The jury's still out on Aubrey de Grey's anti-aging claims

Aubrey de Grey's claims that aging can be defeated, which he voiced at TEDGLOBAL last year and at TED2006, "exist in a kind of antechamber of science, where they wait (possibly in vain) for independent verification". While they "don't compel the assent of many knowledgeable scientists", they're also "not demonstrably wrong".

That's the overall (in)conclusion of the challenge put forth last year by the MIT Technology Review to scientists to disprove de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS). Three submissions by scientists and groups of scientists have been analyzed by five judges - all the details in this previous post - and the magazine announced yesterday the results of the jury's work: "SENS is a collection of hypotheses that ... cannot rise to the level of being scientifically verified. However, by the same token, the ideas of SENS have not been conclusively disproved". The challenge remains open.

(cross-posted on TEDblog) [tags: Aubrey De Grey SENS TED2006 TEDGLOBAL]