All of SarahC's Comments + Replies

It didn't come from either, it came from me, as a benchmark for what seems conservatively possible to achieve in the near-term, and for the size of impact necessary to be plausibly cost-competitive with other causes like global poverty. (If the same amount of funding yielded only one year's delay in the DALY burden of age-related diseases, I think that would make global poverty likely to be a "better buy.")

I believe there are larger effect sizes out there than metformin; metformin has a relatively small effect size on mice compared to other lifespan-modifying interventions, and the TAME trial chose metformin (as Barzilai admits) because it's extremely safe and well-studied, not because it's expected to be the best.

I agree with you; I don't think aging research would be cost-effective at a trillion dollars of total funding. I expect that's hugely more money than necessary.

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avturchin
5y
Surely, there are lager effect sizes there, but they need much more testing to prove the safety and such testing is the most expensive part of any trials. There is a few already safe intervention which could help to extend life, that is, besides metformin, green tee and vitamin D. Even as a trillion dollar project, fighting aging could be still cost-effective, after we divide the benefit for 10 billion people. If we speaking on de novo therapies, current price of just one drug development is close to 10 billions, and comprehensive aging therapy like SENS should include many new interventions, so it may be reasonable to estimate that it will be equal to 100 new interventions, and thus trillion dollar price is real. The sum is large but affordable for humanity as whole: total space funding for all history is around this price. However, it is impossible to get such trillion dollar funding via donations. But EA efforts could be used to attract larger funders, like pension funds, farma, governments, billionaires and insurance companies for funding such projects as they will eventually benefit from the cure for aging.

Yes, I'm aware, and thanks for explicitly flagging that.

DALY estimates are obviously fraught, and I understand that they're not exact for any particular charity, but they seem seem relevant to back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit thinking about cause areas.

This is a correct point.

However, I think it's worth noting that the most striking advance in aging research in recent years -- the discovery of senolytics -- came from biogerontologists, including those at the Buck Institute, which is dedicated to aging research. Nearly all studies on lifespan are conducted by researchers who specialize in aging. In that sense, I think it's fair to say that a good deal of aging research comes from specialized aging researchers.

Cancer research, I think, should not be considered aging research, because the vast m... (read more)

I might do more cost-effectiveness estimates, but it's not a top priority -- I'm currently running the Longevity Research Institute, a nonprofit devoted to experimentally testing anti-aging interventions, and I have a lot of object-level work to do there. Definitely happy to consult, make intros, and share my own existing notes whenever you have questions.

Yes, my estimates are a large underestimate of the potential benefit of life-extending therapies if you assume that they extend life at all, rather than just delay the onset of disease-related disability. I wanted to indicate that the impact is large even with rather pessimistic assumptions.