I do research at the interface between aging and bioinformatics.
It's a great place to be because many aging researchers, while smart and capable at their own techniques, are basically in the informatics stone age. So there is a lot of collaboration potential.
As for GP's comments, I'd agree that there needs to be more focus on "root causes" and fundamental mechanisms in aging research. But SENS itself is broadly considered hokum.
I expect the informatics stone age in aging research will start to dissipate more rapidly in the years ahead, given that Calico and Human Longevity look to be focused in that direction.
I would love to see more of the people who dismiss SENS criticize it on the published details of ongoing or proposed research rather than just hand-waving. Sadly all too few seem to be willing to do so. Clearly it isn't nonsense, since there are SENS labs and allied research programs in a number of universities now, including Cambridge, Wake Forest, etc, and a range of important figures in aging research and other life science fields relevant to regenerative medicine support SENS.
My concern about Calico and the other commercial efforts at aging research is, will the tools and data they develop be made public so that others can build on them? Also, supposing they succeed, I find the idea of commercial ownership of a (real) anti-aging drug morally repugnant in the extreme, perhaps even dystopian. But I certainly can't deny that Google has informatics experience.
SENS, as I understand it, can mean (at least) 3 different things:
a) The idea that we should focus on root causes rather than late-stage manifestations. I agree with this.
b) The idea that we should attempt to repair aging-related damage without needing to know what caused the damage. I find this debatable. We have stumbled on to some big treatments (aspirin, penicillin), without knowing how or why they worked. But in general, if you take a broken, complex system (e.g., a car, some source code) and attempt to repair it without understanding how it works, you will fail. With aging, many changes occur. How can you determine which changes are "damage" and which are compensatory regulatory changes without understanding the chain of causation?
c) A specific list of 7 aging-associated markers of damage and proposals to clear that damage, with the implication that if we do so, we will drastically reduce or eliminate age-associated morbidity and mortality. This is the part that is seen as hokum. At best, it is a hypothesis. Let de Grey get a grant and prove it, like everyone else does, rather than publicity-hunting and implying that it is only the stodgy old aging research establishment keeping us from eternal youth. But if you want semi-technical criticisms:
- On what basis are these 7 types of damage chosen and not others?
- One of the proposed treatments for the natural shortening of telomeres over time is the periodic, whole-body addition of telomerase or the equivalent. Considering that telomerase is overexpressed in cancer and is an important ingredient to uncontrolled cell division, do you think this is a good idea?
- On a related note, SENS presupposes that a cure for cancer must be found before the entire program can be made practical. A minor problem.
- The technology for several other of his other proposed interventions does not currently exist; for example, expressing mitochondrial genes only in the nucleus.
Anyway, I actually share SENS' goals but not its unwarranted confidence in its specific proposals to achieve them.
Thanks for your comment. I'm really fascinated by the efforts people/organizations/corps are putting into such research and the roadblocks that are potentially in the way of progress.
One thing I'm also fascinated by are the bio "hacker" labs/spaces, and I was wondering if you think something in that direction would be more suited for people to build on and if you think that such labs are even close to being in a position to pursue such endeavors that have mostly been relegated to universities (and the funding environment for such research) and corporations (and the closed source environment typically better suited to monetization)?
Every aspect of wet-lab biology is very expensive. Beyond the equipment and reagents, if you want to do in vivo aging research, you need a pathogen-free environment to house rats/mice for months or years and food to feed them.
Hackerspaces are promising in that they are finding ways to do certain techniques inexpensively. But to do the kind of wet-lab research that results in a published paper requires a wide array of equipment that I don't see available to the layman anytime soon (unless they're independently wealthy).
On the other hand, there is nothing specifically preventing interested amateurs from doing bioinformatics or aging informatics themselves. Only a few things (e.g., sequence analysis) require big clusters; you can do quite a lot on your home PC. If you need data, tons of it is freely available: http://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ is a good place to start. http://rosalind.info/ provides good tutorials.
I wish we would see more open-source developers creating well-designed bioinformatics platforms under the auspices of e.g., Apache or GNU. In general the programming experience of bioinformaticians is quite low, and we are under tremendous pressure to publish often, so there is little incentive to maintain projects over the long-term.
