Researcher João Pedro de Magalhães - author of the excellent senescence.info website - is now set up with his own lab at Liverpool University across the pond. He'll be forming up the The Integrative Genomics of Aging Group and getting to work on what is clearly his passion. From the research introduction:

Ageing has a profound impact on human society and modern medicine, yet it remains a major puzzle of biology. Our group aims to help understand the genetic, cellular, and molecular mechanisms of ageing. Although our research integrates different strategies, its focal point is developing and applying computational and experimental methods that help bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype, a major challenge of the post-genome era, and help decipher the human genome and how it regulates complex processes like ageing.

In the long term, we would like our work to help ameliorate age-related diseases and preserve health. No other biomedical field has so much potential to improve human health as research on the basic mechanisms of ageing.

...

Because longevity evolved in the human lineage, we are particularly interested in employing modern computational methods in primates to study the evolution, structure, and function of genes associated with ageing, which may shed light on the genetic changes that contributed to the evolution of human longevity. Ultimately, our goal is to understand why we are different from each other and from other species and what is the role of each DNA base in the genome in determining these differences, in particular in the context of ageing and age-related diseases.

This is all fresh from the presses, and there are possibilities for undergraduates and postgraduates to help with this work. Take a look if you're at that stage in a life science career, and haven't already been spirited away by the Methuselah Foundation's Undergraduate Research Initiative.

For my part, I'm pleased to see that the goal of intervening in aging is ceasing to be the dreaded third rail of grantsmanship that must not be mentioned. As more labs around the world are founded with the explicitly stated agenda of treating aging to improve the human condition, the tide of public support and understanding will continue to turn. It's that tide, the broad sentiment of support for longevity science, that will sustain much needed growth in the research community over the long haul.

Posted by Reason at September 22, 2008 7:39 PM | TrackBack (0)