Gregory Benford on living longer

His talk is so far pretty straightforward: figuring out genes that cause disease and eliminating them, which he refers to as “re-tuning bad signals.” He’s talked about “Methuselah flies,” which have been selectively bred to live longer. These flies, he notes, do not have decreased quality of life as they live longer — they are having sex, he says, long past when the normal flies have died. “If that’s something that interests you,” he says, then you should pay attention to this. Lots of laughter and applause. This has been very common among speakers — making a “joke” about living longer or having better sex, which not really a joke, just a sort of glib affirmation of everyone’s aims here. It feels weirdly like a pep really or a political meeting.

Benford is talking about longevity studies, and notes that women have been living longer than men for several centuries. “Or at least, it seems longer,” says Benford. Much male applause. Take that, women!

Benford’s talk is over, and unless I missed something, he really didn’t say anything. He is chairman of the board of a company and is basically just hawking his gene sequencing services that test for your genetic defects. And then they give you nutritional supplements accordingly, to try to fend off whatever diseases you’re prone to. Here’s a slide discussing what his company does:

A questioner asks what the FDA has to say about this, since they don’t recognize aging as a disease (yet). Benford calls on David Rose to answer the question. Rose says the FDA is regulating health, but he says “everyone in this room is going to hell in a handbasket, not because of one or two genetic diseases,” but because we’re getting uniformly worse through aging. And that, he says, is what they’re trying to stop. Scattered but voracious applause and cheering. It’s that same phenomenon again — this weird rally attitude of yeah, you tell ’em! Who is it that they think they’re sticking it to? Or what?

Benford clarifies his talk in response to another question, saying that the goal of his company is to target specific genetic weaknesses using natural remedies. It’s not just aiming at everything, he says. This is meant to be in contrast, perhaps, to Kurzweil’s approach of taking massive general supplements.

And now on to Kurzweil again…