Information to be used to help raise money for the SENS Research Foundation.
In short: It's about "ending aging": developing therapies to treat all age-related diseases, which would allow people to live for thousands of years.
SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. It's a fancy way of saying "Ways to stop the health problems associated with having been alive a long time", or even more simply, "How to end aging". As you can read on the Wikipedia entry for SENS, it's a term coined by Aubrey de Grey, who studied the biology of aging at the extremely-prestigious University of Cambridge, to describe a new strategy for defeating aging that focuses on repairing damage to the body rather than trying to prevent it.
If you're not familiar with SENS, please consider reading the very-short SENS movement's rationale.
Now, SENS is just a strategy. Aubrey started the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) to fund and conduct research that follows the SENS strategy for defeating aging.
So to recap: SENS is the new strategy to defeat aging, and the SRF is the organization following that strategy.
The current goal is to get the SENS Research Foundation's funding to $50 million/year from its current level of $4 million/year, so that it can be diverted to crucial research that is now possible but not being done for lack of funding.
Aubrey has said that when he first decided to tackle aging, he foresaw three major problems:
- Figuring out how to fix aging, or in other words, coming up with a plan of research that would lead to therapies that would prevent all age-related diseases. (Source)
- Convincing the researchers necessary to execute the plan that it was worth their time. (Source)
- Convincing the funders of research that it was worth spending money on. (Source)
Aubrey found the first problem (Source) and second problem (Source) to be easier-than-anticipated, and they were essentially solved within a few years (by 2005).
Since then, "it's all been about problem number three: the funding" (Source). Aubrey estimates that the necessary research could be done three times faster if SENS had ten times more money (so, $40-50 million/year).
- To learn how to edit this GitHub project, see How to edit this GitHub Project.