Today's popular science article for consideration is the usual mix of frustrating and interesting remarks that result when various researchers are convinced to talk to the press on the subject of SENS rejuvenation research. I in no way exaggerate when I say that all approaches to the research of aging, all of the intent in aging research, all of the fundamental disagreements in the field, ultimately revolve around SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. The advocacy and the science of SENS are the moral and technological sun in this solar system, for all that many of those orbiting it apparently would rather things were otherwise. Is the point of aging research to cure aging, rejuvenate the old, and greatly extend healthy human life spans? Is the point of aging research to move as rapidly as possible to this goal? In the SENS view, yes, and with specific plans for how the medical control of aging can be realized. Everyone else in the field must be defined by their answers to these questions, and thus by their position on SENS, their differences from the SENS view.

When looking in on this situation from the outside, it is important to realize that (a) more than fifteen years after its introduction, SENS research still represents only a tiny fraction of the research field, (b) that its origins are as an outsider group, its founders entering the research community because they were sufficiently outraged by its lack of action with regard to aging to put aside their own plans, and (c) that only SENS and SENS-like research appears to be producing the basis for cost-effective interventions to address aging as a medical condition. Given this situation, no-one in the field can really ignore SENS, but there are nonetheless a great many who would prefer to.

In one sense, the SENS approach to aging, considering it as the downstream consequence of fundamental damage that should be repaired, has already won the war of ideas: establishment research groups have taken up their own SENS-like agendas based on identifying damage and addressing it in order to turn back aspects of aging. Researchers now argue over how to effectively treat aging rather than remaining silent. Senescent cell clearance, on the SENS list for more than fifteen years on this basis of many lines of research from the past few decades, has in recent years been proven to be a reliable means of reversing numerous aspects of aging in animal studies. It is well on the way to the clinic, under development by a number of funded startup companies. This significant progress has required a fraction of the expenditure to date on, say, calorie restriction mimetic drugs or other ways to slightly slow aging that are diametrically opposed to the SENS philosophy. These are approaches that do not repair root cause damage, but rather try to alter metabolism to slow down accumulation of damage. Senescent cell clearance therapies to date demonstrate very well the point that SENS approaches are cheaper and better, as we should expect of any attempt to repair damage rather than just slow it down.

Yet in another sense, SENS has barely touched on the bigger picture of research and development. It is a tiny fraction of the ongoing work in the field. The vast majority of aging research remains investigative only, with no intention of producing therapies. Only a couple of the characteristically SENS approaches have made it into the mainstream in a big way, senescent cells and amyloid clearance. The first working, real rejuvenation therapies are not yet available in the nearest clinic. Yet tiny fraction as it is, it is the fraction that matters when it comes to results, as the past few years of work on senescent cell clearance has demonstrated. When the only thing that really matters is results, given that the successful treatment of aging is a matter of life and death for all of us, that puts SENS firmly at the center of the field.

SENS as a line of advocacy and set of specific research programs to achieve rejuvenation has helped to fundamentally change the research community since the turn of the century, from one in which no-one could talk about treating aging as a medical condition, to one in which young researchers publish openly on this topic and the first therapies are moving towards the clinic. Yet the researchers whose field has been changed remain on the whole remarkably unwilling to credit any of this to the small community of advocates and researchers who have occupied the central point of strategy and intent in their field. Even those researchers who ten years ago penned a letter dismissing all of SENS as something other than science, the presented evidence for the merits of senescence cell clearance included, find it hard today to admit outright that they were completely wrong. But everything of importance in aging research comes back down to SENS in the end: are research groups working on meaningful ways to turn back aging, or are they just wasting time and funding? What matters more than saving all of the lives lost to degenerative aging? Than preventing all of the suffering caused by degenerative aging? This is a meaningful question in a field that is still in the ragged process of a slow - and apparently sometimes reluctant - change from pure research to applied research, and whose members often seem quite hostile to the SENS advocates who ask these and other pointed questions.

Can Human Mortality Really Be Hacked?