This is a blog by Kamil Pabis who is a young researcher in Brian Kennedy’s lab in Singapore / NUS. He is what might be termed a “longevity maximalist”, a person who wants to live as long and healthy as possible without limits.
In 2022 as COVID was winding down we started building a longevity community in Singapore which has now become one of the largest and longest-running such communities thanks to all our members, speakers and organizers.
Recently we had an event to celebrate the success of our meetup and brainstorm ideas to improve our community. I took this opportunity to design a little survey. If you have any suggestions you can always contact me on twitter at Aging_scientist. The first part deals with attitudes towards lifespan extension and the second part is a narrative review of Bryan Johson’s impact on our meetup.
Full article:
If you’re in Singapore - check out his Longevity Meetup group:
Some level of “Hype” helps the field… but if it veers to heavily into hype the field loses credibility and people just tune it out as a bunch of BS that dreamers are wasting time with…
As Kamil says:
“Too little hype and the field runs cold: little funding, especially non-conventional funding, few outside experts wanting to join, no grassroots communities, etc. On the other hand, of course, too much hype and the field will run hot and burn down.”
The field obviously benefits from people conveying all the breakthroughs and positives of the “Longevity Biology” field. But if there is too much “immortality talk” I think most people just roll their eyes and move on with whatever they were doing, treating it much like as if they had just seen another religious fanatic holding a sign saying “The End is Near” and trying to convert to their favorite religion and repent.
Talk about “immortality” has been a rather long running scam that so far has never happened; the fatality rate for individuals in the mammalian species is running at 100% right now, as far as I can tell. To say we’re going to have Lifespan Escape Velocity in 10 years seems to be veering a little too far into the “immortality zone”.
If people end up buying and consuming thousands of capsules of resveratrol because of David Singclair’s press coverage, and they still see their body degrade and age, they might just give up on the entire field of longevity science.
