As you might know, generating a growing audience online is hard work. Writing the content has little to do with that hard work, and is in fact probably a distraction from the thousand and one tasks, trades and optimizations needed to involve more people in reading your work. If you're the sort of person who cares deeply about the content, you're also probably not cut out for the sausage-making details and compromise involved in building an audience. There are always exceptions, often very successful exceptions, but this seems to be the way it goes for the most part.

Needless to say, I'm not cut out for sausage-making and compromise, and have never more than dabbled on the optimization side of things. I'm more interested in building an ongoing conversation and repository of information to better engage those folk who have sparked an interest in healthy life extension, in directing advocacy and volunteerism to the best present ends, and in providing an example for others to follow.

However, it's hard to argue that there would be any net loss if the audience were much larger. Traffic to Fight Aging! has been roughly static for a year or two now, and I can't see it growing further through what little time I have to be proactive. With the ebb and flow of ourside events, sure, but that's no way to build a readership. So, a few axioms, which you can take or leave as you like:

• Breadth of readership will help to grow the healthy life extension community
• Breadth of readership will bring more support for initiatives like the Methuselah Foundation
• Breadth of readership will not happen through my efforts
• I'm certainly not going to change the way I write to gain readership
• Breadth of readership is more important than control over content

Or I should say the illusion of control over content. No-one really controls text that is placed online; intellectual property is more a set of narrowly observed manners in this environment. As I see it, I have a few choices here:

1) Join a well-trafficked, established syndicate

For example, Seed's ScienceBlogs, which I passed on back when they started up. The downside there is that they own your content completely, putting their copyright on it, or such was the case when they were trying to recruit me. It's more of a newspaper-columnist relationship than anything else. The inability to change your mind later about your writing, or engage other efforts in parallel to gain readership, is a big disincentive.

2) Open source your content

Remove any copyright or copyleft and let anyone do as they will with it. I suspect the net effect here would be zero. Those who were going to use my content already are, and they are largely a collection of spam machinery that provide zero value to my goals. It takes work to obtain readers, or indeed to make the world aware of your existence - it's far from the case that simply opening up the gates will do anything.

3) Deal with the Devil

The few entities who would be easily approached to take on the sausage-making are in the "anti-aging" marketplace. While the nature of digital media means that someone, somewhere is at this very moment selling magic potions and faery dust by reworking my posts on legitimate longevity science, I don't wish to be proactively helping that cause.

4) Find a better syndicator

The ideal for me would be to hand off content, but not ownership of that content, to a non-devilish third party who simply goes ahead and uses the content for profit in the traditional audience-growing fashion. Meanwhile, I'll sit back here as I've always done, writing on the topic of longevity science, aging research, and the work needed to make it a reality. All very hands off.

Now, of course the issue with #4 above is that it requires many of the same skills and initiatives as does growing your readership in the first place. If you're the sort to have easy access to syndication offers, odds are you're not the sort to need them.

These are all things I'm chewing over as I look at the past years and contemplate the years ahead. Comments are welcome.

I thought I'd point out a couple of Future Blogger posts today, as it's good to be able to demonstrate the spread of ideas when it comes to longevity science and the future of longer, healthier lives through advanced medicine. Let's start with a life span of 1000 years - which is the average age you'd reach if you lived as incautiously as folk do today, but age-related cellular and molecular damage in your body was regularly repaired:

10 Reasons You Will Live to 1000

#9: Human Desire. I understand perfectly well that a vast majority of people are terribly uncomfortable with the idea of radical life extension. Nevertheless, there are thoughtful and intelligent people such as Aubrey de Grey who are actively challenging society to think differently. Rather than accepting aging as an inevitable aspect of life, they are instead encouraging society to view aging as a disease - something to be treated. This is a profound paradigm shift, but is it any more profound than Copernicus telling people 500 years ago that they were not at the center of the universe? History has a way of demonstrating that the future often turns out much different than most people appreciate and that what constitutes "conventional wisdom" in one era is laughed at and mocked by future generations. Our "acceptance" of death might be one such issue.

A triad of things to think about in this context: firstly, moment to moment, people want to continue to live in good health. Secondly, people will do almost anything to avoid change, and death and aging are presently the status quo. Thirdly, people still, nevertheless, manage to plan the course of their changing financial lives decades ahead of time.

The future of progress in the science of longevity will be formed of a million little personal thinking wars; planning versus fear of change versus the desire to live and take part in the world. How many will help to develop the technologies of rejuvenation, versus sit on the sidelines and hope? It is the foresightful and energetic who shape tomorrow, setting out plans and taking actions that will lead to better lives for their future selves.

By 2040, we will live in ageless, disease-free bodies, experts say

Imagine living in a body fashioned from "designer cells" that can never age or get sick; and sporting a mind that thinks millions of times faster than today’s brain. Though this may seem too optimistic to happen in just 32 years, experts believe that nanotech, biotech, infotech, and cognitive science advances over the next three decades could create this future by 2040.

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[Nanotechnology researcher] Robert Freitas believes that tiny medical nanobots expected by late 2020s will help us upgrade our bodies. "However we won’t reengineer ourselves all at once," he stresses, "It will be an incremental process one step at a time; and it could begin with artificial respirocytes replacing red blood cells, giving us an immense energy boost."

I suspect the timeline is somewhat aggressive. You have to count business cycles when thinking about how long it takes before products arrive; until we have general artificial intelligence or greatly augmented natural intelligence, human organization is going to be the incompressible element in broad progress. It takes ten years to move from laboratory to halfway decent product with widespread adoption in the least regulated markets, and twenty years to see mature products in that market. Little of that time was research and development - time is constrained by fundraising, organization, legal barriers, weight of regulations, and so forth.

I think that it's a viable prediction to say that the fundamental building blocks of artificial bodies will mostly be demonstrated by the 2040s: advanced nanorobotics; artificial cells; bioartificial organs; massive computational capacities; a complete control over evolved biological cells; a working understanding of all human biochemistry (with small gaps, rather than the present great gaping unknowns); reverse engineering of much of the brain's functionality. Biology and machinery will be well blended by that time, as much of the new nanomachinery in the molecular manufacturing industries will operate at the scale of cells and molecules.

However, it's a big jump from what is demonstrated in the laboratory and what is commercialized, proven and widely available as a product, especially in oppressively regulated areas like medicine. We live in interesting times, in that the rate at which new medical technologies become available over the next few decades - and therefore the length of healthy life we can expect - is much more dependent on what we want and are willing to pay for, and, sadly, what regulators are willing to forbid, than on constraints imposed by what is scientifically possible.

The 2050s could see the medical technologies necessary for agelessness available to the masses ... or their development might still be in the future at that time, buried beneath decades of delay, regulatory costs, suppression, and lack of advocacy for development. The future we get is very much up to us.

Don't forget to mark your calendars for the Understanding Aging conference at UCLA, Los Angeles this June 27th, organized by the Methuselah Foundation and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Despite the unassuming name, this is all about how to develop the medical technologies of rejuvenation by repairing the damage of aging:

You are cordially invited to participate in the scientific conference "Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches," which will be held from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA. The conference includes a free symposium for the general public on June 27th focused on public policy implications of successfully postponing aging. The scientific conference, on June 28th and 29th, will be focused on the science and technology of aging and its postponement.

The opening symposium has its own website; the scientific conference is much like the influential Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference series of past years, while the symposium is intended to catch the public eye and draw attention to this very important field of research:

AGING The Disease - The Cure - The Implications (ADCI)

Applying the new technologies of regenerative and genetic medicine, the engineering approach to aging promises to dramatically extend healthy human life within the next few decades.

How do you and your loved ones stand to benefit from the coming biomedical revolution? Are you prepared? Is society prepared?

At ADCI you will engage with top scientists and advocates as they present their findings and advice, and learn what you can do to help accelerate progress towards a cure for the disease and suffering of aging.

The Methuselah Foundation volunteers are working hard in the background to make this all as successful as past SENS conferences; if you are in the Los Angeles area, why not dive in and help out?

Hopefully you know the story behind mitochondrial DNA, free radicals and the accumulating damage to our biological machinery that we call "aging." If not, a summary of the modern mitochondrial free radical theory of aging can be found back in the Fight Aging! archives, and a more detailed version in the book "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime".

The very short summary: mitochondria inside your cells produce fuel to power cellular machinery, but side-effects of that process tend to damage the DNA the mitochondria carry within them - quite separate from the DNA in the cell nucleus, and much more fragile. An accumulation of damaged mitochondria over the years leads to more free radicals in the body, which in turn cause all sorts of varied destruction to molecular machinery and important molecules. That contributes to, and some would say is the dominant cause of, aging and age-related disease.

The best way to deal with all this? Either replace all the mitochondrial DNA with fresh undamaged versions every few decades, a feat demonstrated in mice a few years ago via protofection, or make the damage to mitochondrial DNA irrelevant by blocking its ability to generate more free radicals. This latter approach is used by Methuselah Foundation funded researchers, amongst others, and is a part of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.

So, with the background out of the way, I can now point out some interesting research via FuturePundit. It seems that not all human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA for short) is created equal: some leads to a more rapid accumulation of age-related damage than others. Perhaps not in all tissue in the body, and perhaps not of great enough relative significance to spend a lot of resources investigating, but take a look and see what you think based on this evidence:

Genetic variation in the DNA of mitochondria - the "power plants" of cells - contributes to a person’s risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD)

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Variation in the mitochondrial genome reflects human migrations and different environmental exposures. Changes in the mitochondrial DNA can alter the efficiency of energy generation and lead to over-production of "reactive oxygen species" - free radicals that can damage the cell.

"By identifying genetic changes associated with the mitochondria, our results lend additional confirmatory evidence for the role of oxidative stress in AMD. This supports study of interventions that attempt to bolster our antioxidant defenses."

The interesting question: if you're going to use protofection to replace your mitochondrial DNA every few decades, is it worthwhile to replace it with the best of breed, most efficient human mitochondrial DNA? Since you're wiping the slate clean every time regardless, and the normal course of human life suggests that 30 years is a fine length of time to be carrying a set of mitochondrial DNA without replacement, the answer might be "no," unless the additional cost is very small.

Looking at research priorities, identifying best of breed mitochondrial DNA, or manipulating our mitochondrial DNA to look more like it via some form of gene therapy, is clearly nowhere near as important or impactful as wholesale replacement and repair of all our mitochondrial DNA.

Sixty years ago, room sized computers for extremely specific applications were an impressive technology demonstration. We all know how that evolved. At a comparable stage in the advance of biotechnology, today we see that bioartificial implants - cells combined with microscale and chemical engineering - can perform one of the tasks of a pancreas:

Encapsulating a large collection of islets has been difficult, he says, because the material to make that capsule has never been designed for that purpose.

"This device differs because its polymer membrane has been designed to have the optimal properties for encapsulating islets," Rosenthal tells C&EN. "It allows for free movement of insulin and glucose but restricts access of immune molecules that might attack the encapsulated islets." Likewise, any viruses that might be piggybacking on the islets are trapped behind the membrane.

"Because of that, we can use pig cells, and the only thing that communicates between them and the patient are the small molecules and small proteins," Rosenthal notes.

The polymer can also sequester oxygen from the environment, thanks to its silicone-based components. This oxygen nourishes the encapsulated islets cells. "These membranes are biocompatible, flexible, transparent, autoclavable, and they're easily synthesized and relatively inexpensive," Rosenthal says.

Those room sized computers were pretty clunky and dedicated; the real challenge was in integrating such a beast with the processes and organization it was intended to help. The same is true of medical implants and helper devices, as we're just not very good at putting things in the body yet, measured on the grand scale of what is possible. It's tough, expensive and often damaging to the patient. But take a look at the computer you're using to read this post. Sixty years ago, you'd have had to build a city of rooms to match its power. Integration of that power for use in specific tasks is easy now, and an entire infrastructure exists to handle the tasks that are beyond one person's time and energy.

So to the future of bioartificial organs. A computer doesn't look much like a brain, a slide-rule, or a typewriter. The bioartificial pancreas of the future won't look a whole lot like the pancreas you're carrying around with you at the moment. In parallel to work on regenerative medicine and repair of aging - aiming to maintain the body we have - we will see a great breadth of development in semi-organic prostheses and other functional replacements, and the growth of support infrastructure for that technology.

There is a certain logic here that suggests bioartificial bodies as an end-point: consider that researchers can build a bioartificial pancreas, but it's still that case that long-term use of implants is a burden in the best cases, and simply impossible in most others. The problem is the integration between systems we have built and evolved systems in the body: everything from matching blood vessels to dealing with the immune system response is a challenge. So instead of hooking your new bioartificial organ up to a body, wouldn't it be easier to hook it up to another collection of bioartificial organs, where it is perfectly feasible to control all the interactions? The end of that line of thinking is a comprehensive support machinery for the human brain, an entirely different form of body and technology base in beneficial competition with regenerative medicine. Choice is good; mix and match.

It's a challenge to say what will be hard and will be easy 20 years from now, never mind further out. Maybe controlling the body to accept long-term implant use is trivial in 2030, and everyone queues up for the latest blood filter device from a Japanese fashion house, as it's substantially better than the one you were born with. But if you're interested in living for a long time, it's a benefit to keep up with what is happening today, and think about what is plausible in the years ahead.