Aubrey de Grey's Chance of Success: 1 in 48 million
Now that I have Kurzweil on the ropes, I turn my attention to another prominent Transhumanist: Aubrey de Grey.
On his webpage, de Grey outlines his approach to eliminate aging through what he calls Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). SENS has seven approaches that all must work for aging to be eliminated. However, according to this report, the chance of a drug entering into Phase 1 trials is just 8%.
So, assuming the same rate of failure for all seven of Mr. de Grey's approaches, I get 1 chance in 47,683,716 (from .08^7).
Therefore, de Grey and SENS are refuted.
On his webpage, de Grey outlines his approach to eliminate aging through what he calls Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). SENS has seven approaches that all must work for aging to be eliminated. However, according to this report, the chance of a drug entering into Phase 1 trials is just 8%.
So, assuming the same rate of failure for all seven of Mr. de Grey's approaches, I get 1 chance in 47,683,716 (from .08^7).
Therefore, de Grey and SENS are refuted.
This post is a straw man argument. If the author of the original post took any time to look into what de Grey is proposing, de Grey does not suggest that everything would be fixed at one time. Furthermore, de Grey refers to treating the "seven deadly things" he identifies, but he does not specify that the treatment would take the form of a pharmaceutical drug, and thus applying that particular assumption to all seven points is a gross oversimplification and severely undermines the validity of the author's argument.
I could go on, but instead I'll just say this. I would advise people who are curious to actually spend some time to read what has been written about SENS, rather than accepting the author's argument at face value. I'm not saying whether de Grey is right or not, that's entirely up to debate, but I am saying that the argument used here to say that he is wrong is itself a grossly oversimplified straw man argument and thus should not be taken seriously.
I would like for the author to revise his argument and make a more credible refutal. I would gladly read it. As it is though, I just cannot see enough here from the author for it to be taken seriously.
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I agree with Anonymous Coward.
100% of respondants to your survey currently dislike this entry.
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ditto
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Junk.
He bases the success chances on the overall probability of any drug getting into phase I trials being 8%.
This figure is based on the therapeutic potential of experimental substances based on ADME and
pharmacokinetics. But often, pharma industry is almost throwing random chemicals at cell cultures
and mice to see what effects they have.
As I understood it, this figure would only hold if the SENS treatment basically were a random chemical...
It's not even clear if any of the SENS targets would be modulated with a chemical substance,
most probably it would be biological drugs/enzymes, gene therapy or early nanomedicine,
in which not ADME/PK but MABLE and other measures of treatment efficiency would apply, and
chances would be much higher, because the drug targeting is much more thought out than
the general pharma method of discovering drugs, often almost by accident. Plus, SENS and more broadly,
Mprize motivated research would not try a single drug or therapy but hundreds or thousands.
Please learn some basic probability theory.
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