In Aubrey de Grey's 2015 Paper Do we have genes that exist to hasten aging? New data, new arguments, but the answer is still no he puts forward a number of arguments as to why he believes aging to be other than programmed aging (PA). One of these argument is his "COA Cancelling out argument". I extract from the paper his reasons for this. STRONGER CHALLENGES TO PA A simple but remarkably rarely stated argument against PA, which here I shall term the “cancelling-out argument” (COA), is that it is impossible for a species to maintain two sets of genetic pathways whose selected actions diametri cally oppose each other. Specifically, since we clearly have a large amount of genetic anti-aging machinery (repairing and pre-empting the damaging side-effects of metabolism), we cannot also have pro-aging machinery that accelerates the accumulation of such damage, unless the latter machinery is selected for another purpose. The logic leading to this con clusion is ...
As I biohacker I do quite a bit of self-experimentation. There is an interesting ethical question about self-experimentation. Obviously people have the right to make their own decisions. Self Experimentation has a long history in Medicine and at least five Nobel Prize winners have won a prize following self experimentation. However, it is potentially dangerous and people have died. The ethical question is whether researchers should be penalised by being unwilling to self-experiment. To that extent some US ethics committee argue against the academic publishing system accepting the results of self-experimentation. I personally, unsurprisingly, think that is wrong. There should not be a condition of employment that people self-experiment, but it cannot be right to exclude the results. We also need to recognise that there are serious problems with animal experiments. Everything Wrong with Mouse Studies (Kinda) subtitled: Odors, magnetic fields, and even a mouse's siblin...