There is a widespread sense of enthusiasm for healthy life extension out there - but it is largely clueless enthusiasm, focused on things that don't matter in the grand scheme, are unproven, ineffective, or pushed by the health demagogue of the moment (who often happens to be selling you a product).

There are two sorts of clueless enthusiasm for healthy life extension; type 1 is focused on the now, the cricket who wants answers immediately, searches where the light is shining, and has no willingness to look to the future. People affected with this sort of clueless enthusiasm are actively engaged in deluding themselves - or allowing themselves to be deluded by others. Reality is harsh: while there are many simple things you can do for your health, all require work and sacrifice. There is no silver bullet, and there is no presently available way to greatly extend your maximum life span. There are any number of people willing to claim otherwise while taking your money, however.

In short, there is primary aging and there is secondary aging: there are methods of ameliorating the latter, and very little that affects the former. We're all on a clock, and burying your head in the sand of willful self-delusion isn't going to prevent your suffering and death in the decades ahead.

Primary aging is the gradual - and presently inevitable - process of bodily deterioration that takes place throughout life: the accumulation of biochemical damage that leads to slowed movements, fading vision, impaired hearing, reduced ability to adapt to stress, decreased resistance to infections, and so forth. Secondary aging processes result from disease and poor health practices (e.g. no exercise, smoking, excess fat and other forms of self-damage) and are often preventable, whether through lifestyle choice or modern medicine. The two categories are somewhat fuzzy at the borders by these definitions; we hope that advancing medical and biotechnology will move the known and understood aspects of primary aging into the secondary aging category as rapidly as possible.

Type 2 clueless enthusiasm is potentially more useful to those of us seeking support for scientific anti-aging research. The type 2 enthusiast does look to the future, but is just as ill-informed as the type 1 enthusiast when it comes to science, what will work and the best path forward. I stumbled over a recent column that I believe to be illustrative of the type:

"Fifty percent of Baby Boomers can live up to 100 and beyond."

He received a standing ovation when he boldly predicted genetic research on stem cells and cloning "will take us to 120 and beyond. Soon, we will be the Ageless Society."

While arguably over the top, such optimism is consistent with the Boomers' ever-present desire for youth and health. They eat better, exercise more and hope to benefit from furthur scientific breakthroughs.

The enthusiasm is there, but there is no substance nor understanding when it comes to the details. Enthusiasm without meaningful direction is just like investment without meaningful management - it doesn't matter how much support there is, because it's all being wasted. Like water poured on the ground, it soaks away without effect. You can put a waterwheel under a stream of water, however; this is what advocates for scientific, directed anti-aging research seek to do. We can harness the support of type 2 clueless enthusiasm - and turn it into clueful enthusiasm - by providing a plausible path forward to a future of longer, healthier lives. It all comes down to education, spreading the message and having the science to back it up.

Technorati tags: advocacy, anti-aging, life extension

Posted by Reason at 1:17 PM
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What slows progress in scientific research? Some fairly direct pointers in these two recent articles:

Brain research requires rethinking:

In the past decade, funding of biomedical research has doubled, the human genome has been sequenced and the drug approval process has been speeded up considerably. But, disturbingly, the result has been virtually no new treatments for conditions of the brain.

"Why are there not more drugs?" Dr. Martin asked.

The reason is that a lot of pharmaceutical companies are more interested in producing blockbuster lifestyle drugs and "me too" medications that mimic their competitors' successful products than in investing in treatments for the likes of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The regulatory system doesn't promote innovation, Dr. Martin said. And intellectual property (patent) laws promote secrecy and discourage collaboration, undermining the type of co-operation that is needed to tackle complicated brain conditions.

Your Genetic Future

One big question is how FDA will handle the changing paradigm. The agency is used to weighing a drug's side-effect profiles against the severity of the condition and the drug’s overall effectiveness. Highly targeted drugs, perhaps linked to a genetic test, call for a completely different regulatory mindset. Side effects may suddenly be verboten--and volumes of genetic data will be a stiff challenge to FDA’s reviewers.

How will the agency react? Probably slowly as it has so far, Galas says. The agency is underfunded, and that makes it difficult to keep up with current research trends. That uncertainty in turn makes investors nervous, potentially slowing the growth of the industry--and employment opportunities.

In anticipation of targeted medicines, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are increasingly performing genetic studies of clinical trial participants in hopes of identifying genetic profiles that predict therapeutic outcomes. A drug that only benefits 15% of participants might seem like a clinical failure--but if those respondents share a genetic profile, the drug might be admitted to the market with an accompanying genetic test.

But such data can be difficult to interpret, so it could even slow down an approval process. This could be a disincentive to doing such tests in the first place. Until FDA’s stance is clarified, pharmacogenomics will be a volatile and unpredictable business and career path. "Young companies trying to get into pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine are facing daunting challenges because of uncertainties with FDA and just the inherent difficulties of trying to change the paradigm to something where side effects are unacceptable," says Galas.

...

Despite these new opportunities, genetics remains a field defined by uncertainty, as both FDA and industry wrestle with questions of data analysis, side effects, and other issues. The uncertainty is likely to be a drag on job growth in medical genetics. "If you’re coming into the field now, the market for your type of jobs may not grow as fast as you had hoped," says Galas. "We always underestimate the impact of these types of technologies, but we also overestimate the speed at which they’ll be adopted. There’s going to be a huge need for people to do this work. The better the people and the more of them there are, the faster it will happen."

Large pharmaceutical companies will follow the safest profit-bearing line - which is determined by regulation they help shape to protect their business from competitors in the short term. At the same time, government employees are following their own political goals and urge to power with no regard to long-term negative effects on the regulated. The way in which those in charge of large companies and government employees collaborate to ruin progress for the many in the name of short-term gain for a few was recently clearly laid out (again) at Mises.org:

The Chicago School of economics favored and still favors the theory of "regulatory capture." Under this theory, an industry or some portions of an industry cultivate government to obtain laws and rules that favor the industry.

The government trades favors for what it wants. Politicians gain political contributions, side payments, and votes for being seen to control the industry. The industry captures the regulators. End of story.

North went much further. He called the first step of obtaining favors "baiting the trap." But matters do not stop there, he pointed out. The trap is set when the industry becomes comfortable with its subsidy, tax break, tariff, exclusive position, license, or whatever. It then begins to extract monopoly rents and to lower product quality.

This then leads to further steps such as public outcry and a government demand for the industry to police itself. Then come crisis, further regulatory intervention, and eventually a government stranglehold over the entire industry via a panoply of boards and price controls. This is when the trap is sprung. The market is replaced by government power and bureaucrats. Government, its aim being control, traps and captures the industry.

In the shorter term, the interest groups use the state against the public. In the longer term, the state and its bureaucrats rule the roost. In the end, the government bureaucracies expand. Paperwork and soft jobs rule the industry, innovation and competition are eclipsed, and the public suffers from poor product quality and high prices.

Medical research and development in Western-style democracies has slid into an unfortunate position: dragged down by regulation, and no let-up in sight in the growth of government and its willingness to impose costs upon progress towards better medical technologies. The true cost of this state of affairs lies in what you do not see: the vast and encompassing commercialization of new and innovative medicine that would be taking place in a free market - or even just one far less regulated.

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.

How else will your future health be harmed because a large government allows the unscrupulous to manipulate their way to short-term gain at the cost of slow progress in medicine?

Technorati tags: libertarian, medical research, regulation

Posted by Reason at 9:24 PM
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Mike Treder has been blogging at the Emerging Technologies conference. Today he caught the breakout session on anti-aging research, in which the speakers were representative of the pro-longevity mainstream in gerontology and associated aging research. This is to say that they believe there is some small progress that can be made by manipulating genes and metabolism, they might be proponents of compression of morbidity over life extension, and reject out of hand any idea that faster progress is possible. From Treder's post:

In audience Q&A, Perls just called Aubrey de Grey a "goofball." Guarente says maximum lifespan (100-110 years) in humans probably will never increase, but the average will grow.

The best response to any number of comments like that is to (a) prove yourself right, and (b) get the job done more effectively. That process is getting underway at the Methuselah Foundation. To my mind, the worse thing you can do is to take the naysayers seriously. That way lies self-fulfilling prophecies; if you don't try, those who said it will never happen will certainly be right. Aubrey de Grey makes a good case for the better research path to extended healthy life spans; as more funding comes in, that case will just keep getting better.

Looking back at some thoughts on future conflict in anti-aging and longevity research, I see this sort of behavior as a good example of the way in which moderates or conservatives in a field feel they have to defend their legitimacy from potentially better, eclipsing solutions. It's just human nature, and we should take it as a good sign - the feeling of long-term funding being threatened by the advent of a new and more effective paradigm.

Technorati tags: anti-aging, gerontology , life extension

Posted by Reason at 9:39 PM
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You might recall work from earlier this year on the reduction in stem cell capabilities with aging; it suggested that stem cell populations decline, but their ability to regenerate does not. This contracts other research that suggests just the opposite; it should be interesting to see just how these results are reconciled in the end. Head to head contradictions are a strong sign of a field in flux and progress, carving understanding from the rock face of the unknown. At the present pace of stem cell research, we'll have an answer before the end of 2008.

Ouroboros pointed out a more recent paper that takes the "lots of stem cells, but declining ability to regenerate" side of the debate. This one also ties into myostatin and the promotion of muscle growth, something that has been put forward as a potential path to therapies for sarcopenia, or age-related muscle loss.

In young mice, lack of myostatin resulted in increased satellite cell number and activation compared to wild-type, suggesting a greater propensity to undergo myogenesis, a difference maintained in the aged mice. In addition, muscle regeneration of myostatin-null muscle following notexin injury was accelerated and fiber hypertrophy and type were recovered with regeneration, unlike in wild-type muscle. In conclusion, a lack of myostatin appears to reduce age-related sarcopenia and loss of muscle regenerative capacity.

This makes sense; you need active stem cells to grow muscle. So what is myostatin doing with the satellite stem cell population associated with muscle growth and repair? Answering that question might go a long way towards understanding what causes our stem cells to decline in activity with increasing age - and then to move on to safely preventing that fate.

Technorati tags: aging, stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 10:01 PM
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A few pithy quotes from around the blogosphere:

"Anti-Life" Conservatism:

To paraphrase advocate Aubrey de Grey: Would widespread use of life-extension technology lead to problems? Obviously it would. Would it lead to any problems as serious as continuing to have a hundred thousand people die every day (the status quo)? No.

Silicon Valley's search for Fountain of Youth; Thiel joins Ellison in quest:

Oracle's Larry Ellison has also pushed science aggressively in this area, but we haven't heard much about his efforts of late. If there is a place where the Fountain of Youth will be discovered, it will probably be here. There is more health research, and money going to fund it, than anywhere else. And there are wealthy entrepreneurs who want to fund this sort of thing.

Money for anti-ageing research:

In the end, some of this comes down to personal values, and the overriding one from my viewpoint is that of retaining and exercising our capacities for as long as possible, rather than suffering the humiliations of decline and dependence. Despite all the pro-death propaganda around, I'm betting that this value will eventually prevail.

Transvision 2006 Review Part IV:

"If a thirty-year projection sounds like science fiction, it may be wrong. If it doesn't sound like science fiction, then it is definitely wrong." - Chris Peterson & Gayle Pergamit

If you've picked up an interest in healthy life extension within the past couple of years, you might not be familiar with the work of the Ellison Foundation. It is fairly quiet in comparison to the more vocal folk and organizations in aging research and related fields.

The Ellison Medical Foundation supports basic biomedical research on aging relevant to understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities. The Foundation particularly wishes to stimulate new, creative, research that might not be funded by traditional sources or that is often under-funded in the U.S.

You can find a most interesting debate (on video and in PDF format) in the archives of the sadly defunct SAGE Crossroads website. Aubrey de Grey talks timelines for anti-aging research with Richard Sprott of the Foundation; you should take a look while it is still available online.

If pushed to make a categorization, I'd put the Ellison Foundation on the conservative side of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging, but to the adventurous side of the Longevity Dividend crowd.

Technorati tags: blogging, life extension

Posted by Reason at 10:07 PM
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There's a foolish fellow who thinks science is basically over and done with, or at least fairly close to that point, and has been parlaying this silliness into a career of sorts. He has an article in a recent Discover. It's entertainment, I suppose, only he'd rather like you to take his nonsense seriously:

Argument: We are on the verge of a breakthrough in applied biology that will allow people to live essentially forever. The potential applications of biology are certainly more exciting these days than those of physics. The completion of the Human Genome Project and recent advances in cloning, stem cells, and other fields have emboldened some scientists to predict that we will soon conquer not only disease but aging itself. "The first person to live to 1,000 may have been born by 1945," declares computer scientist-turned-gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a leader in the immortality movement (who was born in 1963).

Many of de Grey's colleagues beg to differ, however. His view "commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community," 28 senescence researchers declared in a 2005 journal article. Indeed, evolutionary biologists warn that immortality may be impossible to achieve because natural selection designed us to live only long enough to reproduce and raise our children. As a result, senescence does not result from any single cause or even a suite of causes; it is woven inextricably into the fabric of our bodies. The track record of two fields of medical research - gene therapy and the war on cancer - should also give the immortalists pause.

This is pretty sloppy science journalism, and makes no sense at all from a scientific point of view. Is the end result of natural selection naturally immune to human intervention? I don't think you have to look too far at all to be able to pitch that idea out with the trash. Does making the treatment of aging sound hard have anything to do with how hard it actually is, or how much scientists know about how to go about it, or how much work has already been accomplished, or how widespread present work is? Of course not; it's just the foolishness of one journalist with - it seems - little knowledge of the field he is discussing.

As I understand the principle thrust of his argument, he is claiming that the slow rate of past progress towards specific goals of manipulating human biochemistry in manner X (rearranging the expression of your genes reliably and safely) make it unlikely we will ever be able to manipulate human biochemistry in manner Y (repairing the known cellular damage that lies at the root of aging). Amongst many problems with this argument is that manner Y - and manner X for that matter - are both perfectly compatible with the laws of physics as we know them. To deny the possibility of radical life extension by means of ongoing damage repair - via technologies presently under early investigation and development in laboratories around the world - is to deny physics. There is no middle ground: either you accept modern physics and all its consequences with regard to the plausibility of deliberately arranging atoms and molecules by design, or you don't.

The fellow's point of view with regard to ongoing work in biotechnology and aging research is slipshod and distant from the action. I have to assume that the rest of his work on other fields - which in many cases I am unqualified to judge - are just as shallow, slippery and ultimately vapid. I leave it as an exercise for the audience to pick at the errors; if entertainer this fellow is to be, you may as well get your money's worth.

The world is full of comedians, fools and dangerous people willing to stand up and tell us that black is white - looking for laughs, other fools, or a means to an end. Don't fall for it.

Technorati tags: aging research, life extension, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:00 PM
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Alagebrium - or ALT-711 - is one of the better known compounds discovered and developed with the intent of repairing a type of accumulated damage that leads to age-related degeneration. In this case, the damage is the buildup of extracellular protein crosslinks, and amongst them the type known as advanced glycation endproducts. Aubrey de Grey gives a good explanation of this topic and the level of interest one should have in ALT-711 at the SENS website:

Luckily, it happens that a lot of the cross-links that accumulate in this way have very unusual chemical structures, not found in proteins or other molecules that the body makes on purpose. This means that it is theoretically possible to identify chemicals that can react with the cross-links and break them, without reacting with anything that we don't want to break. And indeed, several years ago a group of chemists found such a molecule, which has now been tested in many different animals and also in humans and seems to lower blood pressure quite substantially. These chemists formed a company (named Alteon) to market the drug (named ALT-711), but it is still in clinical trials.

We need more work in this area. There are plenty of other types of cross-link that ALT-711 doesn't break, so we need other chemicals that will complement what ALT-711 does.

Another good introduction, with an emphasis on development for use as treatment for specific age-related conditions, can be found at the Alteon website:

Alagebrium is the only A.G.E. Crosslink Breaker in advanced human testing. The compound has demonstrated promising results in several Phase 2 human clinical trials and is being developed initially for cardiovascular and vascular diseases. Results to date suggest that alagebrium may be a novel therapy for a number of conditions that occur as a result of myocardial or vascular alterations associated with aging or diabetes. Preliminary evidence suggests that the compound is able to modify both the structure and function of the left ventricle (main pumping chamber of the heart) consistent with a partial reversal of pathology. Similarly, alagebrium has been shown to improve the reactivity and function of the arterial system. In addition, in all clinical testing to date, the compound has demonstrated a clean safety profile.

Alteon has gone through many of the reshapings common to young pharmaceutical development companies; the latest would seem to place them more in line for financial viability - and thus continuing development of ALT-711 for modest goals relating to the treatment of specific conditions. This is the sort of profile that maximizes the chance of attracting funding and clearing sufficient regulatory hurdles to make it to profitability.

The new management of Alteon Inc. (Amex: ALT), to further validate the Company's newly focused development of alagebrium on diastolic heart failure, highlights the recent publication of several articles that illustrate the medical community's increasing recognition of this form of heart failure. "A strong body of preclinical and clinical evidence supports our advancement of alagebrium's clinical development in diastolic heart failure," said Malcolm MacNab, M.D., Ph.D., Vice President, Clinical Development of Alteon. "The recent focus on this patient population by key opinion leaders further encourages our aggressive pursuit of this disease characterized by an unmet medical need."

It is unfortunate that the modern wasteful, useless regulatory burden so narrows and slows all medical development - but this is the inevitable consequence of overbearing, invasive government. When government employees dictact whether your business is permitted to succeed, venture funding will only be obtained by those who demonstrate the greatest ability to please government employees. Merits and goals are demoted to secondary concerns, and we all know where that leads.

Not that we should be surprised. Plausible solutions and their enactment are the province of the free market and people who work to create and build - something that policians cannot do. The only results you'll obtain from the insertion of big government and central control into any arena of human endeavor are shoddy goods, higher costs, and slow progress. One would hope that most people understand what happens when you attempt to centrally control complex systems - the fate of those who lived through the Soviet Union should spring to mind. As centralization grows, progress, efficiency and quality die; this is an iron law of our time, and one that - sadly - seems to have to be relearned again and again.

Back to the alagebrium. My attention was drawn to a recent study suggesting that ALT-711 might have merit in the treatment of progressive kidney failure in diabetes, or diabetic nephropathy. There's an Alteon press release out there also, for those who don't enjoy reading scientific abstracts.

The renal morphological parameters characteristic of [diabetic nephropathy] decreased in treated compared with untreated mice. Conclusion: Alagebrium may prevent, delay, and/or reverse established [diabetic nephropathy] in db/db mice by reducing the systemic advanced glycation end product pools and facilitating the urinary excretion of advanced glycation end products.

This sort of investigation is fairly standard practice. Because it is so enormously hard to gain government approval for any compound, it makes economic sense to test it for other uses once you have or are close to having approval. Once again, regulation becomes the primary motivator for the practice of science and research, rather than efficiency, speed, merits and goals.

One might view Alteon and the development of ALT-711 as something of a transition from the old to the new in the community of folk seeking to extend the healthy human life span. It has its roots in the old school drug development pipeline and firm focus on supplements and things you can put in a pill. The aims, however, are well within the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), in that Alteon's founders and employees seek to effectively and deliberately repair a small portion of the cellular damage that cause age-related degeneration.

Early SENS research presently funded by the Methuselah Foundation and generous donors takes a somewhat different approach to the problem. Rather than drug discovery, they are working on bioremediation and bacterial enzyme discovery:

So how is LysoSENS supposed to work? In brief, we are looking for enzymes capable of selectively degrading the respective target material in the environment. This idea is heavily inspired by the field of environmental bioremediation (using microbes to degrade environmental contaminants). We are working in the lab of Bruce Rittmann, a well-known environmental engineer, as he has the expertise to find microbes that degrade weird stuff. We hope that we can isolate enzymes from these microbes and deliver them in a manner similar to current FDA-approved treatments for heritable lysosome storage diseases, where the missing enzyme is tagged with certain sugars for targeting and then injected into the bloodstrem. You can learn more about the LysoSENS strategy from its originator and Methuselah Foundation chairperson Aubrey de Grey here (quick and easy) or here (detailed and technical).

May the best science win, to the benefit of all.

Technorati tags: aging, biotechnology, life extension, medical research

Posted by Reason at 1:17 PM
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While the results of any individual survey on attitudes to healthy life extension should be probably be taken with an appropriate amount of salt, trends over time in many surveys are interesting to watch. The Methuselah Foundation folk pointed me to a recent British survey:

Many Britons would give up favourite things, including sex, to reach 100 years of age, a poll suggests. Some 40% said they would give up sex - half of women and a third of men - 39% food and drinks and 42% travel.

But the Bupa survey of 1,003 people found 94% would not give up the company of family and friends and three quarters would not sacrifice money.

People cited being there for family and seeing grandchildren grow up as the main reasons for wanting to reach 100.

The poll, carried out by Mori for Bupa, also revealed half thought scientists should continue to keep trying to prolong people's lifespans, while 45% thought it was everyone's duty to live as long as possible.

But what if you didn't have to give up anything except money? That is the reality of matters today: we stand within sight of ways to greatly extend the healthy human life span, to live longer in vigor and youth, but the resources to get there are not yet dedicated to the task.

Today - and this is a large and important change from a decade ago - there are easy ways for ordinary folk to band together and devote individually modest amounts to help forge the future of longevity research. The Methuselah Foundation provides one such way: donating to the MPrize research prize or funding SENS research.

The future is what you make of it, both as an individual and in collaboration with others. Just as we prepare for retirement by looking ahead for decades and saving now, we can also help to make our later lives far longer, healthier and more youthful. The process is the same: we invest money now to make our future better, and the sooner you invest, the larger the eventual benefit. Scientists stand waiting for our support and encouragement - when we all step up to give material support to healthy life extension research, progress towards longer, healthier lives will greatly accelerate.

Technorati tags: life extension, survey

Posted by Reason at 2:13 PM
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We are fortunate to live in a era in which it is plausible to see significant progress towards far longer healthier lives within our lifetimes. Removing pain and suffering from old age - and pushing old age itself farther into the future - is now a reasonable goal for the vast, dynamic biotechnology and medical research infrastructures. All large goals require significant funding and public support, however. Serious research into the defeat of age-related degeneration is still in its infancy, supported by comparatively small groups and modest funding.

This state of affairs must change, and we are well on our way to making that change happen! Over the past two and a half years, ordinary folk like you and I have joined together in support of more and better research into increasing the healthy human life span. We have pledged more than $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation in this short time to (a) create the MPrize to encourage scientists to strike at the root causes of aging, and (b) fund the development of medical technologies to first treat and later eliminate age-related frailty, disease and suffering.

In September 2006, entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel greatly advanced this cause with a $3 million dollar matching grant for donations to SENS research aimed squarely at the defeat of aging. For every $2 donated to the Methuselah Foundation's SENS research projects, $1 of this grant will be applied. We have until the end of 2009 to to exhaust this grant - so let's get to work!

• Click here to help meet Peter Thiel's matching grant and advance longevity research

The Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), championed by biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, is perhaps the most important aging research taking place today. This is not because of present results, but because of its approach, influence upon other researchers and eventual payoff. SENS is a direct, efficient, fast-as-possible approach towards solving the problem of age-related degeneration:

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

The traditional gerontological approach to life extension is to try to slow down this accumulation of damage. This is a misguided strategy, firstly because it requires us to improve biological processes that we do not adequately understand, and secondly because it can even in principle only retard aging rather than reverse it. An even more short-termist alternative is the geriatric approach, which is to try to stave off pathology in the face of accumulating damage; this is a losing battle because the continuing accumulation of damage makes pathology more and more inescapable.

Instead, the engineering (SENS) strategy is not to interfere with metabolism per se, but to repair or obviate the accumulating damage and thereby indefinitely postpone the age at which it reaches pathogenic levels.

SENS research projects have been funded by the Methuselah Foundation since late 2005, and continue to grow as support for the Methuselah Foundation increases.

Now is the best of times to invest in your future health and longevity. By supporting the Methuselah Foundation, your donation will help to develop the scientific foundation for medical technologies to improve health and longevity for all. Now your donations will stretch even further: for every $2 you donate to support new SENS research, Peter Thiel will donate an additional $1 from his matching fund.

• Click here to help meet Peter Thiel's matching grant and advance longevity research

The future of our lives is not some remote line item in the hands of distant scientists: we are all responsible for building our future. You, I and everyone else can make a real difference to our healthy longevity and the science that will ensure it. What are you waiting for?

Posted by Reason at 9:04 PM
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People don't spend much time evaluating new information that crosses their path. That's simple economics; you have to filter the world in a way that is efficient if you are to have any time left to set and meet your own goals. Modern attempts to build reputation systems are partially an effort - possibly doomed, depending on who you ask - to do better than the ad hoc personal filters built and used by most people.

It is fascinating to watch large numbers of individual filters interacting in action, and recent events have provided a good laboratory. Peter Thiel, an individual of high reputation in many eyes, has donated $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation to fund real, honest to goodness scientific anti-aging research, a field that has a terrible reputation in the eyes of many. This is poor reputation for legitimate science is due in no small part to the fraud, greed and idiocy of the "anti-aging" marketplace, but also to the knee-jerk negative reaction that so many people have to the very idea of working to extend the healthy human life span.

This is an interesting experiment: find any random person you know and ask them what the downside would be to using better medicine to live for 150 years. Nine times out of ten, I'll wager, your friend will tell you that living for so long would be terrible because a person would spend most of his or her life decrepit, increasingly crippled by age-related conditions. In otherwords, your random friend thinks that "healthy life extension" means "being aged for longer."

So here we have a war of first-line, knee-jerk filters based on reputation, prejudice and habit. Does Thiel's association with scientific anti-aging research cause people to put Thiel into the "reject" category at this filter level, or does it cause people to pass the idea of scientists working to extend the healthy human life span through to the next level of inspection, thought and discussion?

From my admittedly scant view of the online world, I'm gratified to see that Thiel's perceived reputation is winning more often than one might expect. In many ways, Thiel's reputation and standing are a more potent donation to the Methuselah Foundation - and the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) - than the $3.5 million. It will go a long, long way towards legitimizing the fight to defeat aging - and frailty, suffering, pain and death - in the minds of the many.

Still, it is a sign of the power and breadth of shallow prejudice against healthy life extension that a fair number of people are willing to instantly dismiss to the crank bucket someone previously regarded as an intelligent, successful, talented businessman. There is much work left to do for advocates attempting to create broader awareness and education, as well as those researchers who are proving their case in the labs.

Technorati tags: life extension, reputation, SENS

Posted by Reason at 6:54 PM
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I received a characteristically interesting email from James Clements just recently, and thought it well worth sharing. The links are mostly added by my hand as a part of an ill-formed habit of annotating the work of others via HTML:

About 20 years ago, I read Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's Life Extension Handbook. It was a revelation to me that scientific advances might, in my lifetime, allow us to live hundreds of years. One of the first things I thought of (having matured during the Vietnam War protests, Civil Rights, and Watergate) was that if we could change the average human lifespan from 70-80 years to 700-800 years we would likely change Society for the better in at least the following ways:

1) The Environment. Who would want to ruin the environment and rape and pillage the land if they had to continue living here for so long?

2) Education. The longer one lives the more easily they can improve their minds through cumulative education. Instead of cramming learning into an 8-16 year period, it would likely be spread out with intervening work over decades. Who would want to work all their life at menial labor if they knew that they could go back to school, improve their mind and pick up new skills, and then have decades or centuries to practice their new trade? Why wouldn't this process just keep repeating over and over?

3) War. There's a reason why the disposable members of the Army are primarily made up of 18-22 year olds – they do not fear death as much and if they think about old age, they think that dying young might be preferable to growing old and decrepit. But, who would want to die young fighting in wars when their lifespan could otherwise be hundreds of years? I truly believe that LIFE will become more precious, not less, when the vast majority of people live hundreds of years. Also, you see it around the world; mostly countries that have a preponderance of young people in their population go to war.

Countries are much less likely to go to war, have civil wars, or high crime rates the older their median population is: http://www.edwardhugh.net/medianage.html. There are 25 countries in the world today whose median ages are LESS THAN 18 year old! And, when you look at this list, they are poor, violence ridden countries full of young people who have no hope and nothing to lose.

Upon consideration of the matter for a number of years, my attitude has not changed. I believe that Mankind would radically change for the better if our lifespans increased significantly. We would likely not reach any kind of Utopian state anytime in the foreseeable future, but we could certainly be a much kinder, gentler, and more prosperous place.

What we're doing will change Human history for the better.

The time preference imposed upon us by the present span of our lives determines the shape of our society.

Time preference is the economist's assumption that a consumer will place a premium on enjoyment nearer in time over more remote enjoyment. A high time preference means a person wants to spend their money now and not save it, whereas a low time preference means a person might want to save their money as well.

A future we will not live to experience has less value to us, so we feel more able to despoil it in any number of ways - the victory of short-term gratification over greater long-term gain. If you look back in history to ages of much shorter, disease-ridden lives, the actions of the time often seem as though the world was populated solely by madmen and the drunk - but in large part, this shape of history was formed by the short time preferences of those who lived it.

To expect to be alive, healthy and in your 40s is a luxury that all to many of the people who ever lived did not have. But most people today have no expectation of being alive, healthy and 100 - the actions, choices and contributions that form society reflect this view of the future. What if you could expect to see a healthy 150th or 200th year? Or live all the way to 800 in good health, for that matter. How then would you prioritize and act in your life? Quite differently than you do today, most likely.

We have a fighting chance at engineering our way to actuarial escape velocity - the point at which medical science increases healthy life span faster than we age - within our lifetimes. To seize this chance, we must gain the support of tens of millions of earnest folk and raise a mighty research infrastructure to rival the cancer establishment in size, dedication and scope. This can be done - it has been accomplished in past decades for cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other conditions.

We can do this for aging, and thereby change the world for the better.

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