Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence

The arrows with flat heads are a notation meaning "inhibits," used in the literature of gene expression and gene regulation.

The ultimate objective of SENS is the eventual elimination of age-related diseases and infirmity by repeatedly reducing the state of senescence in the organism. The SENS project consists in implementing a series of periodic medical interventions designed to repair, prevent or render irrelevant all the types of molecular and cellular damage that cause age-related pathology and degeneration, in order to avoid debilitation and death from age-related causes.[1]

In February 2005, Technology Review, which is owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published an article by Sherwin Nuland, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at Yale University and the author of "How We Die",[6] that drew a skeptical portrait of SENS, at the time de Grey was a computer associate in the Flybase Facility of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge.

During June 2005, David Gobel, CEO and Co-founder of Methuselah Foundation offered Technology Review $20,000 to fund a prize competition to publicly clarify the viability of the SENS approach. In July 2005, Pontin announced a $20,000 prize, funded 50/50 by Methuselah Foundation and MIT Technology Review, open to any molecular biologist, with a record of publication in biogerontology, who could prove that the alleged benefits of SENS were "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate."[7] Technology Review received five submissions to its Challenge. In March 2006, Technology Review announced that it had chosen a panel of judges for the Challenge: Rodney Brooks, Anita Goel, Nathan Myhrvold, Vikram Sheel Kumar, and Craig Venter.[8] Three of the five submissions met the terms of the prize competition. They were published by Technology Review on June 9, 2006. On July 11, 2006, Technology Review published the results of the SENS Challenge.[9]

In the end, no one won the $20,000 prize. The judges felt that no submission met the criterion of the challenge and discredited SENS, although they unanimously agreed that one submission, by Preston Estep and his colleagues, was the most eloquent. Craig Venter succinctly expressed the prevailing opinion: "Estep et al. ... have not demonstrated that SENS is unworthy of discussion, but the proponents of SENS have not made a compelling case for it."[9] Summarizing the judges' deliberations, Pontin wrote that SENS is "highly speculative" and that many of its proposals could not be reproduced with the scientific technology of that period. Myhrvold described SENS as belonging to a kind of "antechamber of science" where they wait until technology and scientific knowledge advance to the point where it can be tested.[9][10]

The SENS Research Foundation is a non-profit organization co-founded by Michael Kope, Aubrey de Grey, Jeff Hall, Sarah Marr and Kevin Perrott, which is based in California, United States. Its activities include SENS-based research programs and public relations work for the acceptance of and interest in related research.