More than 200 scientists and longevity activists gathered at UCLA recently to discuss advancements in repairing humans. New technology is making it possible to imagine a world with ever greater life spans, but old world issues pervaded the discussions.
The Methuselah Foundation’s Aubrey de Grey organized the event and kicked it off with a theoretical explanation of how human aging might be reversed in the future. He argues that there are seven kinds of damage in human cells, and his mission is to get scientists all over the world involved in creating the fixes. The reason to focus on aging is not some vain plan to look years younger. Instead, it turns out that aging is a significant risk factor in all the major diseases that the American population faces such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and Type 2 diabetes.
The opening panel featured well-known and respected scientists such as Berkeley professor Bruce Ames, father of the Ames test for carcinogens, and professor William Haseltine, who coined the term “regenerative medicine.” However, instead of talking medicine, the discussion focused on one of the oldest complaints in science: how to get money for funding.
“We should mount a war on aging where it is not a disease, it is THE disease,” said Gregory Stock, Ph.D., director of the UCLA Program on Medicine, Technology and Society. To do this, Stock proposed an “aggressive publicly funded program.” While no one challenged this idea on the panel, during the two days of the conference, it was clear that some questioned the efficacy of such a plan.
Indeed, in a less formal setting, Ames lamented the fact that under the mostly government-run system of science grants, the “true visionaries are not getting funding.” This is not surprising, given that government agencies are by nature political, making decisions with an eye toward public opinion, not necessarily the best and brightest ideas. Agencies like the U.S. National Institutes of Health and particularly the Food and Drug Administration typically become risk averse over time, as it’s easier to deny approval for an idea or product that no one ever finds out about than it is to take a chance on a revolutionary idea and have it flop.
Yet although government funding agencies can make many mistakes, such as “wasting money on buildings,” as Stock pointed out in discussing California’s Proposition 71 (the stem cell initiative), there still seems to be an allure.
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