SENS
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SENS, short for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, is a detailed plan for curing human aging developed by Aubrey de Grey. SENS is conceived as an engineering project, one rooted in the notion that aging is a medical condition and that medicine can be construed as a branch of engineering.
Aging is a set of progressive changes in body composition, at the molecular and cellular level, which are side-effects of essential metabolic processes. Many of these changes are eventually bad for us -- they are an accumulation of damage, which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance.
The traditional gerontological approach to life extension is to try to slow down this accumulation of damage. This is a misguided strategy, de Grey argues, firstly because it requires us to improve biological processes that we do not adequately understand, and secondly because it can even in principle only retard aging rather than reverse it. In de Grey's view, an even more "short-termist" alternative is the geriatric approach, which is to try to stave off pathology in the face of accumulating damage; this would be a losing battle because the continuing accumulation of damage makes pathology more and more inescapable.
Instead, an engineering strategy such as SENS would not interfere with metabolism per se, but would repair or obviate the accumulating damage and thereby indefinitely postpone the age at which it reaches pathogenic levels. This is practical because it avoids both of the problems with the other approaches: it sidesteps our ignorance of metabolism (because it does not attempt to interfere with metabolic processes and their production of side-effects) but also it preempts the chaos of pathology (because it repairs the precursors of pathology, rather than addressing the pathology head-on).
The above diagram sums up the SENS philosophy. The arrows with flat heads are a notation used in the literature of gene expression and gene regulation, and they mean "inhibits". Thus, geriatrics is the attempt to stop damage from causing pathology; traditional gerontology is the attempt to stop metabolism from causing damage; and the SENS approach is periodically to eliminate the damage, so keeping its abundance below the level that causes any pathology.
