Now that calorie restriction is becoming a much more popular - and well funded - field of research, we are starting to see a range of basic, thoughtful tests as well as forward-looking work on genetics, biochemical mechanisms and calorie restriction mimetic drugs. Betterhumans covers some of the latest results in flies:

Cutting fat and protein extends fly lifespan without cutting calories, providing further insight into the effects of diet on longevity.

...

Researchers varied the nutrients in the fly's standard lab diet of yeast and sugar. Both yeast (which contributes protein and fat) and sugar (carbohydrates) have the same calories per gram, allowing the researchers to adjust nutrient composition without affecting the calorie count. They found that reducing both nutrients increased the flies' life span, but cutting out the yeast had nearly as great an effect. Flies on a calorie-restricted diet lived 82% longer than controls, flies on the yeast-restricted diet had a 65% gain and flies on a sugar-restricted diet had just about a 9% gain.

The original paper can be read in full at PLoS Biology. The obvious next step is to try something similar in mammals (such as mice) and see what happens; I will be interested to see the biochemical explanations for these results, bearing in mind the information that researchers have uncovered to date.

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I have to admit, I find it very annoying to see otherwise sensible people throwing around terms like "nut" and "fringe enthusiast" on the basis of the briefest aquaintance with facts and background to describe biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. The man is a scientist. He works in science. He writes papers, organizes conferences, chairs a journal, is an advisor to any number of scientific organizations. If his chosen field - a small, neglected, underfunded field repleat with situational oddities and personality clashes - happened to be anything other than rejuvenation and anti-aging research, you most certainly wouldn't be seeing any of this nonsense. Does the small community of biologists who spend their time scraping together conferences and funding for the study of rare frogs in obscure parts of the world get this much disrespect?

Bah.

I really find it hard to believe that my modest acquaintance with the inside of the scientific sausage-making process renders me somehow privileged when it comes to understanding the way in which these things work. It's not rocket science! The slow fight over the introduction of a new paradigm is just human nature; one of the hardest aspects of working within the scientific community is getting the old guard to debate your new ideas in public. I experienced that in person in a completely different field, but is this concept really so hard to understand?

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Aubrey de Grey's latest thoughts on WILT - Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres - will appear in Frontiers in Bioscience later this year. Those who are new to the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) proposals may want to take a look, although only the abstract and list of contents are online as of the moment:

The intrinsic genetic instability of cancer cells makes age-related cancers more difficult to postpone or treat than any other age-related disease. Any treatment that a cancer can resist by activating or inactivating specific genes is unlikely to succeed over the long term, because pre-existing cancer cells with the necessary gene expression pattern will withstand the therapy and proliferate. "Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres" (WILT) is a proposal to pre-empt this problem by deleting from as many cells as possible, the genes required for telomere elongation. Cancers lacking these genes can never reach a life-threatening stage by altering gene expression, only by acquiring new genes, which is far more unlikely. Continuously-renewing tissues can be maintained by periodic reseeding with telomere elongation-incompetent stem cells that have had their telomeres lengthened in vitro with exogenous telomerase. Here, I describe why WILT might prove to be an exceptionally powerful anti-cancer modality.

Both InfoAging and Wikipedia are good places to start for basic information on telomeres and why you should know more about them in the context of healthy life extension. You'll find more on the whys and wherefores of WILT and age-related cancer at the SENS website, and even more discussion and argument in the Immortality Institute SENS forum. That should keep you reading for a while...

UPDATE: The full paper in PDF format is now available at the SENS website.

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I feel it's worth noting that Brian Delaney and Lisa Walford's new book on calorie restriction is now shipping; you can order from Amazon and expect a near-future delivery. It has a weighty title: "The Longevity Diet: Discover Calorie Restriction - the Only Proven Way to Slow the Aging Process and Maintain Peak Vitality" - following the old adage about the best way to sell from the bookstore shelf, I suspect.

At last, here's a book that synthesizes the increasingly popular CR (Calorie Restriction) diet for the layperson. CR is not a diet primarily about weight loss, although readers will lose weight. CR is about eating highly nutritious foods to extend your healthy years.

Here's the concept: eat fewer calories and choose foods more carefully. This will reallocate how your metabolism uses its resources to convert food into energy; in other words, what goes in will be used more efficiently. You will feel better and function better - and the big bonus: the CR diet slows aging. CR lengthens the periods of youth and middle age and substantially reduces the risk of virtually all the diseases of aging.

Brian Delaney and Lisa Walford, two longtime CR practitioners, will take you on a handheld stroll through the process, including an introduction to CR, how to do it, some of the key issues in the current dialogue, and the skinny on superfoods.

If any of you folks in the community have your hands on a copy and want to let me know what you think, go right on ahead. More publicity for calorie restriction and the Calorie Restriction Society is a good thing in my view - CR is a gateway concept that can lead a wide range of people to think seriously about radical life extension and advanced medicine for longer, healthier lives.

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These blog things are cropping up in the strangest of places, such as the middle of a Ziff-Davis online media property. Here we have an interesting post from the Future in Review conference:

During a panel on the future of nano-biotechnology, Alan Russell, head of regenerative medicine at the University of Pittsburg, described progress in moving from treating symptoms to generating cures and regenerating tissues as a result of the convergence of nanotechnology and biology. "Every tissue from head to toe is being regenerated somewhere across the planet," Russell said. Corneal epithelium are being grown in dishes at one temperature and then cooled and peeled off and placed on an eye. Three patients in the U.S. have received whole cultured bladders grown using nano-biology techniques. A uterus can be grown outside the body in animal tests, placed inside the body and subsequently produce babies. He predicted that within the next five years, spinal cord injuries will be treated with stem cells and some of the paralyzing effects reversed. In South America, stem cell therapy is used to eliminate disease in failing hearts. U.S. trails are starting next week, Russell said. The Department of Defense has allocated $20 million to study whole limb generation. "If a newt can do it, why not we," Russell said. However, limb regeneration is more than five years out.

"Nanotechnology" in this business-oriented context should be taken to mean nanoscale engineering rather than more futuristic visions (such as molecular manufacturing). The first wave of nanotechnology is an straightforward advance in materials science and the ability to reliably manipulate ever smaller objects - such as cells and their subcomponents. The above quote is very enthusiastic on the topic of regenerative medicine, but is not too much of an exaggeration - a great deal of very interesting work is currently taking place at the cutting edge of medical research. We'll have to wait a decade to see what crystallizes out of the mix in terms of therapies and widespread uses, but it all looks very promising from where I stand.

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Leonid Gavrilov has made available the PowerPoint materials from a recent University of Chicago seminar on the Reliability Theory of aging.

The reliability-engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory has been greatly improved over the last several decades. It allows researchers to predict how a system with a specified architecture and level of reliability of the constituent parts will fail over time. But the theory is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well.

...

In reliability theory, aging is defined through the increased risk of failure. More precisely, something ages if it is more likely to fall apart, or die, tomorrow than today. If the risk of failure does not increase as time passes, then there is no aging.

Reliability theory is, like evolutionary considerations of aging, a "why" theory rather than a "how" theory. It is useful as a reference point and foundation when thinking about how to address the aging process via medical science, and fits well with Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. You can download the PowerPoint materials at Leonid Gavrilov's website.

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US stem cell politics casts its pall across the land and requires me to write on the topic rather than on something more constructive and directly related to longevity research. Let me start by saying that, in my cynical, libertarian eyes, little of use was accomplished by politicians yesterday - as on any other day. Sure, the US House of Representatives passed a few bills on stem cell research amidst much posturing and grandstanding:

The US House of Representatives has voted to increase government funding for embryonic stem cell research. The vote sets up a confrontation with President Bush, who has vowed to veto the bill if it passes the Senate. The bill was passed by 238-194 votes - short of the two-thirds majority required to override Mr Bush's veto.

The senate has sat on stem cell legislation of varying sorts - good, bad and ugly - without a vote for two years now; it is quite possible there will be no further vote on this latest legislation. Even if there was, and even if the President declines to follow through with the threat of a veto, will this bill mitigate or stop threatened anti-research legislation that has scared away private funding for years in the US? Would it prevent politicians and other parasites from holding back research, pinning down the engines of progress beneath a mountain of regulation and unnecessary costs?

One can suppose that a degree of my cynicism on this issue is triggered by policitians yet again donning the robe of savior to "fix" a problem of their own creation. Without overreaching politicians and an overpowered state, we would simply have freedom of research and rapid progress. Past history should teach us that true progress is made despite politics, not because of it.

Here is an interesting comparison: look at the size and funding of the Korean team that made two noteworthy breakthroughs in embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in the past two years:

... their research got less than 200,000 US dollars a year in funds mainly from the government.

Two years is around the length of time that Advanced Cell Technology - a formerly high profile private company and one of the original forerunners in stem cell research - has been languishing for lack of private investment as a result of the hostile US political environment. From October 2004:

Due to a dearth of funding, Lanza said his company has been unable to follow up on promising results in animals and carry out experiments that could lead to life-saving therapies for humans. The financial situation is so dire, the company has at times been unable to afford basic office supplies."

Another interesting comparison: the concrete philanthropic donation of $50 million to stem cell research - including embryonic research and therapeutic cloning - from the Starr Foundation was announced this week. A search for "Starr Foundation" on Google News will net you a bare 22 hits as of the time of writing. Compare that with the barrels of ink spilled on the worthless posturing of politicians yesterday ... the denizens of our society appear to have serious problems relating to values, what is important and a general grasp on reality.

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As I noted in an update to a recent post, Cynthia Kenyon backed down from agreeing to review Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) for Technology Review. All within a few days of editor Jason Pontin announcing it too; one has to wonder about the timing and thought processes there. This is, sadly, par for the course; as Aubrey has remarked in the past, one of the hardest parts for him is to get other scientists to debate on the merits of his proposals in public. There is still tremendous stigma attached to anti-aging and healthy life extension in the gerontology community, counterintuitive as that might be. Imagine a cancer research community that did nothing but examine the biochemistry of cancer, that made no effort to seek cures, and indeed actively discouraged attempts to implement therapies - sounds ridiculous, right? Yet that is exactly the state of affairs we are faced with within gerontology. There is no shortage of calls for more funding for aging research, for work to understand the aging process, but only the sound of crickets (and forward-looking folks like Aubrey de Grey) when it comes to working towards rejuvenative therapies for the aging process.

I seem to recall someone suggesting that we place a bounty on a published, peer-reviewed scientific critique of SENS from an A-list life scientist. This is sounding like a better idea as time goes by, but it looks like such a bounty would have to be somewhat larger than whatever the going rate for articles is at the Technology Review...

Another point to consider: so long as Jason Pontin is working towards this goal, he's doing good work for the cause of healthy life extension activism, even though his ultimate intentions are less than helpful and his his views on the nature of science are very wrong:

My objections to de Grey's prescriptions were pseudo-philosphical: I felt de Grey wasn't doing science so much as religion. This feeling sprang from scientific skepticism: no working biogerontologist to whom I spoke thought much of de Grey's theorizing. All noted that he had never worked a "bench"--that is, he performs no experiments.

By this standard, my years in theoretical astrophysics count for nothing - and half the scientists in the world are doing pretty much nothing as well. It's just plain wrong to equate non-lab work with non-science.

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Frank from Anti-Aging Medicine & Science sat in on the Immortality Institute's latest online chat session, this time with S. Jay Olshansky as a guest. He comments:

I came away from the chat with the feeling that Professor Olshansky has been unfairly villanized by some in the anti-aging community. Folks, he's on our side. While he doesn't see radical life extension happening any time soon, he believes that anti-aging work should be done and he is a supporter of the Methuselah Mouse Prize.

I've probably done my share of unfair villanizing in the past, but in my defense I should note that Olshansky has changed his public position on healthy life extension over time. The positive spin to put to that is that Aubrey de Grey is succeeding in his fight to bring the scientific community around to his way of thinking about things. The sort of criticisms I have applied in the past to Olshansky are still true for many other prominent folks in the research community; people whose public and private stances on healthy life extension research are quite different, or who refuse to address the issue publicly in a substantiative way. Progress at this early stage is a matter of broading and expanding the discussion as much as anything else.

UPDATE: You can find the chat log in the discussion thread for the chat session. Go read it - interesting stuff.

[17:01] <BJKlein> Jay, so why are you picking on us?
[17:01] <JayO> because I want you to succeed.

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I spent a little time cleaning up the Longevity Meme website content yesterday, focusing on the Take Action! activism section. Maintaining a website is a little like maintaining a mansion - there are always too many rooms to clean and too little time to do the work. So you polish the areas that people look at most frequently and work on the rest as you can. Slick, relevant, useful content has a way of getting stale and dusty even with the best of future-proofing - and no-one wants to be perusing a stale, dusty website.

Having brought that area up to some semblance of respectability, the next project is to revamp the way in which I present the concepts of healthy life extension, regenerative medicine and anti-aging research (of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) variety). Much of the introductory writing on the Longevity Meme was originally drafted prior to my association with Aubrey de Grey and the Mprize team, at a time when I was very much more focused on early battles over stem cell research. While the content has been tidied up and improved since then, the original thrust - that regenerative medicine is the best way forward for healthy life extension - has been rendered a little dated ... or at least, my present understanding of the possibilities of research has improved. One or the other. Clearly regenerative medicine is necessary and important, but SENS-like research forms an entirely separate program, and is a better path forward for near-term progress in radical life extension. This is a distinction that I need to make apparent and clear in the Longevity Meme introductory and supporting material.

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It seems I'm behind the times in my predictions of the near future of computing-driven biotechnology. Within a few weeks of my saying this:

Most currently real world experimental techniques - rather than just a select few - will become cheaper to carry out in simulation. Why spend millions keeping racks of mice when you can spend hundreds of thousands on reliable, tested software to do the same job - software that will become cheaper by an order of magnitude with each passing decade.

Wired pops up with an article on a working simulation of a mouse:

This month, the American Diabetes Association and biopharmaceutical company Entelos completed a virtual mouse that will be used to study cures for type 1 diabetes.

Running on a server, the non-obese diabetic virtual mouse will allow researchers to test the effects of new drugs on the virtual animal's cells, tissues, organs and physiological processes, according to Barry Sudbeck, Entelos' business development manager.

The virtual mouse can replace several stages of a pre-clinical drug trial, sparing the lives of hundreds of mice, Sudbeck said.

It's only a narrow application simulation, but I'm impressed; I hadn't thought that anyone was close to a viable product. This is the first step on the road towards vastly decreasing the time and cost of biotechnology development - not to mention making it a great deal more ethical. The ideal world is one in which we can speed ahead rapidly towards viable therapies without causing animal or human suffering in the necessary trials, studies and tests. Simulational experiments are the best road ahead.

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Since I'm paying less attention to stem cell research at Fight Aging! these days, I feel it's worth reminding folks that other blogs - such as Today's Stem Cell Research and Hype and Hope - keep up a regular patter of postings. But onwards; recent good news from Korea may, if we're lucky, cause productive ripples in restrictive Western stem cell politics:

Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology comments that the researchers "have demonstrated that therapeutic cloning can work in a medically useful way. Prior to this study, there was a question as to whether it was biologically possible. ... The answer is yes, it works. And they did it in a dramatic way - they used therapeutic cloning to derive stem cells that genetically matched patients who had real diseases that could be treated using this technology."

Ronald Bailey put out a piece for Tech Central Station in a very short period of time - it hits many of the points I was considering for this post:

The Korean researchers allowed the stem cells to differentiate into various cell types including skin, nerve, kidney and muscle cells. The stem cells produced by Hwang and his team are immunological matches for specific patients, and that means that if they were transplanted that they would not cause immune rejection. While this research is a tremendous breakthrough, the researchers hasten to point out that it is too early to consider actually transplanting the cells into patients. First, because some of the cloned stem cell lines carry the defective genes that led to diabetes and immunodeficiency disease. Second, because researchers still have to learn how to safely and stably transform stem cells into specific cell types, say, pancreatic islet cells to treat diabetes.

...

The House of Representatives has twice voted to criminalize precisely this research, proposing to toss therapeutic cloning researchers into prison for up to ten years and fine them one million dollars. In fact, if this effort to criminalize research on cloned human stem cells were to succeed, Americans who go abroad to seek cloned stem cell treatments, say, to cure their diabetes, could be jailed for up to ten years for illegally "importing" cloned stem cells. The Bush Administration was also pushing the United Nations to adopt a treaty to outlaw both cloning to produce transplants and reproductive cloning.

Some of the most promising research into cures for age-related conditions has been held back and underfunded for years in the US. But regular readers know this already; much of the recent news regarding stem cell research has been nothing but politics. It is a great pity that we live in a society that places so little value on individual responsibility, freedom and choice, especially in those areas of human endeavor where the most good could be accomplished. Centralization and socialization of medicine are terrible things; why do we allow the uninformed and unskilled to squander resources and hold life and death decisions over our heads?

The bottom line: politicized medical research is slower, less effective, less efficient medical research. The slower it goes, the more likely you are to suffer and die from an age-related condition that might otherwise have been cured. The slower it goes, the less likely we are to make serious progress towards a cure for the aging process itself. Politicians can do nothing but destroy and delay; they should leave well alone - let those who are willing to work put their talents, unhindered, towards creating longer, healthier lives for all.

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By the look of things, biogerontologist Cynthia Kenyon has agreed to a column for Technology Review in which she discusses Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. From a blog entry by Jason Pontin:

In August, Cynthia Kenyon, a much-respected biogerontologist working at UCSF (she has significantly extended the lifespans of nematodes, amongst other successes), will answer de Grey in Technology Review's "By Invitation" column. What are the most important issues that Dr. Kenyon should address in her analysis of de Grey's ideas on human aging? Quick, write and tell me. Her deadline is approaching fast.

From my previous readings, I'm not actually all that sure where Cynthia Kenyon stands in terms of her view on the science. We all know where Pontin stands, and have castigated him appropriately for his ad hominem and unseemly attacks; I can't say that he seems to have learned his lesson yet, unfortunately.

Still, Pontin is asking for feedback for an article addressing substantiative scientific issues, so I think we should go and provide it - politely, please, even though he's being provocative as usual.

UPDATE: Apparently, she declined to do it after all:

I asked Dr. Kenyon if she would comment on de Grey's prescriptions almost three months ago; she agreed; and I announced her "By Invitation" column on this blog last week, asking readers what issues they would like her to address. But after a great deal of work, Dr. Kenyon very graciously told me she simply felt she couldn't do an "effective" job. I remain committed to finding a biologist who will criticize SENS: after Technology Review's profile of de Grey, Do You Want to Live Forever?, many of his admirers challenged me to have a working scientist say why de Grey's ideas were impractical--if they were impractical. So far, I have been unable to find one biogerontologist who felt comfortable writing about SENS--which is telling perhaps. But I shan't give up yet.

I wonder what's going on there behind the scenes?

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The Mprize for anti-aging research recieves a small mention in the latest issue of Discover Magazine:

The M could stand for many things—like a million dollars, the prize money in its pot, or even medicine, the field of science it hopes to revolutionize. But it stands for Methuselah, the biblical character whose name is synonymous with longevity. The prize, set up by University of Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, will go to the scientific team that successfully extends the life or reverses the aging of mice. What works for rodents, de Grey hopes, will someday work for humans. How will the winner be chosen? All a team has to do is extend a lab mouse’s life beyond the current record of 4.98 years—the equivalent of a 150-year-old human.

Every little bit helps - and that goes for donations too. The number of donors matters just as much as the current prize total when it comes to attracting media attention and wealthy sponsors. So step up to the plate and put in a little money - it's a well-placed investment for the future of your health and longevity.

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The Longevity Meme Folding@Home team is moving up in the rankings thanks to the new members who joined since my last reminder. All this competition is in a good cause, as outlined at the Folding@Home website:

Proteins are biology's workhorses - its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease.

...

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

Michael Cooper emails to note:

The Longevity Meme is now being tracked at Extreme Overclocking, a large popular group. ... Since TLM moved into the top 800, it is being followed here:

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_list.php?s=&p=8

Click on The Longevity Meme entry,

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/team_summary.php?s=&t=32461

Provides detail, similar to Statsman, about TLM's team.

Send your spare processing cycles to help research into the fundamental biochemistry of age-related conditions ... and boost the rank of the Longevity Meme team. Download the Folding@Home client and join our team today!

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You'll recall that aging researcher Leonid Gavrilov was looking for suggestions on a Perspectives piece for the Science Advisory Board. You can find a recent draft copy via the always useful transhumantech list:

This Perspectives paper was commissioned to me for the Internet community of about 25,000 lab scientists, who are unfamiliar with aging and life-extension research. Hopefully this paper may help to increase public support for scientific studies on aging and life-extension.

...

If so, then why should we care about caloric restriction at all? Well,the answer to this question is that we can study the mechanisms of anti-aging action of caloric restriction, and this may help us to develop drugs that mimic the positive anti-aging effects of caloric restriction, while being free of its negative side effects. Also in this case there will be no need to impose severe limitations on human diet requiring a strong willpower. In other words, the caloric restriction is not an ultimate solution to the aging problem, but rather a light in the end of a tunnel, which gives us a hope and shows the way to go.

...

One thing is for sure: The dietary guidelines alone will not allow to defeat aging and to extend healthy lifespan beyond current longevity records. To achieve these goals we need concentration of the best minds and resources (like Manhattan project). These resources are unlikely to come from federal funding overstretched by war efforts, but perhaps they might come from such wealthy visionaries like George Soros, Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar, who could make a difference.

Much of the currently funded research that pertains to healthy life extension is in the field of calorie restriction, calorie restriction mimetics and other ways to extend life through manipulating metabolic processes. As Gavrilov points out, this is not a path that will lead to radical life extension, but it is a step towards wider acceptance and understanding of the fight to cure aging. In terms of philanthropy, Gavrilov is clearly in much the same camp as biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey - he sees evangelism of healthy life extension to wealthy philanthropists to be a viable way forward in the face of conservatism within the gerontological community.

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As you might (or might not) have noticed, I'm currently experimenting with text ads for the Mprize for anti-aging research, using Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), formerly Overture. Please refrain from running off to find and click them - I'm assuming that the folks reading Fight Aging! already know about the Mprize and what it aims to achieve. This experimentation aims to introduce the Mprize to folks who haven't heard about it before and gain some experience for later low-cost advertising campaigns. The Mprize is sufficiently different from both the Longevity Meme and Fight Aging! to prevent me from simply copying my existing keyword advertising lists and working from there, however.

I prefer YSM for the initial stages of this sort of experimentation, since it's more a much more time-consuming affair to get Google's automation to play ball for healthy life extension and related topics. The current YSM keyword list looks something like this:

aging disease
aging research
anti aging pill
effects of aging

aging gracefully
aging process
aging with dignity
anti aging medicine
anti aging product
anti aging therapy
antiaging longevity
health aging
health longevity
healthy aging
life longevity
longevity
longevity and aging
longevity research
longevity science
reverse aging
stop aging
successful aging

Of these, the first four are the most successful to date; the number of click-throughs is nothing to write home about, but the click-through rate is high. Meanwhile Google confirms that "aging disease" and "aging research" are good in AdWords, but I haven't been able to convince the system there to keep my keywords active for a number of other prospects.

I'm now soliciting suggestions from the floor as to other, higher traffic keywords I can try. Those and other thoughts on modes of low cost advertising would be greatly appreciated.

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I think that a recent Wired piece on low cost biotechnology reinforces the points I have made on the future of open source biotechnology development and healthy life extension.

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can't afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months - the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

Still, don't expect to cure cancer right away, surprise your loved ones with a stylish new feather goatee, or crank out a devilish frankenbug. (Instant bioterrorism is likely beyond your reach, too.) The goodies you buy online require practice to use properly. The necessary skills may be acquired through trial and error, studying online curricula, or taking a lab course at a community college. Although there are cookbook recipes for procedures to purify DNA or insert it into a bacterium, bench biology is not easy; the many molecular manipulations required to play with genes demand real skills.

A wide range of applied biotechnology development is no more complicated than applied electronics - and the present results of the work of an initially small group of garage entrepreneurs in that field are fairly impressive. Good things happen when the price point of participation becomes low enough: there's never any shortage of ideas and skill compared to capital.

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There is a certain type of person who, when presented with a given scenario, will instantly jump to the boundary conditions and edge cases to try and probe the limits of what he or she is facing. This, I think, is why discussions on immortality - even the colloquial meaning of "vulnerable agelessness" resulting from a way to halt or reverse the aging process - have a way of slipping into discussions of cosmology: the life span and end states of the universe.

Personally, I'd hate to be put in the position of having to make any sort of long term plans based on cosmological certainty today. The field has been in the throes of tremendous change for the last twenty years - brought on by expanding computing power and new observational technologies - with no signs of letting up soon. Today's balance of competing models for the far future of the universe is very different from the consensus five years ago, and it will no doubt look just as different in another five years.

So discussing cosmology in the context of long term plans for transhumanist-style ageless physical immortality - worrying about risk functions, how to reduce accidental death rates to miniscule levels, reengineering the body and mind to support vastly longer life spans - isn't really a serious activity in my mind. Sure, it's fun to talk about it, but it's a form of escapism - just like avoiding the topic of death and the present fight to cure aging. Cosmological research, society and science will undergo amazing, accelerating advances and changes in just the next century ... but none of us will be around to see the end results if we don't ensure that the first steps towards effective healthy life extension and the defeat of age-related degeneration are taken now.

By all means talk about these things, but first things first, folks. We have a lot of work to do before we'll need to worry about cosmological changes interfering in the continuation of our daily lives.

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An article of general interest to transhumanists and healthy life extension advocates is to be found at Reason Online. Ronald Bailey takes on the "democratic socialist" arm of transhumanist thought:

Technologies dealing with the birth, death and the meaning of life need protection from meddling - even democratic meddling - by others who want to control them as a way to force their visions of right and wrong on the rest of us. Your fellow citizens shouldn't get to vote on whom you have sex with, what recreational drugs you ingest, what you read and watch on TV and so forth. Hughes understands that democratic authoritarianism is possible, but discounts the possibility that the majority may well vote to ban the technologies that promise a better world.

However, even as he extols social democracy as the best guarantor of our future biotechnological liberty, Hughes ignores that it is precisely those social democracies he praises, Germany, France, Sweden, and Britain, which now, not in the future, outlaw germinal choice, genetic modification, reproductive and therapeutic cloning, and stem cell research. For example, Germany, Austria and Norway ban the creation of human embryonic stem cell lines. Britain outlaws various types of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to enable parents to choose among embryos.

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Furthermore, Hughes's analysis is largely free of economics - he simply ignores the processes by which wealth is created and gets busy redistributing the wealth through government health care and government subsidized eugenics. After reading Citizen Cyborg, you might come away thinking that Hughes believes that corporations exist primarily to oppress people.

Healthy life extension research - in effect, the right to live - is currently suffering from socialist ideals, just like all other branches of medical research. Socialism itself brings inefficiency, oppression, poverty and lack of freedom, slowing and blocking research that will lead to longer, healthier lives.

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As a recent ScienceDaily release points out - if we ignore the cries for more public funding in the guise of general doom and gloom regarding the current state of medicine - vaccination has had an enormous effect on health and prevalence of chronic disease in the time since its development:

A comprehensive system of vaccine development in the U.S. resulted in a reduction of 87 to more than 99 percent in illness from ten vaccine-preventable diseases during the twentieth century.

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In addition to the major reductions in illness during the twentieth century from smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, pertussis, polio, rubella, congenital rubella syndrome, tetanus, and H. influenzae, type b (in children less than 5 years old), new vaccines in the past 10 years for varicella (chickenpox), hepatitis A, and pneumococcal disease have led to significant reductions in disease in young children, including a drop of 92 percent in mortality from chickenpox in children four years and younger.

Quite aside from mortality rates and their effect on life expectancy, less chronic disease means less cellular and other forms of biochemical damage accumulated over a lifetime - and thus, by the Reliability Theory of aging, a better chance at a longer, healthier life. This class of explanation for historical gains in life span is explored elsewhere at Fight Aging!, so feel free to take a look. You might find some related musings on the fight against infectious disease interesting as well.

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A comment from Max More, made on the Extropy Chat List:

I've often made parallels with the alchemists and their three goals of transmuting the elements, achieving flight, and immortality. I like to say: two down, one to go.

The alchemists were pre-scientific, of course, but had their heart in the right place.

Has to be said, I wish we were further along with the last goal there - but whatever you might think of that remark, it's food for thought.

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Bruce J. Klein of the Immortality Institute dropped by today to shoot some interview footage for "Exploring Life Extension". Bruce has been traveling the length and breadth of the US for months now, meeting members of the healthy life extension community and racking up more than a hundred hours of tape. It's an open question as to whether anything I said is compelling or useful enough to make it into the final version or subsequent use of footage, but we shall see.

The film is a good and worthwhile project, but more interesting to me is the web of contacts and relationships that Bruce is putting together in his capacity as Immortality Institute chair. Journalists, scientists, businessmen, community leaders, and so forth, many of whom are names you'll recognize. As a fairly immediate extension of the rumor circuit and grape vine, Bruce indicated that there's a lot more going on out there in the community than makes it to a level at which I'm going to notice. Which leads me to conclude, once again, that healthy life extension advocates are being nowhere near vocal enough about their efforts. If I don't know about it, you can be sure that most of the rest of the world doesn't know about it either ... and as I tend to restate every now and again, that's a big part of our funding and credibility problem.

I mean, come on folks. We all know that the science of healthy life extension is "just" details, money and work. The high level path for technology and development to greatly extend the healthy human life span is clear. The big problem is one of public awareness, education and support. Not enough people know what is possible - so if you're off out there doing your part to get things done, make more noise about it! We've moved beyond the stage at which minor efforts at publicity vanish into the wild; there are enough people online and offline, professional and amateur, who write on this topic to act as an effective echo chamber and amplifer now. Give them something to write about.

But onwards: the logical next step would be to monetize Bruce's large and expanding network of relationships in order to fund a high profile healthy life extension project under the Immortality Institute banner. What could this be: a research prize, a major media project with mainstream distribution, or something different and more out of the box? There are many options, many doors opened by means of contacts made and proof of capability. We shall see how it turns out.

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It's been a slow weekend for both news and my brain, more is the pity, so I'm reduced to pointing out research that suggests a modicum of "good stress" is good for longevity:

Dr Kyriazis, the medical director of the British Longevity Society, argued that moderate stress increased the production of proteins that help to repair the body's cells, including brain cells, enabling them to work at peak capacity.

"Research shows that cells subjected to stress repair themselves, allowing us to live longer," he said.

"As the body ages, this self-repair mechanism starts to slow down.

"The best way to keep the process working efficiently is to 'exercise it', in the same way that you would exercise your muscles to keep them strong."

"Good stress" in this context results from activities that require effort, learning and time management, but are not simply execises in frustration or feeling trapped. This is akin to normal exercise, supplementation or calorie restriction in terms of managing your health using present day knowledge and lifestyle choices - we know that it's a good thing to do, it will lengthen our lives and delay age-related disease ... but we can't use it to obtain what I would regard as significant healthy life extension. Yet far too much attention and time is put towards these issues rather than into, say, raising the profile of directed longevity research. Science is capable of providing us with far better than the absolute best we could ever manage with present day techniques for maintaining our health and lengthening our healthy life spans. Think regenerative medicine, stem cells, nanomedicine, therapies to repair mitochondrial free radical damage, the whole engineered negligible senescence plan. We should put more effort into supporting the advance of science into the realm of radical health life extension and less into tinkering around with present day methodologies that have a much more limited potential payoff.

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Randall Parker notes a useful reference point for those of us who like to keep a weather eye on the falling costs of DNA sequencing and related bioinformatics - and the consequences thereof.

Cambridge Massachusetts 2003 venture capitali start-up Helicos Biosciences claims that by 2007 Helicos will be selling a machine that will sequence a person's genome for $5000.

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Incredibly cheap DNA sequencing will be occasion for a massive biomedical and social science project to compare the DNA sequences and large amounts of biomedical and behavioral and other information between millions of people.

Some of the commenters have expressed skepticism as to the plausibility of this timeline (rightly so, I suspect - it seems a little aggressive). However, the more important thing here is that venture funding organizations have bought into this timeline ... and are presumably still buying into this timeline. This is the sort of short time frame that venture investors like to put money on; hence more funding leading to more progress across the board leading to more aggressive estimates of short time frames. It's a positive feedback loop that drops ever more money into development until breakthroughs are made or the bottom drops out of this miniature bubble.

Now if we could just make faster progress in organizing one of these positive feedback loops for funding research into healthy life extension medicine...

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Some good old-fashioned common sense on healthy life extension is put forward by the Speculist crew:

Chances are you'll still be in no hurry to die if 100 years from now life is still rewarding. You may still feel the same in 1000 years. This is also an answer to those who might not want life extension. De Grey is not arguing for mandatory immortality. He's arguing against mandatory age-related death.

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It's not life that gets old. It's the getting old that gets old.

People are funny creatures; too many of them think that they'll get bored with a life that is a few decades longer than the current standard. But I know from experience that I can get bored in a matter of a few minutes, an hour tops, if I really put my mind to it - as could anyone else. So if you can accept the possibility of an interesting and rewarding life of 80 years, why not one of 150? Or 1000?

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It has to be said, I feel odd pointing to a Michael Fumento piece as something worth reading. That, given his anti-science positions on embryonic stem research and blatant cherry picking of studies to support them. The man seems to be on more solid ground with the topic of weight, mortality, health and longevity - and that recent study that too many people have taken entirely the wrong way - however.

These all dovetail with findings that in every species from worms to monkeys, calorie restriction increases longevity. The leanest animals also look and act younger. In the only calorie restriction analysis of people, "The results clearly suggest that humans react to such a nutritional regimen similarly to other vertebrates." If Flegal’s findings were valid, they would stand biology on its head.

He is more than a little behind the times on studies of calorie restriction and healthy life extension in humans, however - there has been more compelling work of late.

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A quick link for you today: R.U. Sirius discusses radical life extension with Terry Grossman, co-author of Fantastic Voyage.

People tend to be frightened by new ideas, but we need to recall that average life expectancy a century ago was only 47 years, but has now increased to 77 years today. This is a 63 per cent increase. The rate of technological progress is accelerating, and it is highly likely that we will see the same type of increase in life expectancy that occurred in the last century (1900-2000) to occur in the first 20 years of the present century (2000-2020). A 63 per cent increase in life expectancy would mean life spans of over 125 years in the next few years. As the biotechnology revolution begins to unfold (what we refer to as Bridge Two in our book), radical increases in life expectancy will result from several intersecting technologies that are already making their way from the research laboratory to patient care: stem cell therapies (using not only politically sensitive embryonic stem cells, but umbilical cord blood stem cells and even adult stem cells), therapeutic cloning (creation of specific cell types and organs as replacements for defective tissues and organs), bioengineered drugs and gene-based therapies (blocking the expression of harmful genes or their replacement with healthful genes). This will lead to Bridge Three, which will involve the full flowering of the nanotechnology and artificial intelligence revolutions, now in their infancy.

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Who says that libertarians can't write articles that are simultaneously good and entertaining? Here's one from Bill Walker that covers a wide range of topics, from the evil done by centralized state control over medicine to cancer, telomeres and future therapies:

If telomerase inhibitors were a new kind of computer chip, they would have been on every Wal-Mart pharmacy shelf and selling for ten dollars a bottle by now. ... In a free system, life insurance companies, consumer magazines, and other competing interests would provide medical databases. Maybe even the AMA would become a force for "truth-in-medicine," as it was to some degree before the creation of the FDA. Under common law but free of arbitrary regulation, drug development would be as fast as computer development. Cancer would be extinct and human beings would finally, really, own their own bodies.

The Mprize for anti-aging research gets a link in the piece as well - something I'd like to see more of.

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The Betterhumans magazine - the online face of transhumanism these days, so far as eyeballs and page views go in any case - is giving a sneak preview of their shiny new site design. It looks good and not-so-coincidentally happens to feature a nice new Mprize total display and prominent placement of biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. Good job, I think - but take a look and see for yourself.

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Aging researcher Leonid Gavrilov is requesting comments, advice and suggestions over at Longevity Science:

Today I am starting to write a new Perspectives paper, and I am asking for your help and advice. ... I am invited to write a Perspective paper on caloric restriction, which in my mind has been transformed to a broader topic with a title:

"Life Extension, Caloric Restriction, and Scientific Philanthropy"

This Perspective paper is addressed to the audience of about 25,000 biomedical researchers world-wide (members of the Science Advisory Board), and it will be publicly available on the Internet for everybody.

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This kind of Perspectives papers may be potentially important for making the Society and potential philanthropists more friendly to ideas of extension of healthy lifespan, so your help and editorial advice on this paper would be greatly appreciated.

He gives some references and enough of a beginning to show the direction he intends to take, so drop by and offer suggestions and references for similar past work.

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