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Interesting idea, and I'm sure it's been done already - just a question of finding out where, when, and whether it's time to do it again.
"Doing" is far more important than "consuming" for long term future health - consider it the difference between building a better engine for your car versus taking better care of the present engine. Obviously taking better care of the engine is a good thing, but it'll only prolong the engine life span so far no matter how much time and effort you spend on it.
Current thinking amongst the people I know of appears to be some amalgam of:
1) Mobilize aging science; science is a supertanker, taking years to make course (and funding priority) changes. Aubrey de Grey works on this, as do a number of other prominent scientists.
2) Squash the fraudulent anti-aging marketplace. Some scientists are putting a lot of effort into this, as it has come to the point of badly damaging the prospects for funding of real anti-aging science.
3) Squash anti-research politicians and legislation. John Sperling has this on his agenda, as do the folks at CAMR.
4) Full steam ahead with stem cell based regenerative medicine. This looks likely to provide near term therapies that will extend healthy lifespan through repairing age-related damage.
5) Full steam ahead with the proteinomics, bioinformatics and genomics. The tools and their capabilities are advancing at an amazing rate, in leaps and bounds. Scientists are able to do in weeks now what would have taken years in 1999. Almost all of the interesting advances in recent years stem from the use of these new tools.
6) Nanomedicine is set to pick up where regenerative medicine leaves off in terms of extending healthy lifespan, but that is a way away.
7) Building an industry to turn research into products. John Sperling, BioMarker Pharmaceuticals, Elixir Pharmaceuticals, Geron, Advanced Cell Technology, etc, etc. There's a lot of money pouring into the fundamentals at the moment, the tool-builders, both in regenerative and stem cell science and in nanotechnology.
8) Insofar as the here and now goes, the best way to keep yourself healthy and long-lived is still undeniably calorie restriction. No competitors on the horizon yet, despite claims for the latest round of super-supplements - to be treated with skepticism until sound science backs their claims up.
So as you can see, funnily enough, the answer is probably to keep doing the same thing you have been doing in your own healthy and lifestyle practices. If you're interested in it, you were probably already aware of calorie restriction.
However, advances in medical science and the politics and social battles surrounding them are demonstrating the increasing need for widespread support. The science can move very fast now if it has the funding and the support.
The future of healthy life extension increasingly looks to be one in which the science is well in hand, and the real battle is to get the necessary funding, stop anti-research legislation, and get internal scientific politics sorted out - in other words, it's the will, not the technological obstacles.
Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
[Posted by: Reason at February 9, 2004 2:12 AM]
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