Lol at "NOT" and "(maybe)" in the same title.

From hearing de Grey speak, you might get the impression that the scientific community has deftly avoided studying ageing. This is not the case; it has been studied for some time.

It's weird that you got this impression, because in many TED Talks de Grey explicitly mentions that biogerontology has more than a century of history. It's his approach to be new, together with the attitude of aging research as translational research instead of just basic non-translational biology research. When, for example, The Buck Institute was founded 20 years ago, it was frowned upon to think about aging research as a translational field, and the whole discipline was much smaller.

Regarding antagonistic pleiotropy: be careful not to mix theories explaining different causal levels of aging. Antagonistic pleiotropy explains some of the processes that lead to damage, but doesn't say anything about damage itself. Aubrey de Grey's categorization of damage is actually more accepted than ever. The scientific consensus is settled on something very close to it, described in the landmark paper "The Hallmarks of Aging", from 2013.

I don't know who you heard criticizing de Grey so harshly, but that's very uncommon now. It happened in the early 2000s but not now. SENS Research Foundation, in fact, works with many universities and established institutions.

I highly suggest to read my new post about SENS Research Foundation that I just published here. I delve deep in these topics and more. I also plan to interview Dr. de Grey, and you will find some potential interview questions.

Thanks for taking the time to post; I like seeing people share experiences like this on the Forum as well as on Facebook.

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I'd recommend against titles that use an all-caps "NOT" when the post's conclusion is highly uncertain; readers are likely to get the wrong impression before they look at the post, or even after they've read the post (titles are easy to remember).

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I don't have any opinion of SENS, but it seems like a strong adjustment from "yes, donate" to "probably don't donate" would be better off coming from a deeper investigation (e.g. "these two key papers have mistakes X and Y" or even "I surveyed 50 experts and found that 90% of them thought SENS was approaching the issue incorrectly"). Conversations at a conference seem like pretty weak evidence against someone's scientific work unless they are extremely damning (e.g. "this person faked the data for a major study") or represent a strong consensus within a community with solid credentials and past achievements.

(I don't know from this post how many people you spoke with, what their positions are, or how successful they've been in their own work on ageing.)

I suspect that even de Grey wouldn't claim that SENS was at all likely to "solve ageing on its own", or that his organization is among the first to really study aging (though if he did, that would push me somewhat away from wanting to donate, as a sign of massive overconfidence). Maybe his TED talk proves otherwise, but I'd guess that his true argument is something like "aging research gets less funding and attention than it should, compared to other types of health research" (for a post that makes a similar argument, see Sarah Constantin).

I accidentally made this a linkpost for Aubrey de Grey's TED talk. I then tried to undo this, but it didn't seem to work.