From the perspective our own long-term future as living beings, an understanding of how the mind works - or rather how the biology of the brain supports and enables the mind - is vital. Why is this? Let us start with this: the approach to longevity research I think to be best over the next few decades is SENS or a similar repair strategy. We are clearly going to struggle to rebuild ourselves - even understand our biochemistry - rapidly enough to halt aging within our lifetimes. The repair approach, as illustrated by the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), is in effect a way of working around our ignorance of metabolism and biochemical complexity but still achieving results. We focus on what we do know, the forms of damage and change that accumulate with aging, and the plausible methodologies for preventing and repairing this damage.

All fine and well so far. But you have to play the odds. Let's say that we run into problems repairing biomolecular damage of aging in a kidney, say, and the organ continues to fail at advanced age. Suppose the research community runs into a real tough roadblock in kidney biochemistry that might take decades to work through. That isn't so threatening for a kidney; grow a new, young kidney from scratch via the nascent science of tissue engineering, or employ one of the artificial replacements presently in the works.

The brain, on the other hand, is a whole different kettle of fish. It is your foundation and self, plain and simple. There can be no wholesale replacement of tissue, and so the risk of long-lasting roadblocks and tough periods in rejuvenation research for the brain is a serious threat.

What, then, will be the causes of age-related death 30 years from now? The body is an exceedingly complex machine; blocking off one failure mode, or preventing a single mode of death that results from a class of accumulated damage will leave many other possibilities. Behind the neurodegenerative diseases we know lie a hundred, a thousand ever more subtle and devilish ways in which age-related cellular damage can kill us. You can plug as many holes as you like, but eventually you're going to run out of fingers.

From where I stand, the true benefit of metabolic and biochemical research into the mechanisms of human life - at ever increasing levels of detail and complexity - is that it enables and supports the more direct approaches to extending longevity like SENS. The more you know, the more you can do. The better the tools honed in basic research, the better the resulting science and technology. So it is reassuring to see that scientists continue to make progress in understanding the biology of the mind:

What happens in our brains when we learn and remember" Are memories recorded in a stable physical change, like writing an inscription permanently on a clay tablet" Prof. Yadin Dudai, Head of the Weizmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department, and his colleagues are challenging that view. They recently discovered that the process of storing long-term memories is much more dynamic, involving a miniature molecular machine that must run constantly to keep memories going. They also found that jamming the machine briefly can erase long-term memories. Their findings [may] pave the way to future treatments for memory problems.

...

“This drug is a molecular version of jamming the operation of the machine,” says Dudai. “When the machine stops, the memories stop as well.” In other words, long-term memory is not a one-time inscription on the nerve network, but an ongoing process which the brain must continuously fuel and maintain. These findings raise the possibility of developing future, drug-based approaches for boosting and stabilizing memory.

Technorati tags: life extension, medical research

Posted by Reason at August 16, 2007 9:03 PM | TrackBack (0)