Mprize volunteer and healthy life extension advocate Kevin Perrott has posted his initial impressions of the SENS 2 conference at Health Extension:

Over the next little while as the buzz and exhilaration fades I will attempt to post both images and approved video clips from some of the more intriguing sessions although I will be hard pressed to pick and choose which those might be as indeed, the quality of the presentations was quite high and their very diversity makes it difficult to rate them. Still, there were a few which stood above the others in their descriptive capacity which was able to bring a crystal clear clarity and support and indeed vindication to the idea that rejuvenating aging tissues via replacement or removal of damage is happening.

Now.

Not in some far-off bad (or good) science-fiction novel... but TODAY.

A great deal of promising science relevant to repairing Aubrey de Grey's seven classes of age-related damage is taking place - but almost all of it is only incidentally relevant, drops in the ocean of general biomedical research that will lead to inadvertant healthy life extension. More support, funding and infrastructure must be directed towards a deliberate effort to reverse the causes of age-related degeneration if we are to see success in our lifetimes:

Making gains in SENS science in unrelated bits and pieces is likely to be a slow path for progress towards meaningful healthy life extension, however. Curing any one age-related condition is a wonderful thing for sufferers, but it will not increase healthy life span for anyone else - nor will it lead directly to therapies that can extend healthy life span without further investment and work. It would be much more cost-effective to directly address the root cause of aging and age-related disease.

Technorati tags: life extension, SENS, SENS 2