I don’t think you can define aging research so narrowly and get the same expected impact. E.g. De Grey’s SENS includes curing cancer as one of many subgoals, and radical advances in stem cell biology and genetic engineering, massive fields that don’t fall under ‘aging research.’ The more dependent progress in an area is advances from outside that field, the less reliable this sort of projection will be.
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 majority of cancer therapies are not also aging-modifying therapies. If aging research pans out, of course, it will produce ways to prevent or treat cancer, but this will probably not depend very closely on the vast corpus of general cancer research.
Stem cell biology and genetic engineering seem to fall into a different category, as important inputs to aging research as well as to many other types of biomedical research. I don’t know if EAs have a general framework for evaluating the cost-benefit tradeoffs of more “upstream” or “basic” or “tool” research compared to “downstream” or “translational” or “applied” research—obviously the benefits of basic research can be much larger than the benefits of translational research, but the variance is also larger.
At any rate, my (non-quantitative, tentative) belief is that aging-focused translational research is more underfunded than research into multipurpose biological technologies (like genetic engineering or stem cell reprogramming), but this may be changing in the near future.
I don’t think you can define aging research so narrowly and get the same expected impact. E.g. De Grey’s SENS includes curing cancer as one of many subgoals, and radical advances in stem cell biology and genetic engineering, massive fields that don’t fall under ‘aging research.’ The more dependent progress in an area is advances from outside that field, the less reliable this sort of projection will be.
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 majority of cancer therapies are not also aging-modifying therapies. If aging research pans out, of course, it will produce ways to prevent or treat cancer, but this will probably not depend very closely on the vast corpus of general cancer research.
Stem cell biology and genetic engineering seem to fall into a different category, as important inputs to aging research as well as to many other types of biomedical research. I don’t know if EAs have a general framework for evaluating the cost-benefit tradeoffs of more “upstream” or “basic” or “tool” research compared to “downstream” or “translational” or “applied” research—obviously the benefits of basic research can be much larger than the benefits of translational research, but the variance is also larger.
At any rate, my (non-quantitative, tentative) belief is that aging-focused translational research is more underfunded than research into multipurpose biological technologies (like genetic engineering or stem cell reprogramming), but this may be changing in the near future.