The aging-focused futurist biotech / longevity science ecosystem in the Bay Area is well worth getting to know better - or being more aware of. It is the root system of a revolution in applied biotechnology that is gearing up for launch, and will be talked about 30 years from now in much the same way that Steve Blank talks about the connections of the opening years of Silicon Valley today. This ecosystem stretches from the transhumanist salons (the diaspora of the old Extropy Institute) at one edge through to the researchers in the Kenyon lab at UCSF and the Buck Institute at the other. On the winding road of connections that link those two communities stand such figures as Peter Thiel, the Laura linked in this submission, Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation research center staff, Christine Peterson and the other folk at the Foresight Institute, various volunteers associated with the Methuselah Foundation, a range of gung-ho immunotherapy startup efforts focused on GIFT cancer research, a bunch of strong AI researchers and advocates, Paul Glenn and his Foundation that funds aging labs in a range of universities, Halcyon Molecular down in Redwood City, Larry Ellison and his Foundation that acts more or less as an arm of the NIA, Patri Freidman and the seasteading crowd, and so forth.
It is a web, and to better understand the prospects for ventures like SENS, or immunotherapy startups, one has to have at least some grasp of how all these people are connected and how the money likes to flow through this web - it is a whole parallel world to that which Hacker News usually represents/reflects, but one that is very similar in many ways.
(And I missed mention of the Gerontology Research Group, and Gregory Benford and Genescient, amongst others).
It is a balkanized community online - much the same as most. Hacker News is an unusual thing in that respect.
So you'll find some of the research community, mixed in with tech journalists, advocates, and other interested parties, posting to the Gerontology Research Group mailing list.
You'll find a mix of activists and researchers of a different type posting to the SENS Foundation forums.
There's some side-discussions at the long-running Extropy-chat list, but less so these days.
And the standard fragments of the community in LiveJournal, the other social networks, a range of Yahoo groups and Google groups like New_Cryonet. The loose network of occasional and regular bloggers. And no doubt a range of other watering holes and mailing lists I'm unaware of.
Again, Hacker News is an oddity in the general scheme of things for a community of any size.
It is a web, and to better understand the prospects for ventures like SENS, or immunotherapy startups, one has to have at least some grasp of how all these people are connected and how the money likes to flow through this web - it is a whole parallel world to that which Hacker News usually represents/reflects, but one that is very similar in many ways.