Biomedical gerontologist and radical life extension advocate Aubrey de Grey will be continuing his winter of conference appearances - after the Immortality Institute conference this coming weekend - by presenting at NEXT05 on November 25th 2005, at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. You can find the program of speakers at the NEXT05 website, and I highly recommend you take the chance to hear de Grey speak if you are in the vicinity.

To get up to speed on de Grey's work and the case for major research projects aimed at extending the healthy human life span, you might want to start with the introduction to the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) at the Longevity Meme and move on to read through the SENS website:

SENS is a detailed plan for curing human aging. SENS is an engineering project, recognising that aging is a medical condition and that medicine is a branch of engineering. Aging is a set of progressive changes in body composition, at the molecular and cellular level, which are side-effects of essential metabolic processes. Many of these changes are eventually bad for us -- they are an accumulation of damage, which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance.

...

the engineering (SENS) strategy is not to interfere with metabolism per se, but to repair or obviate the accumulating damage and thereby indefinitely postpone the age at which it reaches pathogenic levels. This is practical because it avoids both of the problems with the other approaches: it sidesteps our ignorance of metabolism (because it does not attempt to interfere with metabolic processes and their production of side-effects) but also it pre-empts the chaos of pathology (because it repairs the precursors of pathology, rather than addressing the pathology head-on).

Technorati tags: conference, life extension, SENS