SENS is a radical departure from the approaches that biogerontologists have traditionally explored for combating aging, and it claims to be able to achieve vastly greater extension of youth than anything that has come before (at least from supposedly credentialed experts on aging). Thus, it is no surprise that SENS is extremely controversial within the field. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I am attempting to bring about a change in thinking about aging and how to combat it that is bigger than the field has ever undergone before, and as in any such situation there is a good deal of knee-jerk resistance from those with a large intellectual investment in the prevailing orthodoxy. Gandhi's famous description of campaigns to change people's thinking goes something like this: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they oppose you, then they say they were with you all along." By that measure, 2005 was the year in which SENS emphatically progressed to "Gandhi stage 3".

The shift from off-the-record and occasionally rather sarcastic ridiculing of SENS to all-out, public denunciation occurred as a result of two events: first, a sharp rise in the amount and prominence of media interest in SENS, and second, an essay I wrote in EMBO Reports that strongly criticised the biogerontology community's current approach both to promoting the value of their work in the wider world and to the evaluation of new approaches to combating aging (such as SENS). Though I am well liked within the community and considered to have made plenty of significant contributions to our understanding of various aspects of aging, some of my senior colleagues reacted to these events by concluding that I was in grave danger of doing biogerontology serious harm by promoting a research agenda that, in their view, is utterly unsupported by current scientific knowledge. They set out this position in a short "Viewpoint" article published in EMBO Reports in November, which is one of the most strongly-worded criticisms of another scientist's work that you will find in the literature. I was of course invited to respond, and my reply appeared in the same issue.

The tone of the EMBO Reports exchange might lead you to presume that these authors, and perhaps the biogerontology community in general, are now shunning me and doing all they can to marginalise SENS. In fact, this could not be further from the truth. First, other senior gerontologists are now taking a strong interest in SENS and asking me to describe it in writing in specialist biogerontology fora, such as here. Perhaps even more significantly, a few weeks after the EMBO exchange appeared I took part in a debate at the Gerontological Society of America annual meeting in Orlando, in which another participant was Huber Warner, lead author of the Viewpoint piece, and many other signatories to the piece were present. The debate was extremely cordial, and afterwards Warner invited me to write up my talk for publication in the oldest and most conservative biogerontology journal, "Journals of Gerontology - Biological Sciences", of which he had just become the editor; in the end in the end they appear in Rejuvenation Research. The view (expressed in the Viewpoint article) that SENS is so crazy that it should not be dignified with learned debate is evidently held by only a small minority of that article's signatories, let alone the biogerontology research community at large. Some senior biogerontologists who have studied SENS in more detail are openly supportive of it, even though that could be thought to be politically risky when feelings are running so high.

A parallel initiative was launched in July 2005 by MIT Technology Review, the magazine that received a flood of criticism after publishing a highly negative and (in many people's views) offensive couple of editorials about me and SENS in their February 2005 issue. Much of this feedback noted that neither the editorials nor the profile of me in the same issue actually contained any scientific analysis of SENS -- they only rejected it as "obviously" ridiculous. Stung by this, the magazine's Editor-in-Chief, Jason Pontin, approached various biogerontologists who had originally given him the impression that SENS lacked any merit, asking them to set out their reasons for this view for publication in TR. He was surprised and frustrated -- and not a little angry -- when two of them agreed to do this but then backed out later when they had studied SENS enough to see how substantive it is. As a result, TR and the Methuselah Foundation joined to offer a $20,000 challenge prize to anyone from the mainstream biogerontology research community who was able to write a critique of SENS that persuades an independent panel of experts (biologists but not gerontologists) that SENS really is too crazy to merit serious discussion.

Update: in June 2006, the Challenge evaluation panel was announced. On July 11th 2006, Technology Review announced that all three submissions so far received had been rejected by the panel. This does not prove that SENS will work, of course, but it constitutes rather compelling evidence that SENS is indeed worthy of discussion and experimental exploration, because all entries, especially the one that the judges considered "most eloquent of the three", were written by people whom the man in the street would tend to trust on gerontological matters. The authors of this entry wrote an enraged "dissent" from the judges' decision which you can find here.

The importance of the above saga for the progress of SENS is immense. As detailed in my outline proposal for an Institute of Biomedical Gerontology and my timeframes page, the schedule for developing SENS depends in the first instance on the pace of research in several SENS areas that are far from adequately funded at present because they seem too ambitious. Obtaining funds for this work is therefore the primary goal of my advocacy efforts, and I think the most realistic source of that funding is philanthropy. Until the EMBO Reports exchange, I had a big problem here: wealthy individuals are careful with their money (or else they wouldn't be wealthy any more), and before committing to major contributions to SENS research they will perform due diligence, determining whether SENS is really as promising as I think. Now, I know that the experts whom such a person should consult for this include biologists in many areas that I have drawn on in constructing the SENS program, most of whom would in no way call themselves biogerontologists. Most biogerontologists themselves know, in their heart of hearts, that they do not possess all the background knowledge necessary to evaluate SENS -- but they don't like to say so (for various reasons, some quite understandable). But a potential donor hearing me say this may well be skeptical, reasoning that surely experts in the biology of aging are the only people to consult, because they will know all that one needs to know in order to evaluate a proposal for combating aging. With the publication of the EMBO Viewpoint, I now have incontrovertible documentary evidence that this is not so -- that a large and representative cross-section of the biogerontology research community have formed a low opinion of SENS despite lacking key knowledge, both of the existing experimental work on which SENS is based and of the reasoning that shows why SENS will be effective. I am therefore far better equipped than previously to ensure that any potential donor performs due diligence in a manner that will elicit a scientifically informed evaluation of SENS, rather than an evaluation dictated by prevailing biogerontological dogma.