
SENS Research Foundation Receives $2.4M Ethereum Donation from Vitalik Buterin - KasianFranks
http://www.sens.org/outreach/press-releases/srf-receives-24m-ethereum-donation-from-vitalik-buterin
======
joefourier
If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should
passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation,
I encourage you to read the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant by Nick Bostrom:
[https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html](https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html)

Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical
research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.

~~~
pavlov
Abolishing natural death may be desirable, but there's no question it would
mean dramatically less children in the world. Instead of new minds and new
experiences, human society would be dominated to an even greater extent by old
minds and their established patterns.

In Bostrom's "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant", note the line spoken by the aged
king at the end: _" Today we are like children again."_

When the dragon is vanquished, the old are children again – but they're also
the last children.

~~~
pjscott
That's a problem. It's a better problem than being locked in the dungeons of
the dragon tyrant for lonely years while you wait for it to consume you.
Please let's address these things in order of priority.

~~~
pavlov
How do you know that "potential end of all human creativity" is a smaller and
better problem than "individuals eventually cease to exist"?

~~~
pjscott
I know which I'd prefer, from my standpoint as a regular human now. If I'm
wrong, nonexistence sounds like a much more solvable problem than universal
permadeath. This is not a difficult comparison.

~~~
IntronExon
This isn’t a solution to death... we will all still die. It’s just that you
won’t age or die from old age. Accidents, murder, suicide, natural disasters
etc are all still on the table. Framing this as freedom from death in general
is delusional.

------
dawhizkid
It's amazing to me, despite so many reproducible studies on genetically
similar animals to humans as well as human studies, that people aren't more
excited by this free and unlimited resource every person on earth already has
available to them to fight aging/increase longevity in fasting/calorie
restriction.

~~~
xexers
I listened to Aubrey on a podcast recently. He was saying that caloric
restriction doesn't give much benefit if you start in your middle age. You
need to start in your early twenties.

~~~
dawhizkid
I agree, which is why I do keto and IF and in my twenties. The majority of the
world's population is in their youth, so this knowledge impacts a huge % of
the world's population.

------
wallflower
Someone on HN mentioned this paper in another thread about life extension. I
find it fascinating that old age can be explained as redundant system
breakdown and eventually failure.

> Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows
> researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of
> given architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its
> components. Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are
> entirely composed of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will
> nevertheless deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are
> redundant in irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct
> consequence of systems redundancy. Reliability theory also predicts the
> late-life mortality deceleration with subsequent leveling-off, as well as
> the late-life mortality plateaus, as an inevitable consequence of redundancy
> exhaustion at extreme old ages. The theory explains why mortality rates
> increase exponentially with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by
> taking into account the initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11742523)

------
megadethz
Worlds youngest billionaire.

~~~
icelancer
And to think it was rooted in the fact that he got mad that he was banned from
World of Warcraft, leading him to distrust centralized authority, and the
Bitcoin team blew off his smart contracts ideas, so he made Ethereum.

In a parallel universe, Buterin is doing something way worse for humanity with
his genius and his resolve, so I'll take the Buterin we have today.

~~~
pavlov
Ethereum is still like a tech demo though.

Right now, Ethereum's promised "global supercomputer" is more like a 1960s IBM
mainframe that you can access through wildly expensive dial-up links. What
kind of world-changing networked software would you have built on that?

It doesn't seem to actually work for any applications other than escrow (ICOs)
– and even that has a strong pyramidic sniff to it, because it's used to
collect investments into Ethereum-based protocols that can't really result in
functional applications on Ethereum unless it's radically redesigned.

Maybe they'll pull it off and Ethereum will be useful a few years from now.
I'm not making any bets.

~~~
icelancer
Cryptocurrency represents billions of dollars of value exchanged every single
day with the bits being the physical representation of money.

Ten years ago that kind of adoption would have been considered impossible.

Anything beyond that is moving the goalposts. I'm happy to be along for the
ride rather than commenting about the "this is not the likely implementation
of this technology" / "it's used for scams" / "it doesn't scale."

I am aware of all that and I agree with most of it. But the financial adoption
of this technology is itself incredibly amazing, and something I think people
overlook so they can make a technically-correct point about the tech in its
infancy. Which is not to say you are doing it, but it's pretty close,
especially since I didn't advocate for Ethereum as genius (it's pretty
interesting, if you ask me; and smart contracts do a great job of exposing how
stupid people are and how terrible of developers we are).

~~~
pavlov
I agree the financial adoption is fun to watch (from the sidelines, eating
popcorn), and I think there will be interesting applications for smart
contracts eventually.

However I'm not convinced that Ethereum's "jack of all trades" approach has
long-term potential – it looks a lot like an initial vague research prototype
that needs to be pared down to specific verticals before you have a product.
(Exposing the stupidity of everyone who tries to use it for anything may not
be the best way to build a long-term community?)

Personally I like to imagine Ethereum as a 1969 mainframe occupying a giant
office floor, and then ask the question: ARPANET was just around the corner in
1969, so what would that change look like this time? In other words, what's
the "TCP/IP" for Ethereum's "mainframe on dial-up"?

------
reasonattlm
I think it important to note that the SENS research programs are just about
100% funded by philanthropy, with thousands of supporters over the years. This
donation is a part of ~$6M from the year end fundraiser: about $500k from a
lot of people in the community, Buterin's donation, $2M from the Pineapple
Fund, and $1M from an anonymous donor.

Needless to say everyone in the SENS community is very pleased by this
unexpected generosity. These funds will go a long way towards helping to push
allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes (remove the contribution of
damaged mitochondria to aging) and cross-link breakers (remove stiffening of
arteries and loss of elasticity in other tissues) to completion over the next
couple of years, not to mention a range of other important projects in
rejuvenation research.

It makes us think that we're somewhere crucial in the tipping point for
support and understanding of rejuvenation biotechnology as field.

\--------

On this topic, I have a pet theory regarding wealth and its use to change the
world. Historically, people who became extraordinarily wealthy have done so
only after many years of work on projects that they were deeply invested in
for the sake of the work, not for the sake of financial reward. Consequently
they had no real idea regarding what to do with that wealth, other than to
keep on moving forward in the shape that they had carved out for their lives
prior to that enrichment. They became one with the process that brought them
to where they were. Further, these were usually older people by that point,
come to terms with the human condition, more comfortable with the world as it
is, not as a younger and more fiery individual would have it be. Not everyone
is worn down to acceptance - look at the large-scale, results-oriented
philanthropy of Bill Gates, for example - but I think it is definitely the
case that vision is often one of the early casualties of aging, and the advent
of personal wealth doesn't change that situation for any given individual. For
every Bill Gates there are another twenty billionaires who fail to change the
world in any significant way beyond the ventures that earned them their
fortunes.

Cryptocurrencies, the first application of blockchain technologies, have
resulted in a sizable number of people who have become enormously wealthy in a
much shorter period of time, and at younger ages, than has typically been the
case in the past. Even the dotcom bubble era and its immediate sequels didn't
reach these levels of youthful enrichment, and that produced a fair number of
people young enough and wealthy enough to set forth to remake sections of the
world in the service of loftier agendas. They escaped being shaped by the
processes of their enrichment to a great enough degree to retain fire and
vision. Consider the willingness to put capital towards world-changing
futurist ideals exhibited by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean
Parker, to pick a few. But while that generation of high net worth individuals
have certainly supported the life sciences, and in Peter Thiel's case SENS
rejuvenation research, they largely haven't followed Thiel's support for the
goal of treating aging as a medical condition, and Thiel himself has certainly
not gone all-in. He hasn't followed the logic further towards its end, in that
the only rational use for excess capital in this age is to develop viable
treatments to reverse aging. When you can buy time with money, and not just
for yourself, but for everyone, then that is the rational thing to do.

The wealthy of the blockchain community may well proceed differently. The
times are different, for one, as rejuvenation research after the SENS model of
damage repair is more broadly known and accepted nowadays. The technology
industry of the Bay Area, still in many ways the spiritual center of modern
software engineering and invention, includes a great many supporters of SENS,
the Methuselah Foundation, and the SENS Research Foundation, and that number
has grown considerably over the past fifteen years. Aging is an engineering
problem, SENS is a set of repairs and a set of outlines for repair
technologies, and engineers grasp that readily. It isn't a coincidence that
there are so many engineers, software and otherwise, to be found participating
in the past fifteen years of philanthropy to support progress in rejuvenation
research, work based on periodic repair of the cell and tissue damage that
causes aging. Now it is the case that many of those engineers in the
cryptocurrency space are both young and suddenly wealthy, people who have not
been worn down to an acceptance of the world as it is, have not become one
with their process of enrichment. They are still willing to consider radical
change to the status quo, full of the fire of success, and equipped with
sufficient resources to push forward the research and development that they
would like to see happen. Exciting times.

~~~
jacques_chester
An alternative theory is that we read more science fiction, from a younger
age, than previous generations of bubble winners.

------
ACow_Adonis
How can i put this delicately but openly...

As an ignorant observer... is the SENS foundation viewed as alegitimate
research org, or is it, to borrow a phrase coined by Djikstra..."something
that could only have been invented in southern california".

~~~
reasonattlm
Read their publication list. The SRF collaborates with most of the important
research groups in the field:

[http://www.sens.org/research/publications](http://www.sens.org/research/publications)

Also, see their research advisory board, which includes numerous respected
researchers, leaders in their areas of work.

[http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-
board](http://www.sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board)

You might be familiar with senolytics, the clearance of senescent cells as a
way to treat aging that is presently taking off in a big way in the research
and development communities. Aubrey de Grey, cofounder of the SRF, called for
that back in 2002, and the SENS programs have advocated for it since then:

[http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf](http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/manu12.pdf)

The SRF and original parent organization Methuselah Foundation seed funded
Oisin Biotechnologies to work on gene therapy for senolytics a few years ago.
Other lines of development have also spun off into companies in the SRF
network.

------
jrs95
At first I thought this said "SNES Foundation" and I was _very_ confused.

------
matt_wulfeck
What would you do with more years added to your life? Probably spend it glued
to your phone like the years you have now.

~~~
dawhizkid
Even if the price of such a drug was $0, realistically only wealthy people
could afford to live significantly longer.

~~~
rictic
What? Why?

~~~
dawhizkid
People in this country can barely scrap up enough money for a 20 year
retirement, if they even do that. If everyone suddenly lived on average
another 40-50 years, when do you retire? How does that effect the
sustainability of a pension scheme/social security?

~~~
naasking
> If everyone suddenly lived on average another 40-50 years, when do you
> retire?

You retire when you can for however long you can afford, then eventually go
back to school and start again. That's the whole point of multiple lifetimes.
If that doesn't interest you, then you can live your one full life, retire and
die like all of your ancestors.

------
np_tedious
Good kid, that Vitalik. Why can't you be more like him, Johnny?

------
bloudermilk
The idea that you can invent a crypto currency, mine the earliest (and
therefore easiest-to-mine) tokens yourself, build a business/community/market,
then get incredibly rich strikes me as incredibly shady. In theory it's not
that different from founding a company, selling some of the shares to
investors, keeping "founder shares" for yourself, then growing the company.
But somehow it seems much shadier?

I guess the difference is: in a company an investor can look at a cap table
and say "that's a reasonable number of shares for the founders to keep"
whereas the coin "investors" can't know how much of outstanding equity belongs
to the founders.

~~~
timjver
What makes it immoral for Buterin to have a large amount of Ether? Would it be
immoral for a very early investor to buy a lot of Ether for a very low price?

~~~
hanniabu
I think what he's alluding to is just that the amount he owns it's very clear,
although there are estimates out there which are close enough.

~~~
icelancer
Is Buterin supposed to invent a cryptocurrency and own none of it and not be
invested in its own success? How much is acceptable? Who deems the amount
acceptable?

~~~
bloudermilk
These are all very good questions! I wasn't trying to pass judgement one way
or the other, I just think it's an interesting discussion point. Certainly, if
crypto currency is going to stay mainstream we (the US) will be regulating a
lot of this in short order.

------
mephitix
I've never really understood why people consider aging to be a problem. I'm
not sure if we as a civilization have been able to deal with overpopulation,
at least looking at currently-overpopulated areas.

Personally, I would rather have an optimal life - one where I don't have any
diseases or ailments, so I can live life to the fullest, all the way up until
death. So IMO, currently incurable or intractable things like cancer,
Alzheimers, Parkinson's, dementia, are more important.

If fixing 'aging' can fix these issues, or if an aging fix is a side-effect of
these issues (please enlighten me since I know nothing about aging research)
then I would be fine with that - but would still be worried about
overpopulation, whether it's the rich or both the rich and poor.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Curing aging does indeed need to address degenerative diseases as well, and
quite a bit of anti-aging research looks into those as well.

For example, the Methuselah Foundation and Methuselah Fund are working with
Leucadia ([https://www.leucadiatx.com/](https://www.leucadiatx.com/)), which
has a credible cure for Alzheimer's in progress. SENS and Methuselah are also
working with Oisin Biotechnologies, which has technology to carefully target
specific cells; in addition to working for senescent cell clearing, it can
also serve as a component of a cancer treatment, precisely targeting cancerous
cells.

So yes, anti-aging research can and will be _comprehensive_ , covering aging
itself, age-related degeneration, and the conditions that become increasingly
prevalent if you manage to avoid dying of something else before they strike.

As for overpopulation, that's been specifically researched and considered too.
Among many other things, if you compare birth rates to life expectancy and
mortality rates, you'll find them inversely proportional; people have more
children when life feels more fleeting (to improve their chances), and vice
versa. And even if that _weren 't_ the case, we'd deal with it.

Meanwhile, 150,000 people die every day. That needs to stop. That's not a
price worth paying for _anything_.

~~~
cryoshon
i'm a proponent of the SENS approach myself, but nobody else asked yet, so i
will:

what if 150,000 people dying per day is the cost of mankind's ability to
progress with each generation? especially in science, progress occurs as the
old guard dies...

~~~
JoshTriplett
Making people's lives better is by far the most important goal of science.

Look at it this way: if we were currently in the state where nobody died,
ever, who would choose to start murdering a hundred and fifty thousand people
every day in the name of "progress", or in the name of _anything_?

And in any case, who's to say we wouldn't gain massively in progress by not
losing the most experienced minds, and instead benefiting from their
experience? Or by letting people study longer because they have all the time
in the world?

~~~
orangecat
_Look at it this way: if we were currently in the state where nobody died,
ever, who would choose to start murdering a hundred and fifty thousand people
every day in the name of "progress", or in the name of anything?_

And would we do so not by painlessly euthanizing people after 100 years of
healthy life, but instead by infecting everyone with a plague that cripples
our bodies and minds over several decades?

------
goldenkey
The only reason he did this is because crypto has been crashing -- and public
news like this will add new buyers to the crypto market. Considering his share
of ethereum is worth billions -- by donating 0.01% he raises the rest by
dozens of % points, effectively making him billions. Smart move.

~~~
cyanbane
while I don't disagree with the outcome you stated, that doesn't mean his
motive isn't legitimate generosity. I am very happy that this organization can
do (as of now) $2.4m more research to benefit people.

