I don't want you to live for a very long time (beyond your normal life-span, that is). After all, we already have the problem of those that have been around for a bit longer owning pretty much everything that's worth owning and renting it out at a premium to those that are born later. Besides of course the resource consumption problem, the fact that these treatments - assuming they ever really materialize - will further increase the gap between rich and poor and so on. I honestly believe that the world as we know it would not be able to deal with a bunch of billionaire immortals. We'd be slaves in all but name. And I don't believe that such a medical advance would be made available to all.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  That's not a problem with longevity. Mortality isn't even a solution; it barely qualifies as a workaround, what with dynasties.
- nynx 5y ago
  Now that’s an interesting take. Aside from the likelihood that aging treatments are likely to be free or subsidized by governments to avoid having increasingly old populations, what do you define as my normal lifespan? Should I avoid cancer treatments if I get it later in life? What about heart disease? Or Alzheimer’s? For better or worse, you cannot make those value judgements on others.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No, feel free to get all those. But the moment that your life-extension becomes the shortening of someone else's is where the problems really begin. Resources are finite, we are already straining our eco-systems to (and beyond) the breaking point. At some point we will need some limits to avoid losing it all. Quite possibly we are already past the point of no return in that sense. I think the first time when humanity will really be ready for a major boost in longevity is when we go interstellar, until then it would just complicate matters. And whether or not I'm allowed to make those value judgments of others does not bother me, I am happy to apply the same judgments to myself.

JasonFruit 5y ago

I've been hearing a lot about this guy lately, and he does sound like a crank. But if you want to write an article saying that's definitely the case, you should not say, "I wonder what new flaky idea he’s telling audiences of rich old people, but unfortunately I don’t care enough to try and find out..." The light, flakey tone of this article is inappropriate to an attempt to destroy someone's career, no matter how justifiably. That's a matter to take seriously.

jacquesm 5y ago

His success is mostly limited to milking gullible people, as far as I know not a single usable item is the result of this fraudsters activity over the years. That whole field - and the associated cryo preservation proponents / entities - are simply religion warmed over, sell the eternal life in return for your money today. No proof required and never any complaints.

zozbot234 5y ago
> His success is mostly limited to milking gullible people, as far as I know not a single usable item is the result of this fraudsters activity over the years. Really? SENS research is pretty niche in the broad field of regenerative medicine - that's kind of their schtick after all - but it appears to follow the well-known pattern from medical research where it's amazingly useful for mice, with results on humans being either inconclusive or many years away from practical usefulness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Foundation#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Foundation#Research
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I think you confirmed my point.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Perhaps, but by that standard all basic research in medicine with no short-term application to humans is "just milking gullible people". There's not much in there that's specific to SENS.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Not really, because the bulk of that research is at least based on solid scientific principles whereas what de Grey has been peddling always read as 'made for investors' rather than aiming for specific results. I always figured that Mollers sky car would fly long before de Grey would deliver a result (and I consider Moller to be longest running investor scam in history besides the Catholic church).

hungryforcodes 5y ago

The author sounds just as cranky, ironically.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sebringj 5y ago

From a laymen perspective, I see David Sinclair as the clear leader in this field with actual lab results to back it up. https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/research https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/research I only remember Aubrey de Grey talking and presenting a lot but there wasn't the level of substance that seemed satisfactory to me. Ad hominem alert... Aubrey gives me the sensation of scratching a chalkboard with his strange social life and terrible hygiene but is obviously intelligent. In stark contrast...David has all the admirable hallmarks, socially and academically. Substance really only matters to me but it is worth mentioning Aubrey's oddness as it seems quite extreme and entertaining. I think Aubrey's weirdness actually had the opposite effect of making me give him more credit of a potential mad genius than now seemingly deserved but maybe that will change.

zozbot234 5y ago
The kind of research Sinclair does is quite plausibly complementary to de Grey's in many ways. Sinclair focuses on epigenetic changes in nuclear DNA as a key factor, which SENS would probably classify more broadly as "senescent cells causing trouble" aka ApoptoSENS. OTOH Sinclair's research does not have many tie-ins to the broader field of regenerative medicine, which is where de Grey's approach might have more value.

javert 5y ago

This article is full of blatantly faulty "logic." Maybe de Grey is guilty as charged, but this article is just irresponsible, reprehensible noise. It's OK up to the cryonics comment, as far as I can tell; after that it just becomes sarcastic. For example, making sarcastic comments about a person's alibi does not mean the alibi is actually false. Another example - the author states that he will judge de Grey based on some moron commenting on his blog - which is obviously faulty and shows that the author has suspect motivations. Adding emotionalistic junk to the Internet puts you into the same kind of camp as, well... the normal people that we complain about (QAnon, etc.). I mean, seriously. Practice intellectual hygiene. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be listened to, you are contributing to the overall problem.

jacquesm 5y ago
That's a fair criticism of the article, it would have been a lot stronger without all the junk.
stormageddon 5y ago
I don't think it even starts off that well. Close to the beginning it makes it sound like AdG is telling people he can make them immortal, which is a flat out lie. In podcasts and interviews as recent as a few weeks ago I remember he has corrected questions along those lines, saying nothing will stop a bus from flattening you for example. Ending ageing and ending death are completely different things.

hobofan 5y ago

I don't think Aubrey de Grey is a good guy, and for anyone that is seriously interested in longevity research, it is known that he is mostly an old mascot that has kicked off a lot of (public, though not so much scientific) discourse in that field, but he and his foundation hasn't produced much by themselves. Having said all that, the dismissal of longevity(/rejuvenation) research in general by the author (and many of the comments here) is incredibly shallow. While Aubrey de Grey highlights his mitochondiral research in his book "Ending Aging"[0], he never claims that it is a silver bullet for aging and most off the book revolves around different parts to the puzzle that have all to be solved in order for consistent rejuvenation to succeed. A few years later "The Hallmarks of Aging"[1] (which outlines a similar approach to the book) was published in Cell and is widely recognized as a milestone paper and "roadmap" on what problems need to be tackled on the road to longevity. There are also now many biotech startups tackling exactly those problems outlined, producing real drugs that are currently in trials (e.g. Unity Biotechnology[2]), and the rate of more of them popping up is only accelerating. I could try to write even more here to convince you that longevity research is a worthwile pursuit (and not just vaporware), but it's probably better if you read up on the topic for yourself, for which I can strongly recommend /r/longevity[3] and the resources listed there. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367074 https://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroug... [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/ [2]: https://unitybiotechnology.com/pipeline/ https://unitybiotechnology.com/pipeline/ [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/longevity/

xiphias2 5y ago
One more link that tries to collect current clinical trials: https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ And an example for success for treating mitochondrial disease: https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/gensight-biologics-gs010-lumevoq https://www.lifespan.io/road-maps/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/g... https://www.gensight-biologics.com/product/gs010-for-lhon/ https://www.gensight-biologics.com/product/gs010-for-lhon/ Sure, it's not moving mitochondrial DNA to Nucleus directly, but the vector allows a specific mitochondrial gene to be expressed inside the nucleus. In the future base / prime editing (which didn't exist 10 years ago) can be used to fix mitochondrial DNA damage, which is probably much better solution: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02054-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02054-5 So far the car maintainence metaphore of curing aging seems right.

stormageddon 5y ago

This reads like someone with a personal grudge against AdG, having a tantrum.