
Aubrey de Grey speaking at MIT - MikeCapone
http://citywire.kuluvalley.com/player.html?pguid=E586AD51-418F-C8CE-442B-828A9164D788&vtguid=70B21F9A-4BCA-C090-62F2-F77C0B007FE2
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netmau5
This guy is brilliant and I measure that by the fact that I can actually
understand him rather well considering the subject matter is a completely
different field than my own. He is mostly reiterating what he said at a TED
talk, but his enthusiasm is contagious enough to make me want to hear it
again.

When Ray Kurzweil says the exact same thing, I feel a little skeptical like a
salesman is trying to push snake oil on me, but this guy is so much more
convincing because he's like a hacker friend trying to explain why
immutability is great.

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crystalis
Similar discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368423>

Notably, for the naysayers, there are a few pointers to salient markers of
non-quackery, such as meaningful mitochondrial research.

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reasonattlm
More people should be using this sort of combined video and powerpoint
presentation format.

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johnohara
Agreed. The layout and interaction is very nice. I particularly like the way
the slides (images) swap in and out when you mouseover the list.

Seems a straightforward thing to write.

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pierrefar
This guy is the classic quack, and I had the "pleasure" of knowing him in
person at the Department of Genetics in Cambridge while I was doing my PhD.

The department's name and Cambridge lent him a ton of credence he doesn't
deserve. Sure what he says he wants to do is noble and good to aspire to
(fundamentally, medicine is about helping people live better and longer
lives), but he's not the man to do it.

He was invited to give a talk, to make his case, to the whole department which
he did. To put it mildly, his science to back up his theory was more about
piecing together buzzwords rather than have scientific rigour with properly
controlled experiments.

It seems we weren't the only ones not convinced. The closing remarks in his
Wikipedia profile say this: _"A debate over the legitimacy of de Grey's
proposals for combating ageing was published in MIT's Technology Review. In
the end, none of the challengers to de Grey were able to convince the judges
that SENS was "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate," though the
judges noted that "the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for
SENS.""_

(Ref: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey> )

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quickpost
Peter Thiel doesn't think so:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Philanthropy>

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pierrefar
Spinning a story about something that is noble (as I said), does not make it
good science.

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quickpost
I don't think his goal is to solve the scientific problems surrounding aging,
so his science doesn't matter that much to me. Everything he does seems to be
an effort to increase awareness and generate interest in a subject (reversing
the effects of aging), that shockingly few people think is remotely realistic.

In my mind, he views himself as the heretic leading the charge against the
established views of the rest of the world (that age related death is a
necessary thing).

And, THAT is what Peter Thiel is investing in, because getting people to start
caring about the problem is the first step to solving it. The organizers of
the X-Prize didn't build rockets - they setup a prize that motivated other
people to build them. And, thus he's created the Methuselah Mouse prize to try
to fund a similar distributed effort.

Calling him a quack is inaccurate, regardless of if it's true or not. He's not
a scientist. Instead, he's an entrepreneurial spirit who's trying to motivate
people to believe that we can change the world in completely new and powerful
ways. Just like we always have.

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waqf
I wish you had told me the link would resize my window.

I would then have forgone examining the contents, rather than, as now,
forgoing examining the contents and being pissed off.

