Will we live forever or have the dubious honour of being one of the last few mortal generations? That was the fundamental question that I came to the SENS4 conference in Cambridge, UK to answer.

The conference included around 90 talks, most of them by academic biomedical researchers, many of whom from "serious" universities such as UCL, Cambridge University, etc. A typical topic would be "we have this hypothesis about how this part of the ageing process works, and we tested it in this trial/we built this device". Some of the talks were a little flaky, but the majority that I saw were either good or excellent.

Now, as far as conquering death for those people who are currently within a few decades of dying goes, we are going to have to do an awful lot more, and pull out a lot more stops than I saw evidence of at SENS; if there's one overriding impression I really want to avoid, it is the impression that now that SENS exists, the ageing problem is handled, for that would be a fatal mistake to make. The problem of ageing is a very hard one, primarily because the human body is very, very complicated and very, very messy. The average biomedical talk given at SENS, which represented the work of a few researchers for a total time of perhaps a few months to a year, would typically make some small increment of progress on some small subsystem of the human body, and in some cases that progress was the refutation of some previous promising piece of work.

In discussing the problems and challenges that anti-ageing science faces, the following slide from James Larrick's talk comes to mind: