Bostrom responds to TechRev attacks on Aubrey de Grey; TR editor responds to H+ community outrage

The February 2005 issue of Technology Review has a cover story reviewing the research and advocacy for life extension of Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Methusaleh Mouse prize, the WTA’s 2004 HG Wells award winner and a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. The article by Sherwin Nuland argues a bioconservative line that life extension is bad for human dignity. But far more offensive is the lead editorial by editor Jason Pontin “Against Transcendence.” Pontin says that believing in the transcendent possibilities offered by technology turns people into “troolls” and points to Aubrey de Grey’s beard and the lines on his face as evidence. The transhumanist community has responded passionately to these ad hominem attacks, and below is a letter from WTA chair Nick Bostrom to Pontin, and his response.

Dear Jason,

In your recent editorial you claim that all technologists who believe in
transcendence are in doing so “crazy” and that those who believe in it
completely become “trolls”. I doubt that this is true even if we take
transcendence in its strictest sense as implying some kind of otherworldly
existence. But Aubrey de Gray, whom you characterize as a troll, does not
claim to work for transcendence in that sense. His work is focused on
slowing and reversing the biochemical processes of aging, something that
certainly does not imply that we would no longer be “creatures limited in
space, time, and knowledge”. Surely you do not maintain that anybody who
thinks that technology will eventually make it possible to modify aspects
of human nature and radically extend the human life span is “crazy”?

I submit that considering how people living 100 or 50 years ago would have
failed to anticipate our current technological capabilities, and also the
current rapid pace of technological development in many fields, we should
require very strong evidence before becoming confident that none of these
this-worldly forms of “transcendence” will ever become possible. I have
read, thought, researched, written, and discoursed extensively on this
topic over some ten years, and I at least haven’t yet seen any evidence or
argument that would justify such a conclusion.

Mustn’t we in all honesty admit that we cannot rule out the possibility
that many dramatic changes to human nature, including the human lifespan,
might become possible? This is the first necessary step to having a
constructive discussion about the ethical aspects of using emerging
technologies to enhance human nature in the future. Given the importance of
some of the decisions that may ultimately have to be made, it would be good
to start that discussion as early as possible.

In short, I want to express my hope that this editorial, in particular its
unfortunate ad hominem on Dr. de Gray, was not your final thought on the
matter, and that you will have the opportunity to provide a more balanced
commentary on the complex and difficult issues facing us when we try to
think seriously about the—partly unknowable—opportunities for
improving human life that may become available later in this century. (I
disagree with your claim that it would be wrong to perturb human biology in
this context - see e.g. http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html.)

Best wishes,
Nick

P.S. I did think your parallel between science fiction and romance novels
was apt and witty.

Nick Bostrom
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Oxford University
Chair, World Transhumanist Association

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Dear transhumanists,

Thank you for your posts to the technologyreview.com site. I’ve read them all with great interest. You’re a passionate group!

Let me begin by writing: as many of you suggested, we will invite Aubrey de Grey to reply to Dr. Nuland’s article, the leader “Be Sane about Anti-Aging Science,” and my editorial “Against Transcendence.” You can read Mr. de Grey on http://www.technologyreview.com early next week.

That said, when an editor so completely fails to express his meaning to his readers, he may be tempted to try again. A few notes to that end.

1. I recognize the anger in many of your posts, and apologize if I have offended any of you.

When I called Mr. de Grey a “troll” it was of course a literary device: a reference to a line earlier in my editorial where I quoted the writer Bruce Stirling about the paradox that those who were most intersted in using technology to transcend human nature often lived circumscribed lives that seemed anything but transcendent when viewed from the outside.

Stirling says that people who take transcendence seriously “end up turning into trolls.” This is my personal view. However, neither Dr. Nuland’s article, which I commissioned, nor our leader on anti-aging, which I edited, made this point.

2. My list of the ways that Mr. de Grey seemed circumscribed by his humanity was not intended as an ad hominem attack on de Grey. An hominem attack seeks to discredit an argument by attacking the person who makes it. As many of you noted, I did not seriously grapple with Mr. de Grey’s views in my editorial.

This is because my editorial was written as an introduction, by the editor-in-chief, to the print edition of Technology Review.
An exhaustive list of all the reasons why I think de Grey mistaken in his confidence that human cellular aging can be reversed would have been redundant. The two other articles on biogerontology, in addition to a synopsis of a scholarly publication on the role of mitochondria in the diseases of aging, expressed all I believe about biogerontology.

Those views, in short, are as follows: while I am fascinated by the study of how and why human tissues age, I think it exceedingly unlikely that human aging can be “defeated” in any meaningful sense. All organisms--indeed, all things in creation--age. I think it possible that we might one day extend human lifespan significantly, and I am reasonably sure that in the next 50 years we will “compress the morbidity” of the elderly to a brief period before death. I have to note that most serious, working, responsible biogerontologists published regularly by peer review journals would agree with me--with the possible exception of Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF, who entertains dramatic hopes for human life extension, and who has significantly extended the life span of nemotodes.

My editorial was about what it said it was about: it was written “against transcendence.” It was not written about Aubrey de Grey.

3. Finally, and I write this with a little trepidation, many of your posts reveal a degree of misinformation about Mr. de Grey’s accomplishments and publications.

I would not accuse Mr. de Grey, whom I have never met, of being a charlatan. But there is a certain vaguness in the transhumanist community about his role in the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University. Mr. de Grey is not an academic biogerontologist. He is the computer support for a research team in Cambridge’s Genetics Department. His formal academic background is in computer science. If you consult Mr. de Grey’s publications in a resource like PubMed, you will see they vary more than glowing profiles of de Grey sometimes imply. For instance, his contributions to Science and Biogerontology are commentary and letters. His publications in Tends in Biotechnology and Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences were not, strictly speaking, peer reviewed.

That said, Mr de Grey’s paper, “A Proposed Refinement of the Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,” (de Grey, ADNJ, BioEssays 19(2) 161-166, 1997) is, I am told, genuinely original, and he is, obviously, a fascinating, charismatic, and provocative figure.

My assessment of Aubrey de Grey would be that of the biogerontologist Jay Olshansky: “I am a big fan of Aubrey. We need him. I disagree with some of his conclusions, but in science that’s OK. That’s what advances the field.”

In sorrow and contrition,

Jason Pontin
Editor-in-Chief
Technology Review