Scientific Controversy
While some fields mentioned as branches of SENS are broadly supported by the medical research community, e.g., stem cell research (RepleniSENS), anti-Alzheimers research (AmyloSENS) and oncogenomics (OncoSENS), the SENS programme as a whole has been a highly controversial proposal, with many critics arguing that the SENS agenda is fanciful and the highly complicated biomedical phenomena involved in the aging process contain too many unknowns for SENS to be fully implementable in the foreseeable future. Cancer may well deserve special attention as an aging-associated disease (OncoSENS), but the SENS claim that nuclear DNA damage only matters for aging because of cancer has been challenged.
In November 2005, 28 biogerontologists published a statement of criticism in EMBO reports, "Science fact and the SENS agenda: what can we reasonably expect from ageing research?," arguing "each one of the specific proposals that comprise the SENS agenda is, at our present stage of ignorance, exceptionally optimistic," and that some of the specific proposals "will take decades of hard work, if ever prove to be useful." The researchers argue that while there is "a rationale for thinking that we might eventually learn how to postpone human illnesses to an important degree," increased basic research, rather than the goal-directed approach of SENS, is presently the scientifically appropriate goal. This article was written in response to a July 2005 EMBO reports article previously published by de Grey and a response from de Grey was published in the same November issue. De Grey summarizes these events in "The biogerontology research community's evolving view of SENS," published on the Methuselah Foundation website.
In 2012, Colin Blakemore criticised SENS extensively in a debate hosted at the Oxford University Scientific Society.
Read more about this topic: Strategies For Engineered Negligible Senescence
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