Skip to content

Information to be used to help raise money for the SENS Research Foundation.

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

NathanWailes/sens

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

SENS

Information to be used to help raise money for the SENS Research Foundation.

What's this all about?

In short: It's about "ending aging": developing therapies to treat all age-related diseases, which would allow people to live for thousands of years.

SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It's a fancy way of saying "Ways to stop the health problems associated with having been alive a long time", or even more simply, "How to end aging". As you can read on the Wikipedia entry for SENS, it's a term coined by Aubrey de Grey, who studied the biology of aging at the extremely-prestigious University of Cambridge, to describe a new strategy for defeating aging that focuses on repairing damage to the body rather than trying to prevent it.

If you're not familiar with SENS, please consider reading the very-short SENS movement's rationale.

Now, SENS is just a strategy. Aubrey started the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) to fund and conduct research that follows the SENS strategy for defeating aging.

So to recap: SENS is the new strategy to defeat aging, and the SRF is the organization following that strategy.

The current situation

The current goal is to get the SENS Research Foundation's funding to $50 million/year from its current level of $4 million/year, so that it can be diverted to crucial research that is now possible but not being done for lack of funding.

Explanation

Aubrey has said that when he first decided to tackle aging, he foresaw three major problems:

  1. Figuring out how to fix aging, or in other words, coming up with a plan of research that would lead to therapies that would prevent all age-related diseases. (Source)
  2. Convincing the researchers necessary to execute the plan that it was worth their time. (Source)
  3. Convincing the funders of research that it was worth spending money on. (Source)

Aubrey found the first problem (Source) and second problem (Source) to be easier-than-anticipated, and they were essentially solved within a few years (by 2005).

Since then, "it's all been about problem number three: the funding" (Source). Aubrey estimates that the necessary research could be done three times faster if SENS had ten times more money (so, $40-50 million/year).

How can I help?

About

Information to be used to help raise money for the SENS Research Foundation.

Resources

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Languages