I think that only good can come from more wide-ranging discussion of longevity, science and aging - and what can be done to help us lead longer, healthier lives. The more talk there is of healthy life extension, the more people will come to realize that real progress can be made in the next few decades ... rapidly enough to matter a great deal for most of those reading this today.

The funding needed for progress in the science of longevity is very dependent on public support and understanding. If there is no hue and cry, there will be no progress. Witness any number of achievements well within our capabilities as a civilization that have not come to pass - irrigation of the Sahara, colonization of the deepest ocean, and many more.

A couple of articles caught my eye today; examples that demonstrate the realization of healthy life extension as real science - just like any other modern branch of medicine - is working its way into the existing conversation about aging and society. It's but a few steps from there to support for a war on aging that looks much like the infrastructure and scientific culture dedicated to the defeat of cancer.

Scientists attempt to slow aging process:

In the last century the average lifespan has increased by about 30 years. Most people spend the last years of their lives in a fragile state, Anna McCormick, director of the biology of aging program at the National Institute on Aging, said at a recent conference on Capitol Hill. "We're trying to stretch the mid-life, not trying to add 15 years of very frail life at the end," McCormick said.

System must change as Britain gets older, says poll:

Among questions raised at the debate, titled "Three Score Years and…when" was that of eliminating chronic diseases, leading to hugely expanded longevity. Dr Aubrey De Grey, a Cambridge University geneticist and a self-confessed optimist, said medicine would at some stage be able to address ageing in the same manner as it tackled disease.

"We're within reach of genuinely fixing ageing," he said. If science eliminated age-related disease (defined as disease whose incidence increased with age) the upshot would be massively enhanced life expectancy, possibly within a few decades. Defeating ageing was a fundamentally only a maintenance problem, he said - the repair of ongoing and accumulating molecular and cell damage.

Plans were well advanced in this field, said Dr De Grey. "We can in theory control ageing as well as we can currently control malaria or HIV."

"In theory" here meaning after the investment needed to develop the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), and build the research infrastructure to carry forward from that point. More people should be thinking about these things - working towards a solution certainly beats the alternative of decay without hope.

Technorati tags: advocacy, aging, life extension

Posted by Reason at October 19, 2006 7:27 PM | TrackBack (0)