---
title: "Strategies for engineered negligible senescence"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:06.214793+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Technology Review contest ==
In February 2005, the MIT Technology Review published an article by Sherwin Nuland, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University and the author of How We Die, that drew a skeptical portrait of SENS, at the time de Grey was a computer associate in the Flybase Facility of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. While Nuland praised de Grey's intellect and rhetoric, he criticized the SENS framework both for oversimplifying "enormously complex biological problems" and for promising relatively near-at-hand solutions to those unsolved problems.
During June 2005, David Gobel, CEO and co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation with de Grey, offered Technology Review $20,000 to fund a prize competition to publicly clarify the viability of the SENS approach. In July 2005, Jason Pontin announced a $20,000 prize, funded 50/50 by Methuselah Foundation and MIT Technology Review. The contest was open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that the alleged benefits of SENS were "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." Technology Review received five submissions to its challenge. In March 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, Anita Goel, Nathan Myhrvold, Vikram Sheel Kumar, and Craig Venter. Three of the five submissions met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge.
In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and discredited SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: "Estep et al. ... have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it." Summarizing the judges' deliberations, Pontin wrote in 2006 that SENS is "highly speculative" and that many of its proposals could not be reproduced with current scientific technology. Myhrvold described SENS as belonging to a kind of "antechamber of science" where they wait until technology and scientific knowledge advance to the point where it can be tested. Estep and his coauthors challenged the result of the contest by saying both that the judges had ruled "outside their area of expertise" and had failed to consider de Grey's frequent misrepresentations of the scientific literature.

== SENS Research Foundation ==

The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization co-founded by Michael Kope, Aubrey de Grey, Jeff Hall, Sarah Marr and Kevin Perrott, which is based in California, United States. Its activities include SENS-based research programs and public relations work for the acceptance of and interest in related research.

== See also ==

== References ==

== Further reading ==
Fishman, Jennifer R.; Settersten, Richard A. Jr.; Flatt, Michael A. (February 2010). "In the vanguard of biomedicine? The curious and contradictory case of anti-ageing medicine". Sociology of Health & Illness. 32 (2): 197–210. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01212.x. PMC 3414193. PMID 20003037.
Isaacson, Betsy (5 March 2015). "Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success". Newsweek. Retrieved 28 April 2021.
Mykytyn, Courtney Everts (February 2010). "A history of the future: The emergence of contemporary anti-ageing medicine". Sociology of Health & Illness. 32 (2): 181–196. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01217.x. PMID 20149152.
Olshansky, S. Jay; Carnes, Bruce A. (2013). "Science Fact versus SENS Foreseeable". Gerontology. 59 (2): 190–192. doi:10.1159/000342959. PMID 23037994. S2CID 207588602.