De Grey Technology Review controversy

The De Grey Technology Review controversy was a debate over the validity of the ideas of Aubrey de Grey, published in MIT's Technology Review.

Aubrey de Grey believes that human aging is like any disorder, and that it can, in principle, be eliminated. He has identified what he says are the seven causes of human aging, and has proposed remedies for each cause. He calls his proposals Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

The Technology Review Article
In February 2005, Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, criticised de Grey, at the time a computer associate in the Flybase Facility of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. De Grey is currently Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. Pontin began the controversy by:


 * publishing an article about de Grey by Sherwin B. Nuland, a professor of clinical surgery at Yale, and the author of How We Die. The article was entitled Do You Want to Live Forever?.

But what struck me is that [De Grey] is a troll. For all de Grey’s vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the ­com­puter support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle's beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogeron­tology; he drinks too much beer.
 * writing an editor's letter, titled Against Transcendence, that questioned the usefulness and appropriateness of introducing transcendentalism, or transhumanism, into science. Pontin noted what he said was a paradox: he said that those who looked for transcendental qualities in science often lived what he said were limited lives. Pontin wrote:


 * responding, when de Grey's defenders protested that these articles contained no detailed, scientific criticism of SENS and amounted to little more than ad hominem attacks, that he would find "a working biogerontologist" who would thoroughly criticize de Grey's ideas.

Pontin later commented that the de Grey article was one of the most read and most-discussed article that appeared in Technology Review in 2005. The April 2005 issue of Technology Review contained a reply by Aubrey de Grey, and numerous comments from readers.

Pontin acknowledged that neither the article by Nuland nor his own column attempted to disprove de Grey's ideas. He defended his approach by noting that he "commissioned what I called a 'profile in the style of The New Yorker'". He argued that his own column was never intended to address SENS, but was concerned with the more general subject of science and religion.

As of June 2005, Pontin had failed to find one "working biogerontologist" to debunk SENS.

The SENS Challenge Prize
In July of 2005, Pontin announced a $20,000 prize open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." (See Pontin's TR Blog "The SENS Challenge" ). Technology Review pledged $10,000 towards the prize, and The Methuselah Foundation, an organization co-founded by de Grey, pledged the other $10,000.

In March, of 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, PhD, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Anita Goel, MD and PhD, founder and chief executive of Nanobiosym; Vikram Kumar, MD, cofounder and chief executive of Dimagi, and a pathologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; Nathan Myhrvold, PhD, cofounder and chief executive of Intellectual Ventures, and former chief technologist at Microsoft; and J. Craig Venter, PhD, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute and developer of whole-genome shotgun sequencing, which sped up the human genome project.

Technology Review received five submissions to its Challenge. Three met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. Accompanying the three submissions were rebuttals by de Grey, and counter-responses to de Grey's rebuttals.

On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge. In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and disproved SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: "Estep et al. ... have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it."

Summarizing the judges' deliberations, Pontin wrote, "SENS is highly speculative. Many of its proposals have not been reproduced, nor could they be reproduced with today's scientific knowledge and technology. Echoing Myhrvold, we might charitably say that de Grey's proposals exist in a kind of antechamber of science, where they wait (possibly in vain) for independent verification. SENS does not compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists; but neither is it demonstrably wrong."

In publishing the results, Technology Review also announced that it would make a $10,000 payment to Estep et al. in recognition of what the publication called their "careful scholarship." David Gobel, Co-Founder of the Methuselah Foundation, commented: "While of course Technology Review is at liberty to make whatever ex-gratia payments it likes from its own funds, it is important to make it clear that this consolation prize was awarded outside the framework of the SENS Challenge, and without consulting or notifying the Methuselah Foundation, which contributed half the as yet unclaimed $20,000 SENS Challenge fund.'"