On May 20, Church sent me a cordial email disputing some of what I wrote in my entry. I responded to him on May 22, and asked him if he would mind if I ran his email and my response on my blog. He never responded to that request, so I will not reproduce his email here. But I see no harm in my including below the links he sent me. And then I will follow with my email response to him.
Here are the links that Church thought I should ponder:
2024 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10909732 (see Fig 1b)
2022 rejuvenatebio.com/animal-health-pipeline
2022 rejuvenatebio.com/pipeline
2023 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.13.566787v1.full
Here is my email response to Church:
Dear Prof. Church,
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my blog post. I appreciate the links you sent. The first link gives us the good news of progress toward increasing the lifespan of mice and in reducing their frailty, which could be interpreted as one part of reversing their aging. The fourth link also gives good news of the proof-of-concept of a new factor at the cell level that may be able to rejuvenate cells without the cancer of the Yamanaka factors.
But on 60 Minutes in 2019 you said age reversal was already “available to mice.” And you said the “veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another 10 years to get through the human clinical trials.” That is not exactly a promise, but it does sound like a hopeful prediction. And I will admit that the timing matters to me. If your 60 Minutes prediction was right there’s a good chance I might live to see it; if it takes twice that long, I almost certainly will not.
In re-reading my post, I see a couple of revisions I would make. I would add that I wish you well in what you are trying to do, and strongly and sincerely hope that you succeed (whether through A.I or by other means). And I would add that I believe Elon Musk said that being overly optimistic is one way that great innovators push themselves toward great goals.
I appreciate your “fact checking” offer. I have a comment apropos that. You say that “The Lohr article doesn’t say “feeding” or “literature”. “ Here is the relevant exact quote from the Lohr article:
Lila has taken a science-focused approach to training its generative A.I., feeding it research papers, documented experiments and data from its fast-growing life science and materials science lab. That, the Lila team believes, will give the technology both depth in science and wide-ranging abilities, mirroring the way chatbots can write poetry and computer code.
So the Lohr article does say “feeding.” It doesn’t say “literature,” but does say “research papers” which I take to be the same thing. I appreciate that Lila also is collecting new data. But is it some generative intelligence in Lila that is identifying the new data to seek or is it George Church and his team?
I agree that A.I. can help crank through possibilities that have already been defined. I am dubious that A.I. can come up with the possibilities as well as George Church and his team can. It may seem harmless that A.I. is being over-hyped. But as an economist it is my job to notice that funding is scarce, so funding spent on A.I. is funding not spent on other inputs to science.
I fear that I may come across as a privileged spectator complaining about the bloodied combatant in the arena. But a big part of my research is aimed at reducing the regulations that burden medical entrepreneurs. For instance, I am working on a paper supporting Milton Friedman’s suggestion that the F.D.A. should just regulate for safety and stop regulating for efficacy. Without Phase 3, more can be tried, more quickly and more cheaply.
If you are willing, I would like to paste your response (or an edited version if you prefer) at the end of my original post. Let me know if that is OK.
Thanks!
Art