Anti-Aging Medicine and Science notes that Aubrey de Grey will debate S. Jay Olshansky at BIOMEDEX 2005.

More than 500 participants from Canada, the United States and Europe, are expected to come hear the many prestigious speakers coming from all Four Corners of the globe. Amongst the latter, there will be S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, from the University of Chicago, and Aubrey De Grey, PhD, from the University of Cambridge, who will confront each others' opinions in a conference-debate on immortality, a utopia or a scientific truth?

For a taste of what this debate will look like, you might cast your eye to two articles from the BBC:

Aubrey de Grey - We will be able to live to 1,000
S. Jay Olshansky - Don't fall for the cult of immortality

The brief exchange of comments between myself, Aubrey de Grey and S. Jay Olshansky at the end of last year is also quite informative. The bottom line would seem to be that the only major bone of contention between the two scientists is over timescales relating to the implementation of healthy life extension technologies. This is a very important issue, however, as it ties into funding, public expectations and - ultimately - whether or not real anti-aging medicine is developed in time to save those of us reading this now.

Posted by Reason at 2:19 PM
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Sonia Arrison writes about the slow mainstreaming of transhumanism, a collection of ideas that includes strong support for greatly extending the healthy human life span.

William Safire bid farewell to his column at the New York Times this week, but not because he's retiring. Instead, this Pulitzer Prize-winning, former presidential speech writer is moving on to lead an organization concerned with what some call transhumanism.

Transhumanism is the advocacy of using life-enhancing technology to improve the human condition. It is a forward-looking philosophy, and savvy proponents spend a good deal of time thinking about the ethics involved in areas such as stem-cell research, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and neuropharmaceuticals, to name a few.

...

America, and indeed the world, is entering a new age where significant advances in bio and nanotechnology might allow humans to live better and longer lives. But they might also change who humans are. Imagine if it becomes possible, as in the film Johnny Mnemonic, to integrate silicon into the brain so that memory is greatly enhanced. The question of whether that person is still human, and whether that matters, will be of utmost import from both a legal and cultural point of view.

The time to discuss these questions is now, so it is good to see the issues moving from fringe to mainstream. As Mr. Safire rightly points out, life expectancy for Americans has risen from 47 to 77 over the last century. Moore's law, that computer power doubles every two years, can be now combined with biotech. In the near future, we are all likely to be living much longer lives.

More than just discussing, we need to educate and raise awareness. The future of technological progress is not a track down which we move regardless of what people do - every inch must be worked for, paid for. If we all sit back and wait, expecting our lives to get longer, then we will simply wait until we die, the science left unaccomplished. While the nature of future technology that will lead to healthy life extension is fairly well understood at this time, directed research and funding into slowing, halting and reversing the aging process is lagging far behind. This must change.

Posted by Reason at 3:55 PM
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It looks like Jay Fox is getting a good reception from other quarters in the blogosphere. Good - I fully expect to see many more quality posts at Longevity First based on Jay's track record elsewhere. Some quality thoughts from Classical Values:

For starters, helping people to stay healthier longer is so self-evidently virtuous as to require no excuses. It angers me that such excuses are even thought necessary in "certain quarters". To live a good life requires, first and foremost, that you have a life to be good WITH. The dead have had done with being good.

But the life extension angle, isn't that just a little kooky? We have no proof at all that it's even possible, right? Aren't I just grasping at straws here? Well now, that's the funny thing. We actually DO have evidence that it's possible, at least in lab animals. Heck, it's not just possible, it's a done deal.

Worms have had their natural spans trebled, and quintupled. Rats have gained fifty percent. If the rat comes from a truly screwed up strain, prone to a short lifespan, caloric restriction can triple their life expectancy.

And we've known how to do this since the 1930's. It's only now that we have the tools to begin exploring the why of it.

Given these FACTS, when I hear someone denigrate this type of research as hopeless, or immoral, or doomed to failure, I ask myself where THEIR evidence is...but perhaps I'd better quit while I'm ahead.

Despite the successes in animal studies, we are still a fair way from engineering sufficient support for serious longevity research in humans. The technical obstacles are far less intimidating that the social obstacles and funding obstacles at this point in time - which is why advocacy is so important.

As a side note, keeping the conversation about healthy life extension alive and humming along is very much a part of broader efforts for activism and education. "Conversation" in this sense means that dispersed set of articles, commentary, opinions and back and forth in the online and print world; an emergent environment that reflects the level of interest and thinking in this topic. Fight Aging! was created to help that process along - I've been pleased to see that many other bloggers have joined in. By simply talking about healthy life extension in a public arena, we help our long term goals by making others aware of our ideas and the need for action.

Posted by Reason at 12:03 PM
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Phil Bowermaster of the Speculist has some interesting things to say about Jay Fox's piece on healthy life extension and advocacy entitled "Where's the Rage":

Our ancestors engaged in a war against death that we're still fighting today. They threw everything they had and everything they could think up at the enemy, and as a result we now have science and medicine and religion and, really, the whole of human culture. They were relentless and tenacious fighters, but (being rational creatures) they understood the limitations of the war they were able to wage. As a group, the clan/tribe/people would fight on until the end of time, making what progress they could against death. But as individuals, it had to be acknowledged that each and every soldier would one day fall to the enemy.

That was a terrible thing. An unacceptable thing. But it had to be accepted anyway. Refusing to acknowledge the inevitability of death would have made as much sense as refusing to acknowledge the inevitability of gravity. It was pointless, and you would go crazy if you thought too much about that kind of thing.

...

unfortunately, I think the only way we'll get to the point where people no longer "know" that death from aging is inevitable is when we have some very youthful 80-120 year olds who can attest to it personally. Yes, a lot of people will needlessly die between now and then. But again, we're talking about an unprecedented paradigm shift. Once we cross that particular chasm, my guess is that things will happen very fast. The rage that Jay is looking for will be awakened, and it will completely reshape our world.

You might recall that Phil has an article at the Longevity Meme that gives a good overview of his thoughts on the topic of aging and death. Personally, I think we can do better than Phil's guess at the future in that last paragraph above - the very existence of the anti-aging industry shows that people are very forward-looking and anticipatory in this matter.

Posted by Reason at 11:41 AM
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Jay Fox has been a prolific, thoughtful writer at the Immortality Institute forums for some time now. He's also involved with the M Prize volunteer group and efforts to start a Methuselah Fly Prize. After much arm-twisting, he's now blogging on healthy life extension at Longevity First. Add it to your bookmarks.

Perhaps the simplest and least controversial reason to pursue longevity first is that the other technology can wait.

I dream about space travel and mining the asteroid belt and colonizing the moons of Saturn just as much as the next technophile. But, I can wait a few decades to see those dreams achieved if it means that we can prevent a few hundred million people from dying who otherwise might not have to.

More to the point, I want to see those dreams of space exploration come true in my lifetime, and that merits spending vast resources on space technology. However, with an extended healthy life span, I can wait. If by curing aging, we can give people in their 40's and younger a pretty decent chance of living to 150, then we can all wait a few decades to invest those vast resources in space technology (or fusion power, etc.), and instead invest those vast resources into longevity research. In other words, we have so little to lose, and so much to gain, by making longevity research our highest priority.

Posted by Reason at 11:09 AM
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Tom FitzGerald notes via e-mail that the World Transhumanist Association will soon be working on a collaborative book:

The World Transhumanist Association is moving forward with the project to produce an essay anthology under the title "An Introduction to Transhumanism". As many of you know, I've volunteered to be the editor.

On a suggestion from Mike LaTorra, who is working on an essay on Transhumanism and Taoism, I've set up a yahoo group for those wishing to contribute essays to this anthology. If you'd like to contribute, please join the group at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/introtranshumanism/

We're also looking for volunteers from transhumanists who don't subscribe to WTA-Talk. It would be much appreciated if those of you who are members of other transhumanist communities could spread the word that we're looking for contributions to this anthology. (Please feel free to forward this e-mail to anyone you think might be interested in contributing--just don't spam anybody, please!.)

If you belong to any of the following groups, for instance, or know people who do, you might want to spread the word to them:

The IEET Fellows
The contributors and editors of JET
The Contributors to the recent ImmInst Book
Speakers at the last two Tranvisions
The Board and Honorary Vice-Chairs of the WTA

Again, thanks for all your efforts on behalf of what I'm sure will be a great book. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me directly offlist at pdxwta@yahoo.com.

Tranhumanist individuals and points of view can be found throughout the healthy life extension community and transhumanist groups were amongst some of the earliest modern advocates for life extension technology. Any meaningful introduction to transhumanism should explain and promote healthy life extension - so those of you of a mind to write a submission along those lines should get to it...

Posted by Reason at 1:36 AM
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I spend a fair amount of time building infrastructure to persuade people to do more than simply make use of the best of present day techniques to stay healthy and extend healthy life span - and I spend less time than I should actually engaged in the process of persuasion. Still, advocacy, activism and supporting the rapid advance of medical science are very important. April Smith's latest post looks at why, in the context of calorie restriction (a present day technique) and the M Prize (an effort to promote the development of better longevity medicine):

For those of us who already invest a substantial amount of our time and energy into the only known way to slow aging down, it only makes sense that we invest some amount of our money into a prize that can motivate scientists and the public at large to focus on finding a real solution, one that does not just hold off the inevitable for a few years, but that repairs the damage so that we can keep on going, just like the Energizer Bunny fresh from a battery change.

In other words, don't focus so much on present health that you fail to invest in future health; supporting medical research is the most effective way to invest in future health. We only have the one chance to do something right now - when it will make the most difference to the future of healthy life extension medicine.

Posted by Reason at 12:17 PM
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I am rather puzzled by the sudden rush of media attention regarding "contaminated" embryonic stem cell lines.

The human embryonic stem cells available for research are contaminated with nonhuman molecules from the culture medium used to grow the cells, researchers report. The nonhuman cell-surface sialic acid can compromise the potential uses of the stem cells in humans, say scientists at the University of California, San Diego. Their study was published Sunday in the online edition of Nature Medicine.

It's been known for some time that the lines qualifying for US Federal funding were essentially useless for serious science - for this and other reasons. Several better methodologies for developing uncontaminated lines have been developed. I'm not sure that this latest study is saying anything new, despite all the attention.

A number of other lines, such as those developed by Douglas Melton, are available for private or state-funded research - a good thing too, since a large number of lines are needed to get anywhere.

Posted by Reason at 2:48 PM
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Cancer stem cell research is something that we should be watching with interest, if only because an immense amount of money and time is now devoted to the broader field of stem cell medicine. New research into cancer therapies that overlap with the science behind regenerative medicine is likely to move fast over the next decade. As I'm sure we're all aware, curing cancer is high on the list of things we need to accomplish on the way to radical life extension. The forseeable technologies of regenerative medicine will, on their own, only allow you long enough to certainly die from cancer - unless we do something about it.

A recent New Scientist article mentions some aggressive goals for this sort of work:

Cancer treatments could improve by targeting cancer "stem cells" which give birth to all other cells in tumours.

...

Now, new techniques to do this developed at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Kumamoto University, Japan, have been licensed for commercialisation to Stemline, a biotechnology company in New York, US.

"Once we have eradicated the cancer stem cells, in essence we have destroyed the engine responsible for treatment failure and disease recurrence, the major problems for fighting cancer," says Ivan Bergstein, chief executive of Stemline.

But it could be five years before the first treatments start to come through, warns Toru Kondo, head of the team at the University of Cambridge which pioneered the two new tests.

Five years is fast in the world of medical research - this is just another of the many areas in which advancing biotechnology and knowledge is producing real results.

Posted by Reason at 3:35 PM
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Hype & Hope is one of those "not quite a blog, not quite a news service" offerings that have been springing up of late - many posts and pointers, but little editorializing. Hype & Hope focuses on stem cell research with a more or less equal weight given to financial and business news, noteworthy science and political stories. It looks to be a useful resource in its present incarnation, so hopefully it will stay that way.

Posted by Reason at 3:20 PM
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In addition to being the new full time fundraiser for the Methuselah Foundation, April Smith writes very entertaining and thought-provoking posts - in this case a pop culture account of the road that lead her into an interest in calorie restriction, healthy life extension and her current career move:

Since I've decided to take on this new challenge, I've gotten a lot of questions about "Why would you want to live longer?" "Aging is something that happens to all of us, why fight it?" "Isn't it selfish to want to cure aging?"

If you are wondering any of those things right now, I want you to try this experiment. Don't think about aging as it is happening to you: instead, picture the person you love most in the whole world. Then imagine that person getting older... not just getting a few gray hairs and needing reading glasses, but having to hold onto things to walk, afraid of going out for fear of falling on the ice and breaking a hip, perhaps even losing the sharpness of mind that drew you to him or her in the first place, perhaps unable to remember who you are. Being eaten alive by cancer cells, or barely holding onto life in an ICU somewhere, attached to feeding tubes and breathing machines and almost wanting to die but hanging on because life if just too precious to let it go, even in the midst of great pain.

Why is that inevitable? Why let that happen if you have a choice? Why would you accept that suffering, not for yourself but for someone you love, if there's anything, anything at all, that you could do to stop it?

We do, of course, have a chance and a choice - which makes us far luckier than most of the people who have ever lived. The technologies of radical life extension are, figuratively speaking, right around the corner. All that is missing is the funding, the widespread support, the declarations of intent. Just as happened for cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS research and other worthy causes, this is a a time in which activism and education can make a real and vital difference to the future of medicine and length of our lives.

Posted by Reason at 1:53 AM
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Healthy life extension defies nature - that is an argument you will hear a great deal of if you make a point of advocating longer, healthier lives. (Alongside the Tithonus Error and poorly considered complaints about boredom). By that criteria, however, houses, heating, medicine and all the other trappings of modern society also defy nature - they are very unnatural indeed. Alternatively, one could view them as the natural result of the natural human inclination to effect change in the world. So something deeper is at work here; the charge of defying nature is applied very selectively. Why? Russell Blackford's latest column at Betterhumans is the first part in an examination of "The Supposed Sin of Defying Nature":

Appeals to what is "natural" have a long history in policy debates about unpopular practices - such as homosexual acts, technological innovations and, particularly in recent times, manipulating DNA. The assumption is that there is something wrong morally about interfering with nature's processes, or defying nature itself - however, exactly, those ideas are to be understood.

You'd think that any concept of the inviolability of nature would long have been abandoned by philosophers, ethicists and cultural commentators. But sadly it isn't so. Nature's inviolability is still a club to bash any controversial practice or technology that conservative thinkers dislike.

John Stuart Mill's essay On Nature seemingly exploded the whole idea more than 100 years ago, but it persists in 21st century policy debates. It's like a vampire with a stake through its heart that refuses to die. Choose any of a vast range of controversial topics, from gay marriage to genetic enhancement and beyond, and you'll find a few thinkers willing to argue that it must be stopped because it defies nature.

And so we're left with two questions: Why does this argument persist? And is there anything that we can do about it?

Posted by Reason at 11:11 AM
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It is always very rewarding to see the effects of education and activism for healthy life extension in action. When you have a few minutes today, wander through the comments on the last three items about Aubrey de Grey posted to Slashdot:

June 02 2004: Engineering an End to Aging

December 03 2004: Live to be 1000 Years Old?

January 19 2005: Do You Want to Live Forever?

I think you'll see quite a transformation for the better, on the whole. It goes to show that presenting the science of healthy life extension a wider audience is a very worthwhile activity. Widespread support and understanding is the engine that drives funding for medical research - private and public - over the long term.

Posted by Reason at 4:28 PM
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I'm happy to relay the following release from the Methuselah Foundation:

On Tuesday, January 18, 2005, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, announced that recent generous sponsorship donations would enable two people committed to the extension of healthy lifespans to dedicate all of their time and energy toward furthering the mission of the Methuselah Foundation.

"We are at a critical moment in the advance toward new medical therapies that will dramatically extend our youth, health, and longevity," said de Grey. "I'm delighted that several sponsors have recognized the value of the Methuselah Foundation's work as a catalyst for the development of these technologies, and are willing to fund focused efforts in support of the Foundation."

Michael Rae of Calgary, Alberta, will assist Dr. de Grey in research and writing. April Smith of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania will focus on mobilizing funds for the M Prize.

For a list of Expense Contributors go here: www.mprize.org/index.php?pagename=expense_contributors

You might know April Smith from her calorie restriction blog: she also happens to be a professional fundraiser with a long history of experience in that field. Michael Rae is well known in the healthy life extension community and has his fingers in many pies - you should certainly read his excellent essay on The Three Hundred over at the Longevity Meme.

Posted by Reason at 1:25 PM
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Here is another brace of scientific abstracts from sci.life-extension for your reading pleasure, courtesy of Doug Skrecky. Of especial interest is this item:

Cellular DNA is under constant challenge by exogenous and endogenous genotoxic stress, which results in both transient and accumulated DNA damage and genomic instability. All cells are equipped with DNA damage response pathways that trigger DNA repair, cell cycle arrest, and, if need be, apoptosis, to eliminate DNA damage or damaged cells. The consequences of these processes for stem cells can be profound: diminution in stem cell pools, or, because of altered gene expression, an increased chance for stem cell differentiation or malignant transformation. Furthermore, a number of DNA repair abnormalities are linked to premature aging syndromes, and these are associated with defects in the stem cell population. The specific DNA repair systems for which there are data regarding the impact of repair defects on stem cell function include O6-alkylguanine DNA alkyltransferase, nucleotide excision repair, base excision repair, mismatch repair, non-homologous DNA end-joining Fanconi's anemia protein complex, and homologous recombination. It has recently become clear that deficiencies of these processes are associated not only with cancer and/or aging but also with stem cell defects. This discovery raises the possibility of a link between aging and stem cell dysfunction. In this review, we provide evidence for a link between DNA repair systems and the maintenance and longevity of stem cells.

Some of the most interesting work on stem cells at the moment is unrelated to regenerative medicine - a lot of people would be very happy to see that the degenerative effects of aging are strongly dependent on changes in a small population of cells; e.g. reduced ability of stem cells to repair damage in the body. We don't know whether this is the case or not, but if so it would open the door to another potential class of therapies to slow the aging process. More research is needed, as always!

Posted by Reason at 7:54 PM
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Kudos to Kevin Perrott for his hard work in Edmonton, Canada in connection with Aubrey de Grey's forthcoming talks on the future of real anti-aging medicine. A very busy Kevin notes:

I'm not as optimistic that I made a great live interview with Global Television as they pushed the TV interview I did yesterday to tomorrow or tuesday although I've been assured that there was plenty to work with.. Word to the wise.. if you've had three cups of coffee before noon.. say no to impromptu live interviews at 11:00 AM.. we'll see.. I've been asked to be able to provide an interview a little closer to the date of the talk by another television station... CFRN.

You can see some of the publicity results to date in an Edmonton Sun article and two PDFs of an Edmonton Journal article: Front page and full article. Good job!

Posted by Reason at 12:25 PM
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You'll find an excellent long article at RedNova on the way in which exercise relates to metabolism, gene expression, chronic disease, mitochondrial function, biochemistry, health and longevity. Very good stuff.

To emphasize just how profound this effect is and how recently it has become critical, consider that a century ago type-2 diabetes was never seen in humans younger than 40 years. Even two decades ago it was routinely called "adult-onset diabetes." Today, physicians are seeing "adult" diabetes in 10-year-olds. But it's not just diabetes that's cropping up in youth. Sixty percent of overweight teenagers already have at least one risk factor for coronary artery disease. Whatever merits youth sports may have for social development, young people (and old) need physical activity outside of sports just to maintain metabolic homeostasis to prevent many chronic diseases that will shorten their lives.

...

Work to understand how physical inactivity changes the mixture of proteins made as old skeletal muscle becomes physically inactive remains ongoing. Booth and Scott Pattison of the University of Missouri used small glass plates containing thousands of copies of genes to measure mRNA made by muscle. We found that more than 700 genes (out of about 24,000 measured) changed when comparing old to young skeletal muscles. Since many patients with, for example, broken hips successfully survive the surgical repair but later die with weak skeletal muscles, we wanted to identify the genes responsible for the inability of the weak skeletal muscles to get strong again in old humans. Old rats experience a similar loss in ability to enlarge skeletal muscle after limb immobilization, so we looked at differences using the animal model. A total of 354 genes differed in their expression in skeletal muscle between young and old rats with immobilized limbs. As we write, our current work focuses on determining which of these genes are the culprits that prevent recovery of skeletal-muscle strength after limb immobilization.

By now we hope you'll agree that skeletal muscle is a fascinating and largely underrated tissue. But a richer scientific understanding of its function may also require some changes in the linguistic world. The profound effects of underutilizing skeletal muscle suggest that the old adage "use it or lose it" turns out to be a gross understatement.

Use it or lose it indeed - moderate exercise is continually demonstrated to be one of the four most important things you can do right now for your long term health and longevity. (The other three being a good calorie restriction diet, supplementation and supporting research into real anti-aging medicine).

Posted by Reason at 10:39 AM
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Russell Blackford is one of the few philosopher bioethicists I have time for - in a way it's rather sad that talented people of good sense stand out as exceptions in this field. In a piece at the new Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he argues that the fight to cure aging is really just a narrow way of looking at a war on ontological diminution:

The idea of a "war on ... er ... ontological diminution" does not sound as resonant as a "war on death" itself, but it may be more to the point in current debates about the prospect of life extension. I have borrowed the phrase "ontological diminution" from Carl Elliott's book Better than Well, where Elliott attributes it to David Gems (apparently in conversation).

Elliott describes the problem as "a flattening of the conditions that sustain our existence" as we grow older. As he puts it, "our senses dim, our minds get slower, our sexual desire diminishes, and our bodies lose their physical capacities."

...

I've come to believe that those of us who favour life extension technology should be more modest in our claims and campaigns. We should not be emphasising the benefits of immortality so much as those of simply living longer, better, healthier (all comparative words) lives.

His view makes an interesting counterpoint to my thoughts on the necessity for a suitable outrageous extreme.

Posted by Reason at 10:35 AM
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It has to be said that I've lost a fair amount of respect for the MIT Technology Review after their recent article and editorial (or two) on Aubrey de Grey and his work. It's one thing to be opposed to healthy life extension on principle - the author of the rather good Popular Science piece on Aubrey de Grey fell into that category - it's quite another to be running off into the blue yonder with ad hominem attacks and unsubstantiated assertions about the science in question. I think that Damien Broderick, author of The Spike and one of the more entertaining folks on the Extropy list says it all better than I can:

This statement is typical yet strange:

I should declare here that I have no desire to live beyond the life span that nature has granted to our species. For reasons that are pragmatic, scientific, demographic, economic, political, social, emotional, and secularly spiritual, I am committed to the notion that both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do. I am equally committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and disabilities now attendant on extreme old age. But I cannot imagine that the consequences of doing a single thing beyond these efforts will be anything but baleful, not only for each of us as an individual, but for every other living creature in our world.

'When our inherent biology decrees'. But pragmatically 'our inherent biology' seemed perfectly content for almost every human in history and prehistory to perish at about half that maximum, if not very much sooner. I deplore this sad hankering after an essentialist 'decree' that allows doctors like Nuland to squeeze the last drop out of what is in nature wildly '*un*natural' while clinging to some masked version of authoritative or 'sacred' prohibition.

Nuland's essay is notable as well for its whiny and reiterated complaints about Aubrey's intelligence and energy. (What a nerve! Being smart! Being confident! Being articulate!) I expect to see this sort of complaint in Halfwits Review, not Technology Review.

...

But wait, there's more:

But what struck me is that he is a troll. For all de Grey's vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In his waking life, de Grey is the computer support to a research team; he dresses like a shabby graduate student and affects Rip Van Winkle's beard; he has no children; he has few interests outside the science of biogerontology; he drinks too much beer. Although he is only 41, the signs of decay are strongly marked on his face.

My god! Aubrey doesn't wear a suit! He's (by implication) a drunk! He works with computers! Aging destroys your boyish looks! (Oh wait, isn't that one of the reasons for wishing not to suffer the effects of aging? Oh wait once more, didn't Nuland just write that 'he is a boyishly handsome man'?)

...

And this is such a penetrating sentence:

What does Nuland think of the bearded de Grey's offer of immortality?

A beard! That surely shows what nonsense his claims must be!

...

What's truly extraordinary is that while Dr. Nuland ends by asserting "It is a good thing that his grand design will almost certainly not succeed. Were it otherwise, he would surely destroy us in attempting to preserve us", he makes no attempt at all to show why this might be so, let alone must be.

All we get is smarmy handwaving and loaded language:

"biogerontologists who study caloric restriction in mice and promise us the extension by 20 percent of a peculiarly nourished existence;"

(i.e. not eating like glutted swine on fats and sugars until we expire from our self-inflicted obesity)

"if we are to accept de Grey's first principle, that the desire to live forever trumps every other factor in human decision-making, then self-interest--or what some might call narcissism--will win out in the end."

'Narcissism', for what it's worth, is the psychiatric label for basing your self-estimate on the way other people regard you (as Narcissus fell in love with what he took to be the face of another gazing back at him in a mirrored pond). Yet de Grey as portrayed in the article, and in the disgraceful editorials, is quite immune to that kind of socially imposed self-evaluation. How interesting and self-lacerating this error is.

But in any case, does the desire to live a maximal healthy life trump *every* other factor? I doubt that Aubrey, or most of those in this forum, would make that claim. The curious thing is that at the basis of the scornful attitudes deployed in those editorials and the essay itself is a conviction that life is 'granted' to us--by some supernatural agency, presumably--and that this *does* trump every other factor: "Aging is the condition on which we are given life," we are instructed. Well, I guess that settles it. No further argument is required. Luckily, because none is offered.

Further excellent commentary on the strange and unseemly nature of this particular article and editorials can be found in the Immortality Institute forums and the MIT Technology Review forum - I encourage you to read the article and editorials and then have your say about the quality of popular science journalism we'd like to see from the Review. If they can mess things up this badly in an area where I'm actually qualified to judge, it really does make them a poor resource for reading in a field I'm not familiar with.

Posted by Reason at 8:52 PM
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The bioconservatism discussion over at the Immortality Institute is getting interesting. You should take a look. Aubrey de Grey used this as an opportunity to preview the latest updates to his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence website - a fair amount of new material has been added based on the discussions and experience of the past year.

OK, my site is fully updated. I rushed it a bit for our new friend, so readers are welcome to mail me with bug reports. Oh, and feedback on the text is OK too....

Posted by Reason at 2:28 PM
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Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey will be giving a presentation entitled "The Foreseeability of Real Anti-Aging Medicine, a survey of relevant biotechnology and likely timeframes" at the University of Alberta, Canada, on February 15th.

Does anti-aging medicine exist yet? Certainly not in the sense in which the word "medicine" is normally used, i.e. therapies that cure people of the condition from which they are suffering. The therapies that we have today to combat some of the effects of aging are valuable, but a genuine anti-aging medical treatment will be incomparably more valuable, as it will restore elderly people to the physical and mental vitality of their youth -- and keep them youthful thereafter. It is therefore essential to be aware that these more powerful therapies are not nearly so far in the future as one might think. In this talk I will discuss the details of some of the components of a foreseeable panel of true rejuvenation therapies and explain why it is likely that, with the proper commitment and funding, this panel can be implemented in mice in just ten years from now and in humans in only 15-20 years thereafter.

If you are in the vicinity, you should certainly look at attending. Aubrey de Grey is a good, entertaining speaker - I recommend hearing about the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence initiative from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Posted by Reason at 12:13 PM
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A number of interesting conversations relating to fundraising, activism and support of healthy life extension research are currently underway in the Immortality Institute Action and Reaching Out forum. Take a look and see what folks have in mind for the year ahead: the ongoing growth of the Methuselah Mouse Prize for anti-aging research has made it much more likely that other successful fundraising efforts will emerge in the near future.

Posted by Reason at 2:33 PM
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A couple more interesting items from sci.life-extension to brighten up your day.

Nuclear DNA may be the key to aging after all:

It has been proposed that somatic mutations make major contributions to aging. The first paper, based on a gene knock-in mouse, supports a contributory role for mutation in [mitochondrial DNA] (mtDNA) in aging, but does not support a damaged-mtDNA-producing-more-damaged-mtDNA hypothesis. The second paper indicates some GC-rich sequences in the nuclear DNA are more sensitive to oxidative damage than mtDNA. As a result, key genes involved in brain function and mitochondrial function are progressively inactivated with age. Failure in these nucleus-encoded mitochondrial genes may be a primary reason for mitochondrial failure in old age.

In other words, these researchers suggest that there is no feedback mechanism associated with ongoing damage in mitochondrial DNA, the cellular powerhouses, and reduction in mitochondrial function with age is caused by changes in cell nucleus DNA.

Cerium oxide nanoparticles extend cell longevity:

Nanobiology implies application of the engineering concepts of nanotechnology to biological systems, providing novel opportunities to intervene in the pathology of disease. Here, we have merged nanoscale engineering with cell biology to intervene in a common biomedical pathology, that being aging and free radical-induced cell dysfunction.

...

We hypothesize that the unique valence structure of cerium oxide, in the nanoparticle form, promotes cell longevity and protects against free radical-mediated injury by acting as a regenerative free radical scavenger.

The search for ever better antioxidants (free radical scavengers) has been going on for quite some time, ever since the free radical theory of aging was first developed. It remains to be seen whether current nanoscale materials science can do significantly better than the antioxidants already sold by the supplement industry.

Posted by Reason at 1:34 PM
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The Science Advisory Board hosts a number of science blogs. The latest addition is Longevity Science from Leonid Gavrilov. You may recall his work (with Natalia Gavrilova) on the Reliability Theory of aging, good science that I think we'll be hearing more of in the years ahead. You can find out more about the work of Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova on aging and longevity at their website.

Numerous studies demonstrate that many manifestations of aging can be postponed or even reversed, and that lifespan can be significantly extended in experimental animals. Moreover, our own studies found remarkable plasticity of human longevity ... and suggest that there may be a significant potential for further extension of human lifespan.

Posted by Reason at 11:50 AM
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Two articles today provide good examples of the way in which cancer research benefits all fields of medicine. Effectively fighting cancer requires detailed knowledge of biochemical and genetic mechanisms and the ability to manipulate cellular processes - one could argue that all of the effort prior to the 1990s went into developing the tools to make the tools to do the work. Only with comparatively recent capacities in genetics and bioinformatics has real progress been made in understanding cancer and developing cures. This work brings very real benefits to all other areas of medicine - knowing how cells work is revolutionizing the way in which new medicine is created.

Researchers Tease Out One Critical Role Of Tumor-Suppressor Gene

While mutations in Rb, are linked to several types of cancer including the childhood disease retinoblastoma, Rb normally keeps cell division in check. That means Rb is a tumor suppressor gene, which keeps cells from growing out of control. Scientists believe that Rb is linked to two key processes that frequently malfunction when cancer begins - proliferation (cell growth), and apoptosis (cell death).

...

Knowing how Rb functions in normal cells could clue scientists in to the gene's behavior as a tumor suppressor and why it mutates. It could also ultimately help scientists understand how other types of cancer progress.

"Cancer cells are altered in so many different ways that it's hard to conduct controlled experiments with them," Leone said. "That's why we need to figure out what Rb normally does, as opposed to studying a mutated version of the gene in a cancer cell. This may also help us uncover the mechanisms that cause mutations in other tumor-suppressing genes."

Pitt scientists study how cancer cells get out of control

"Virtually all cancer cells acquire the ability to change their genomic structure," said Saunders. "Researchers in the field are looking for single events that can cause multiple mutational changes to the genome, and this research is an example of that."

Before a normal cell divides, its chromosomes are duplicated and then pulled apart by a structure called a spindle, so that the two daughter cells each will have the same number of chromosomes.

At the end of a normal spindle is the spindle pole, also called the centrosome, which pulls the chromosomes outward. Cancer cells often have extra centrosomes. When a cell has more than two centrosomes, sometimes--but not always--the spindles will have more than one pole and cell division won't work correctly, leading to the swapping of genetic material, uncontrolled cell division, and the formation of tumors.

Why this doesn't always happen when there are too many centrosomes was the focus of the Pitt researchers' investigation. They found that as long as the extra centrosomes "cluster" together, the spindles will form normally, with two ends, and the cells will divide normally. "No one else appreciated that that was required, or what the mechanism was that separated them," said Saunders.

...

Investigating the mechanism by which this occurs, the researchers found that in cultured oral cancer cells a protein called dynein is missing from the spindle, and the centrosomes no longer cluster together.

Furthermore, the researchers discovered that in some types of tumors, dynein is inhibited by the overexpression of another protein called NuMA. Excess NuMA seems to prevent dynein from binding to the spindle. When they reduced the level of NuMA in cultured cancer cells, the dynein returned to the spindles, and the spindles were no longer multipolar.

"This finding suggests that a possible treatment for some types of cancer could be a drug that inhibits NuMA."

This sort of detailed knowledge of cellular processes will invariably prove useful to other scientists in other fields of medicine. There is no useless piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how our bodies work. Curing cancer is a very necessary part of the march towards longer, healthier lives - but the knowledge acquired while doing it will be essential to more directed attempts to extend the healthy human life span.

Posted by Reason at 12:24 PM
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Here are two more items relating to ongoing attempts to fund, legalize or ban stem cell research around the US.

In Connecticut:

Following in the footsteps of California and New Jersey as well as other US states, the Connecticut legislature may this year pass legislation allowing both adult and embryonic stem cell research - a bill the state's governor, Jodi Rell (R), has said she will sign.

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"Last year, all we wanted to do was make sure that Connecticut was a supportive place for research in adult and embryonic stem cell biology," Krause said. "But now that proposition 71 has passed in California and there are funds to recruit stem cell biologists, they are going to be able to… start to recruit people away from existing institutions in Connecticut."

In Massachusetts:

Democratic leaders on Beacon Hill vowed yesterday to immediately push legislation to promote stem cell research in the Bay State, hoping to blunt the appeal of California's $3 billion investment in stem cell research.

Looking back, now that various local governments are falling over themselves to fund or otherwise back embryonic stem cell research and regenerative medicine, I think it is a useful exercise to examine just how we came to this point. How did bans, threatened legislation and a lack of public support a few short years ago transform into the situation we see today?

Details aside, I think that it is important to recognize that this didn't "just happen." Given that medical advances have historically been accepted with enthusiasm after initial resistance, there is a tendency towards complacency amongst some supporters of healthy life extension. This is a dangerous attitude! A great deal of time, resources and hard work were necessary to make progress in this case, as for other advances in medicine, from penicillin to IVF technologies. The fight isn't over yet, either - anti-research legislation is still pending at the federal level.

You get the future you are willing to create, which is why activism for medical research is vitally important.

Posted by Reason at 7:50 PM
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Life expectancy is an apparently straightforward term that hides a number of subtleties. From Wikipedia:

In demography, life expectancy is a statistical measure of the average, or mathematical expected value, of the remaining lifetime of an individual in the given group. For non-human organisms the term lifespan is often used to indicate the average length of life in a given species.

Notice that the life expectancy is heavily dependent on the criteria used to select the group. In countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. In these cases, another measure such as life expectancy at age 10 can be used to exclude the effects of infant mortality to reveal the effects of other causes of death. Usually, though, life expectancy at birth is specified. To calculate it, it is assumed that current mortality levels remain constant throughout the lives of the hypothetical newborns.

Large reductions in infant mortality are responsible for much of the increase in birth life expectancy over the past century. Other contributions come from the reduction in chronic illness and the resulting damage it causes - all damage to a living being is likely to reduce life span according to the Reliability Theory of aging. As James Vaupel put it recently:

Life expectancy [at birth] is a measure of current conditions. It is not a prediction about how long somebody will live. But it's a measure of how long a person, a baby would live if that baby was confined to this year, could not get out of this year, was stuck with the conditions of this year.

It is slowly occurring to me that many folks, mainstream journalists included, use the term "life expectancy" in a fairly imprecise way. It doesn't mean projected life span, and it's not even all that useful to mention life expectancy unless you carefully qualify the group you are talking about. Life expectancy for who, and under what assumptions? There are plenty of examples of this sort of imprecision and mistaken meaning in the current debate over social security.

Posted by Reason at 8:42 PM
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A press release I stumbled across today pointed me in the direction of an interesting piece on the scientific definition of a stem cell. You'll have to pass through the gateway page for the Stem Cells and Development journal to read the PDF - click on the link for "Stem Cells: Shibboleths of Development" on that page.

... the Mouse replied rather crossly: "Of course you know what 'it' means."

"I know what 'it' means well enough, when I find a thing," said the Duck. ...

...

As the fields of development and stem cell research have evolved, different concepts have emerged in these two seemingly interrelated disciplines. As a result, developmental scientists view stem cells somewhat differently than clinical scientists, who have successfully used what they characterize as stem cells for therapeutic purposes. These latter pioneers include hematologists, who by demonstrating the reconstitution of an organ system with a single multipotent cell, have an undeniably strong claim to defining the concept of what constitutes the stem cell. Prior to, and, as will become evident, following this dramatic result, hematologists and developmentalists have viewed stem cells very differently; classifying stem cells as any that led to further development and differentiation. Consequently, the vernacular and rhetoric associated with any one journal claiming an interest in stem cell research has promoted only one of these paradigms.

Stem Cells and Development seeks to integrate the wealth of information the two disciplines provide and thereby close, or at least shrink, the gap between the two positions.

This sort of piece will become more common as research runs more rapidly than the process of accepting firm definitions and nomenclature. What is a stem cell? Is all stem cell research in fact using stem cells, or should we be calling some of these cells by a different name? Read the article and see what you think.

Posted by Reason at 1:49 PM
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Scientists reported successful treatment of the rat version of Parkinson's disease using embryonic stem cells back in April of this year.

The Israeli team treated human stem cells in the laboratory. They then transplanted them into the brains of rats which had a Parkinson's-like condition. The rats' behaviour changed after their treatment. Before it took place, they would turn continually, and would be unable to make side steps while they were being dragged across a surface. But after the transplants, these symptoms were significantly reduced. When post-mortem examinations were carried out on the rats, it was found that the stem cells had developed into dopamine-producing cells.

Betterhumans noted today that similar work now has been accomplished in monkeys:

Takahashi and colleagues had previously shown that mouse embryonic stem cells can differentiate into neurons when cultured under specific conditions. The same culture approach—considered technically simple and efficient—was also recently shown to work in primate embryonic stem cells.

For the new study, Takahashi and colleagues generated neurons from monkey embryonic stem cells and exposed them to a growth factor called FGF20. The growth factor is produced exclusively in the part of the brain affected by Parkinson's disease and is reported to help protect dopamine-producing neurons.

The growth factor increased the development of dopamine-producing neurons, which the researchers then transplanted into monkeys with a primate model of Parkinson's disease. They found that the transplanted cells functioned as dopamine-producing neurons and lessened Parkinson's symptoms.

A few years ago, many observers - myself included - suspected that Parkinson's treatments would be one of the first widely available first generation regenerative therapies based on stem cells. That may still be the case, unless therapies for paralysis and heart disease arrive first. It is interesting to note that the varied therapies attracting the most attention and funding at the moment are all quite different in their approach and utilization of stem cells. This is a very positive sign.

Posted by Reason at 7:38 PM
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ScienceDirect provides free access to the contents of the latest issue of Aging Research Reviews. Have a look through; it's a good way to gain an impression of the state of aging research today.

As the average human life expectancy has increased, so too has the impact of ageing and age-related disease on ou society. Ageing research is now the focus of thousands of laboratories that include leaders in the areas of genetics, molecular and cellular biology, biochemistry, and behaviour. Ageing Research Reviews (ARR) covers the trends in this field. It is designed to fill a large void, namely, a source for critical reviews and viewpoints on emerging findings on mechanisms of ageing and age-related disease. Rapid advances in understanding of mechanisms that control cellular proliferation, differentiation and survival are leading to new insight into the regulation of ageing. From telomerase to stem cells to energy and oxyradical metabolism, this is an exciting new era in the multidisciplinary field of ageing research. The cellular and molecular underpinnings of manipulations that extend lifespan, such as caloric restriction, are being identified and novel approaches for preventing age-related diseases are being developed. ARR publishes articles on focussed topics selected from the broad field of ageing research, with an emphasis on cellular and molecular mechanisms of the aging process and age-related diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders. Applications of basic ageing research to lifespan extension and disease prevention are also covered in this journal.

In particular, you might find "Lessons learned from gene expression profile studies of aging and caloric restriction" to be an interesting paper. Joao de Magalhaes also has a paper in the latest issue, entitled "Open-minded scepticism: inferring the causal mechanisms of human ageing from genetic perturbations":

Given the myriad of age-related changes and the many proposed mechanistic theories of ageing, a major problem in gerontology is distinguishing causes from effects. This review aims to identify and evaluate those mechanisms which have gathered experimental support in favour of seeing them as a cause rather than an effect of ageing. Recent results related to energy metabolism and ageing, the free radical and the DNA damage theories of ageing are reviewed and their predictions evaluated through a systems biology rationale. Crucial in this approach are genetic manipulations in animal models that enable researchers to discriminate causes from effects of ageing and focus on the causal structure of human ageing. Based on a system-level interpretation, the GH/IGF-1 axis appears the most likely explanation for caloric restriction and a possible causal mechanism of human ageing. Although much work remains to fully understand the human ageing process, there is little evidence that free radicals are a causal factor in mammalian ageing, though they may be involved in signalling pathways related to ageing. On the other hand, studying how the DNA machinery affects ageing appears a promising avenue for disclosing the human ageing process.

Posted by Reason at 2:55 PM
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Most important improvements in medicine don't get all that much press. It's improvements in the glue that holds the system together - and the resulting reduction in cost of medical processes - that will make as much difference in the future of your health as more flashy prospective developments, like cures for cancer and working anti-aging therapies. Infrastructure is only boring and unromantic until you start to consider what might be possible if you cut specific costs by a factor of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand - let's say the costs of obtaining, moving and processing medical data, for example:

Meeting the needs of those with the chronic diseases of aging - heart disease, Alzheimer's, and so forth - is a labor-intensive chore we increasingly cannot afford. Health care consumes 15 percent of the U.S. gross national product, up from 5 percent in 1960. In Japan and Europe, which manage care more frugally, the share has in most cases already passed the 10 percent mark. And the numbers continue to rise. We will have to find clever ways to economize on labor, the most expensive element in health care. "General practitioners and other front-line health care people are overwhelmed; they haven't got time for patients, and the vast majority would welcome relief from some well-chosen, well-placed technology," says Philippe M. Fauchet, an electrical engineer and director of the Center for Future Health at the University of Rochester, in New York. He and others are betting that information gleaned from our increasingly networked world will be a big part of the solution.

As the folks at FasterCures correctly identified, working on the infrastructure that could make costs of new medicine fall more rapidly is a desirable goal. Medicine is increasingly becoming an information industry; this means that the major costs and trends could all be subject to the same level and scale of improvements that bioinformatics has brought to medical research. If, that is, that regulatory and other monopoly obstacles can be overcome. Medicine is a backward and inefficient industry precisely because enormous costs are imposed on improvement and innovation by government at the behest of medical associations and other protectionist groups.

Posted by Reason at 4:49 PM
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