The Speculist

"The cure for aging" is the instant-death third rail of grantsmanship and we stay away from it.

I don't think you quite got the full meaning of that comment. The person was talking about the grant application process for federal funding. Such a process is a small part science, a large part reputation, and a larger part marketeering. The trouble is that the marketeering part _is_ done by the scientists. I have seen this process unfold before my eyes; these things are reviewed by panels of scientists and non-scientists and the money is, in part, pre-binned.

This person is stating that, basically, putting "the cure for aging" or "anti-aging" on a grant proposal is dooming it to instantaneous rejection.

The equivalent in computer science is saying you want work on P vs NP or some other such nonsense. These things tend not to be funded, because they are big, red, blinking lights that scream "I'm a crock and have no idea what I am talking about, so please waste money on me!"

D.Vision:

I think Stephen did actually understand the comment. That's why his advice was to use different titles for grant proposals; it is, exactly as you called it, marketeering.

The problem I see is that most grantors are, in truth, not such simpletons that they would be truly unlikely to see through the facade. I think Stephen's advice would work about as well as a celebrity trying to hit a trendy nightclub incognito.

This is not to say that I disagree with the general notion that scientists could do more to sell healthy life extension research proposals to grantors. However, I don't think that trying to hide the motives behind any proposal in this field is going to fool too many onlookers. I lean more towards a strategem that lawyers sometimes use: narrow the issue. After all, it's inconceivable that anyone is really trying to propose a "comprehensive" cure for aging right now. Most proposals today are going to be focusing on a tiny piece of the puzzle. The basic move in the argument would be for each individual researcher or team to make sure the mission statement of the proposal never strays outside its own boundaries. This makes proposals sound more modest and reasonable: "no, we're not talking about a cure for 'aging,' just for this one specified condition that tends to be correlated with age."

Of course, this would almost certainly be the complete truth for any individual research proposal. It would only be over the course of hundreds of such projects that the shape of the larger puzzle would begin to reveal itself.

The problem with this is that the majority of life extension researchers that buy into the maximum life extension vision, and an even greater portion of proselytizers like Reason, want to talk about the big picture first and foremost. They want to talk about how this proposal or that fits into the oeuvre of projects that will vanquish the devil of aging at last. (I'm known to be risk-averse, but in my opinion, the Big Picture prophets dramatically underestimate the risk of backlash as these lines of research start developing a more conspicuous presence in mainstream culture.) Nevertheless, for what it's worth, those are my two cents: anti-aging research proposals can be made more attractive to generally conservative funding groups by emphasizing the bite sized piece that is the specific scope of each individual project, not the big picture where one would face the choice of either saying "cure for aging" or leaving it unsaid and assuming that grantors are such unsophisticates as to be incapable of reading between the lines.

Gramarye:

"Narrow the issue" - that's exactly right, and I think that's exactly the way this is playing out in the scientific community. But certainly sirtuin research and mitochondria research are narrow enough to be let in the club - indeed both are already inside dancing away at taxpayer expense.

You don't go in saying you'll deliver "a cure for aging." D. Vision is right about that - it makes that scientist look like a crackpot. And, as you suggested, it's factually inaccurate anyway. Any single research project will only address small parts of the problem.

But, I think that the big picture guys like Reason and Aubrey de Grey are performing a valuable function. They are continually pointing out that this tree and that tree and all these other trees eventually add up to a forest.

And this message is getting through to younger researchers coming up - guys like Mark Hamalainen.

I'm not sure I see a problem here with the "third rail" of anti-aging. Stay away from extravagant claims and it appears funding is available.