Aging is a medical condition - a disease, if you will. Like many medical conditions it is the result of damage and changes in your biochemistry that accumulate over the years. As for all medical conditions, we can look for therapies that postpone or reverse its effects. We can - and should - search for a cure.

In that vein, the Methuselah Foundation is playing host to a conference on the scientific path to rejuvenation medicine in Los Angeles this coming June.

The preliminary program already has over two dozen confirmed speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous conferences I have [co-]organised, the emphasis of this meeting is on "applied biogerontology" - the design and implementation of biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans) to a youthful degree of physiological robustness.

Those of you who follow the latest aging research will recognize many of the names already in the program, and note that the Methuselah Foundation continues to draw together work from different fields in the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach to the repair of aging.

The conference is preceded by a more press-friendly symposium at which noted folk from the healthy life extension advocates and members of the aging research communities will speak:

The free public preconference "Aging: the disease, the cure, the implications" [will] be held in the 1800-seater Royce Hall, UCLA, on the evening of Friday June 27th, and to the dinner and reception following. This preconference will put the postponement of aging more firmly on the political and social map than ever before.

It will consist of presentations by at least six illustrious speakers, including:

• William Haseltine, Haseltine Global Health, founder of Human Genome Sciences
• Bruce Ames, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, National Medal of Science awardee
• Michael West, Biotime Inc., founder of Geron and Advanced Cell Technology
• Daniel Perry, Director of the Alliance for Aging Research
• Gregory Stock, UCLA Program on Medicine, technology and Society and Signum Biosciences

Mark your calendars - this is something of a "SENS California," and promises to be much like the SENS conference series organized by biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey in recent years.

Posted by Reason at February 25, 2008 7:39 PM | TrackBack (0)