Shooting More Videos For the Science of Ending Aging
Good news from Ben Zealley, one of this year's additions to the Methuselah Foundation science team. The Foundation volunteers are off to the cutting floor once more, and hope to kick off a stream of short SENS science videos in support of the book Ending Aging:
This Monday, Aubrey de Grey and I will be recording several short videos explaining the science of SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, for the benefit of the general public. These videos are intended to serve as an intermediate step between the brief text overviews at the SENS website and the scientific literature. This is a similar niche to that successfully occupied by Ending Aging, but intended to address a slightly different target demographic.The resulting videos will be hosted at the Foundation website, as well as being uploaded to YouTube and Google Video. We hope they do as wonderful a job of raising awareness that 'SENS makes sense' as the many existing presentations and interviews with Aubrey have done in past years.
Credit for this idea goes to Foundation volunteer Jeff Hall, by the way.
The current plan is to produce one 30-minute comprehensible overview for each of the Seven Deadlies, plus an introductory piece and a final video to address common non-scientific questions (on immortal dictators, overpopulation and other beasts) and make an explicit 'call to arms'. We are also considering breaking down some of the more interesting scientific aspects into an ongoing series of shorter video presentations, to better focus on questions and concerns brought up by the community and interested parties.
The content will primarily take the form of Aubrey explaining the underlying biology, what goes wrong and how we propose to fix it, with slides and/or animations to break up the presentation. We may finish each one with a few frequently asked questions (subject to suitable questions being available).
We would like this to be an ongoing process of engagement, reaching out to hit those points brought up by those people interested in SENS, and will be coming back to the studio many times in the months ahead. In order for this series to make as much impact as possible, please chip in with suggestions for slides, specific questions to tackle, or anything presentation-wise you feel we should bear in mind while we're recording.
There you have it - suggestions are desired, so please do jump in and suggest.