I felt I should share this item with you; it is illustrative of the attitudes of a certain set of people who stand in opposition to healthy life extension, and illustrative of a certain sickness that has crept into the minds of men in modern times. It is a petition upon an open access UK government website - there is something of a trend in that country towards using the tools of the web in this sort of manner; time will tell if anything meaningful comes of it. In any case, here is the view of one person as a concisely condensed compilation of the views of many more:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban all scientific research aimed solely at increasing longevity past 70 years.

...

A number of biotechnology companies (which cannot be named here) are trying to allow rich people to extend their lifespans to over 100 years using pharmaceuticals. Unfortunately, this could take money from the poor and give it to the rich (in their long pensions) by increasing everyone else's pension contributions, and housing and healthcare costs. All health research directed towards extending longevity beyond 70 years should be banned to save our pension system and NHS from collapse and to give room for the wonders of the next generation.

Impressively condensed, no? One scarely knows where to start.

As I've discussed in the past, many people play host to a fear of change so great they would rather suffer and die than work to improve the world. Worship of "the system" is symptomatic of this internal rot - there is no system of governance and regulation so bad, so horrible, so destructive that it has no slavish defenders. Imagine - a set of laws to take money from one set of people and give it to another has grown such an ossified cult that there are millions who cannot imagine a world even slightly different, and who would go to their deaths rather than think about changing matters for the better.

Another of my numerous soapboxes, well illustrated in the quote above, is the effect of economic ignorance upon the world.

Life is unfair, make no mistake. People are unequal in opportunity, capacity and the hand they were dealt at birth. To think that this truth can be removed in any way, shape or form is to betray a profound ignorance of economics and the human condition. You cannot make life better at the bottom by tearing down the top; the top is where progress happens, progress that lifts the quality of life for everyone. Punishing success in order to reward failure has predictable results - more failure and less success. The wealthy of 1950 were far worse off than the poor of today precisely because progress brings economic rewards to the successful.

Arguments based on inequality are, at root, made from a misunderstanding - willful or otherwise - of the way in which wealth, medicine and technology are best created. Rapid progress for all requires a free market, strong rule of law and property rights. Such a culture necessarily has a power law distribution of ownership and success. There's a reason the US has led the world in technology, for all that it's going to the dogs nowadays - it's the flip side of the reason that communism, socialism and the politics of envy lead to poverty and suffering.

Creating "equality" by taking from the successful ruins the creation of wealth - very much a non-zero sum game - for all. It takes away the vital incentives and rewards for success. At the end of the process, as demonstrated by all that transpired in the Soviet Union, you are left with the same old inequalities, but now taking place amongst ruins, starvation and disease.

Not to mention the tragedy of the commons that is socialized medicine - a surefire way to turn plenty into poverty by disconnecting usage from responsibility and cost, transforming the non-zero-sum game of economic growth and transaction into a zero-sum game of selfishness and destruction. Commons have a way of turning people perfectly capable of responsibility into helpless, childlike losers who will claw the eyes from anyone they think is doing better, but who will perform not one iota of work to improve the situation for all.

The world of government-enforced commons is a twisted mirrorland, in which more years of healthy life, a greater ability to work, a greater call for products and production are made into a black destruction - rather than the very lifeblood of opportunity, economic growth and happiness they are in a free economy.

Do we really live in a world in which our deaths - on time, to a schedule laid down by government employees - are required to fuel "the system?" Or do we live in a world in which we strive to produce more and better life, and in which rules are made to serve the interests of people rather than vice versa? The answer to that question is up to us.

Technorati tags: economics, life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:01 PM
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Study and careful inference is a bedrock of scientific progress - and so one has to be careful with the concepts of correlation and causation whenever reading about the latest science. We humans are built to see causation everywhere, to pick out patterns from nothing with our hyperactive pattern detectors - even when it doesn't in fact exist. The culture and methods of science exist to rein in the excess, to pick out the flotsam of right answers from the vast sea of wrong answers.

The scientific method is the cure for problems caused by magical thinking, such as a lack of progress towards better lives, and all the limitations - dramatic or trivial - that stem from an incorrect understanding of the way in which the world works. To make progress happen, you must tackle complex systems in a methodical way: propose, explore, test, verify, record, repeat. But that requires more work than merely guessing, and so there will always be some market for those willing to take the "shortcut" to the wrong answer. When the wrong answer doesn't have clear, obvious and rapid bad consequences attatched to it, magical thinking will prosper. Such is the downside of human enonomic preferences - there is always a market for "incorrect" when "incorrect" is sold more cheaply than "correct."

But back to correlation; I bumped into a rather good post on the topic that exercises a number of the same frustrations I note when reading about science in the popular press. No-one is as careful as they should be, sadly, and so much of what passes for information is in fact misinformation. Correlation does not imply causation, and noted correlation is often not in fact correlation - and much of the supposed causation isn't much more than wishful thinking either. In any case, the good post is at Good Math, Bad Math:

Correlation is actually a remarkably simple concept, which makes it all the more frustrating to see the nonsense constantly spewed in talking about it. Correlation is a linear relationship between two random variables.

...

One thing you'll constantly hear in discussions is "correlation does not imply causation". Causation isn't really a mathematical notion - and that's the root of that confusion. Correlation means that as one value changes, another variable changes in the same way. Causation means that when one value changes, it causes the other to change. There is a very big difference between causation and correlation. To give a rather commonly abused example: the majority of children with autism are diagnosed between the ages of 18 months and three years old. That's also the same period of time when children receive a large number of immunizations. So people see the correlation between receiving immunizations and the diagnosis of autism, and assume that that means that the immunizations cause autism. But in fact, there is no causal linkage. The causal factor in both cases is age: there is a particular age when a child's intellectual development reaches a stage when autism becomes obvious; and there is a particular age when certain vaccinations are traditionally given. It just happens that they're roughly the same age.

...

To show causation, you need to show a mechanism for the cause, and demonstrate that mechanism experimentally. So when someone shows you a correlation, what you should do is look for a plausible causal mechanism, and see if there's any experimental data to support it. Without a demonstrable causal mechanism, you can't be sure that there's a causal relationship - it's just a correlation.

How do you know that reported science is relevant and useful to healthy life extension and the advance of medicine? It certainly shouldn't be because someone is telling you as much, directly and outright. Always look a little deeper; take a little time to explore the underlying facts and ideas in any new scientific news for yourself to see if they make sense.

Technorati tags: causation, correlation

Posted by Reason at 9:12 PM
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As one of the go-to people when the media wants to talk about the practice of calorie restriction (CR) for health and longevity, Methuselah Foundation volunteer and blogger April Smith gets her fair share of undeserved snark, vitriol and general rudeness. She recently set up a little essay contest between friends, bloggers and calorie restriction practitioners on the topic of "Why are people so hateful about CR?" It's been a couple of weeks, and now you'll find the winning entries over at April's blog:

I remember what it was like to weigh 25 more pounds than I weigh now and to be unhappy, heaviness causing the sadness as much as the other caused the other, and it seems impossibly sad to watch people your own age go down a totally avoidable path if they just would get straight in their own heads.

Why do I think people are so virulently against CR? In a country where the average American woman is a size 14, even adjusted for vanity sizing, it's an easy target. While CR could easily put on a pious front, it is, these days, the fat that reserve that for themselves.

Watch a taped performance from 25 years ago, one with frequent shots of audience members enjoying the actors. Watch one today. The face of America is changing. It has a double chin and the upper body of a long-former linebacker. And if you're not with the expanding beltline, you're against it.

Calorie restriction is not about weight loss - and yet the elephants in the room aren't going to leave you alone even if you're marching to a different tune. CR is a matter of looking at the compelling decades of scientific backing for eating fewer calories with optimal nutrition in search of a healthy, longer life. But you get thin as a side effect, and those who are engaged in fighting their own battles over fat, size, and a wealth of related issues near and dear to the apes we are at heart will drag you right on in - if you let them.

But CR has nothing to do with any of that. It's about proven health benefits; the only technique you can practice right now to improve healthy longevity that has a meaningful weight of science backing it up.

Technorati tags: calorie restriction

Posted by Reason at 10:06 PM
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Whenever discussion of healthy life extension reaches a certain threshold in the media, or somehow encompasses the viewpoints of a wide range of people, I am reminded that we advocates still have a long way to go in propagating and reinforcing the most basic ideas. We have made a great deal of progress in the past few years, but it's still that case that the vast majority of people have yet to internalize:

• That healthy life extension means being healthy and youthful for longer, not old, suffering and frail for longer
• That significant progress in lengthening the healthy human life span is plausible within the next few decades, with the right level of support
• That there are easy ways for average, everyday folk to help make this happen
• That much of the common wisdom on aging and death stems from millennia of rationalizing the inevitable, but is no longer relevant in an era in which we can do something about aging

I am reminded of this today by yet another commentary on "How to Live Forever or Die Trying" - a book on the culture and science of radical life extension by a fellow who is getting real value from the marketing and promotion spend, it would seem. It is interesting that many of the reviews are basically apologies for death and suffering, and a denial that any change for the better - any attempt to save the tens of millions of lives lost each year, in other words - should be undertaken. Like this one:

In a pacy narrative of the mind, where Descartes meets Wittgenstein and Aquinas rubs shoulders with Swedenborg, Appleyard is steering us in this age of encroaching death denial towards that inevitable question: am I a “deathist” or an “immortalist”? Do I live by accepting death, or by rejecting it? Appleyard argues in conclusion: “All our stories, myths and meanings are constructed on death, on a knowable, shared progress from the cradle to the grave . . . If we live for ever, not only will our particular loves die, love itself will die of thirst, a thirst for death.” He is, of course, profoundly right, but accompanying him on his riveting helter-skelter of a literary journey not only confirms but deepens the humane wisdom of that positive conviction.

There's nothing wrong with choosing death and oblivion - a world founded on individual choice and respect for those choices would be a better place to live in that the one we presently have - but all too many people are doing so in ignorance of the possibilities for more and better years of life in the near future. We advocates need to work harder at pounding on the basics, broading the reach of education and awareness, and making the simple points clearly understood. Life is good, so why not more of it?

Technorati tags: advocacy, book, life extension, review

Posted by Reason at 4:50 PM
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Scheduled for the evening of February 3rd, Channel 4 in the UK will be airing Christopher Sykes' documentary on biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) and the scientific goal of radical life extension. Aging is damage, damage can be repaired, and SENS is a first, coherent stab at outlining exactly - to the best of our knowledge today - how the biotechnology and research communities could accomplish this goal. From the Channel 4 website:

Computer scientist turned biologist Dr Aubrey de Grey is on a mission to end 'the scandal of death. Award-winning filmmaker Christopher Sykes goes on the road with de Grey to find out whether old age and death could soon be a thing of the past.

I believe it should be possible to watch this online on the 3rd via the simulcast section of the website, though I haven't given this functionality a road test myself.

From Christopher Sykes' website:

Investigating the revolutionary life-extension ideas of AUBREY de GREY, immortalist and biogerontologist extraordinary, architect of the SENS programme to defeat old age and conquer death within his own lifetime.

Here are the Radio Times details:

Award-winning director Christopher Sykes follows computer scientist turned renowned biologist Dr Aubrey de Grey on the road as he investigates the possibilites of immortality. Hailed as a genius by some experts and publicly denounced by other scientists, de Grey expands on his theory of immortal life by identifying the 'Seven Deadly Things' that cause ageing and proposes solutions for them all. Will this lead to indefinite life extension in the future and is it something we really want?

As I've said a number of times in the past, the word "immortality" seems to be acquiring a common meaning of "greatly extending healthy life span," at least in the media. The shorthand of journalism, to convey much in title and snippet by the use of few words - or less charitably, to make every word pull its weight in the act of attracting fleeting attention, any attention, in a Darwinian struggle for survival - but it would have been nice had the community settled on a word less loaded with pre-existing meaning.

Technorati tags: documentary, media, SENS

Posted by Reason at 1:44 PM
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A BBC interview with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey - from way back in the dark ages of late 2004 - is once more making the rounds of the vast interconnected conversation of the blogosphere, social news networks and attention aggregators. This whole distributed process by which older content fountains up once more for a brief period is quite fascinating, as I noted the last time it happened for this article:

In the past few years the traditional print world focus on new, fresh content has come to overwhelmingly dominate the online spaces, thanks to the popularity of sequential publishing models; RSS, blogs, aggregation and default searches orded by date. That said, popular link sites or pseudo-news sites (Slashot, Digg, Metafilter, so forth) can cheerfully buck this trend and point out older content that might be fresh for a given audience. That audience will then respond by reading, reprinting, discussing and linking to the older content for a while.

...

The Digg audience found this compelling, and I don't blame them; it is pretty damn compelling. As I pointed out yesterday, while the concepts of radical life extension are old hat for transhumanists and other healthy life extension advocates, they remains uncharted territory and new news for the vast majority of people.

...

People find radical life extension compelling, and rightly so. The mini-wave of interest in this BBC interview was accompanied by a mini-wave of donations and inquiries to the MPrize for anti-aging research and Methuselah Foundation - that is a hopeful sign.

This time too - the rate at which new members have joined the The Three Hundred and new donations in support of rejuvenation research arrived at the Methuselah Foundation has risen in the past few weeks. I'm always pleased to see more people taking the time to learn about the prospects for healthy life extension in our lifetimes, achieved through scientific research and the new tools of biotechnology.

The vigor of this information dredge and recirculation mechanism seems - to my eye at least - to be a better measure of interest in and effectiveness of communication strategies than a response on initial publication. The question presently in my mind is why this particular BBC article returns again and again. Why not any of the many other interesting, well-written and informative interviews, profiles and articles on de Grey and his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) that are presently available online? What is it about this article that makes it so compelling, so effective at education and raising awareness? There is something to be learned here for those of us who would like to see healthy life extension science discussed and supported far more widely than it is at present.

Technorati tags: advocacy, life extension, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:27 PM
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Following on from the tale of two reviews a couple of days ago, thought I'd point out another article on "How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality." Here, again, is a reviewer reaffirming their belief in the immutability of aging and death with an appeal to those arguments from the gut he finds most appealing:

The reason, for instance, why the human body is fundamentally different to a car is complexity. Each and every cell of the body is millions of times more complex than a car, and we have many billions of cells in our bodies, any one of which can go awry, become a cancer and cause the entire system to collapse in death.

In any case, how many vintage cars are used for everyday city commuting - the sort of hard driving we put our bodies through just by the simple acts of eating and breathing?

Complexity is not a barrier to the possible - it is an indication of the level of work and capabilities of the tools required to undertake the task. Scientists manipulate and investigate fantastically complex systems in the body every day - in essence, the present biotechnology revolution is all about our increasing abilities to understand and use complex systems, which is why it so resembles the computer software and hardware industries in its organization and trajectory. Reaching for complexity as a barrier is akin to saying "it's hard, therefore it's impossible." Nonsense, in other words, meaningless. It's one thing to say, as everyone knows, "we can't repair aging and rejuvenate people today" - but quite another to then dismiss the future precisely because we can't do it today.

Yet in all of his writings, de Grey fails to mention that none of his approaches has failed to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans. In fact, a group of 28 distinguished scientists signed a joint letter in 2005 to one science journal condemning de Grey and the gullible journalists who fall under his spell.

Which is a lie followed by a selectively chosen piece of information, the sign of a reviewer who hasn't actually done any real background reading on the subject of the book. Casting biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey as a crank might be nicely reassuring for someone who wants to hold their world unchanged in concept and boundaries, death, aging and all, but it isn't reality. Sure, we have the 28 conservative gerontologists who signed a joint letter - you'll find disagreement in every field. But how about the 57 signatories of the Scientists' Open Letter on Aging, or the 148 to attend the SENS2 conference organized by de Grey to focus on his view of longevity research, or the many scientists to submit papers to de Grey's journal, the highly-cited Rejuvenation Research, or the staff and leaders of the organizations backing the Longevity Dividend, or the donors and supporters of the Mprize and the Methuselah Foundation, co-founded by de Grey? Just like the actual science itself, none of this is at all hidden from sight ... unless you want to ignore it.

As one of the previously noted reviews said:

Oh yes, very funny. Let’s all have a good laugh at these nutters. That’s how many of us will want to feel. As you read this book, your willingness to laugh will tell you something, namely that you are rather more attached to death than you thought you might be. One becomes defensive when death is challenged. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Do you believe involuntary suffering and death are good or bad? Do you accept that aging is the greatest cause of involuntary suffering and death? Do you believe that you have a responsibility to help do good in the world? These are simple questions that lead to a simple answer - working to defeat aging is no more a fantasy than working to defeat cancer, and just as great in merit.

Technorati tags: book, life extension, review, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:46 PM
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Via a couple of posts from Anders Sandberg, my attention was drawn today to an illustration of the scale of medical progress. The latest BMJ contains a list of short essays on important medical milestones since 1840 - glances at small fractions of the enormous progress in medicine that has occurred in the past 167 years.

167 years is not such a long time when you stop to think about it; some people living today have seen two thirds of that span with their own eyes. So much has come to pass; many of the tools of medicine today would have been hard to imagine in the 1950s, let alone the 1840s. Human life expectancy has increased dramatically over this time as the result of improvements in our knowledge and willingness to use it to improve our lot:

Since the Stone Age we have evaluated, interpreted, calculated, and computed. As we observed the effects of our primitive interventions we tried, tried again, and modified our technology. Our legs could take us only so far, until we extended their reach through increasingly sophisticated means of transportation - technology that took us across land and sea and through the air. We overcame the limits of our visual acuity with lenses, opening new vistas of the heavens and the microcosm. Our clinical gaze was augmented by new understandings of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. New tools, such as the stethoscope, radiography, and anaesthesia, let us listen to and see into the human body and tinker with it.

Inevitably, we moved beyond augmenting our limbs and our sense organs. Our powerful brain began to realise its own limitations. With its insatiable urge for self improvement and its unparalleled parallel processing capacity it began building tools to enhance itself. We created external devices that exponentially increased our ability to calculate, analyse, and learn. It took us two millennia to jump from the Babylonian abacus to the mechanical eight digit calculator that Pascal built in the Enlightenment. After only two centuries Charles Babbage envisaged a massive, steam powered mechanical calculator designed to print astronomical tables. Less than a century later Alan Turing created Colossus, an electronic computer that helped end a war plagued by our self destructive drive and power. Over only decades in the second half of the 20th century we developed powerful resources to communicate and exchange unlimited amounts of knowledge, almost anywhere and at any time. We created a global network of computers able to decode the genome; machines capable of seeing our body and its functions in three dimensions; tools to track and control diseases remotely. Computers started to change the way we learn, live, communicate, and heal.

The pace of science, computation and medical engineering is blistering today - why is there any doubt that the medicine of the 2050s will be far more advanced, to the point of extending the present limits of our healthy lives? When we look at what was lacking in 1840 that is known and available in 2007, it seems that those alive then must have lived in the uttermost darkness and suffering. The young of 2050 will see much the same in 2007 - how could people have carried on without reliable cures for cancer, without instant diagnosis of all conditions, without superior, artificial immune systems, without nanomedicine to repair the cellular damage caused by aging?

A look back at history allows us to see the full sweep, power and momentum of medical science, a vision often missed in the day-to-day view of incremental advances. This momentum of progress will carry us into a future of far greater knowledge, capability and longevity - the only questions for we aging individuals are those of pace and timing.

Technorati tags: longevity, medicine

Posted by Reason at 9:32 PM
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I'm pleased to be able to draw your attention to this latest release from the Methuselah Foundation:

The Methuselah Foundation has appointed Allison Taguchi as its Development Officer, responsible for structuring and executing its fundraising efforts. Allison has over 12 years of fundraising and business development experience at research institutes, universities, government agencies, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations. Examples include: Rushford Nanotech Laboratory, Department of Defense, Oakland Military Institute, and University of Hawaii Biotech Research Center.

Working out of the Bay Area, Allison is arranging a series of outreach events throughout 2007 and beyond, at which Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and Founder of the Foundation, will articulate the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) roadmap for directed research into obviating the fundamental mechanisms of aging. Allison said, "I'm looking forward greatly to working with the Methuselah Foundation. We have a slate of SENS-related research projects ready to go that only await funding; these and the Mprize - which will be awarded to researchers who substantially extend the lifespan of laboratory mice - will attract much interest in the Bay Area tech community and beyond."

As you may or may not know, in addition to her past demonstrations of proficiency in the fundraising arena, Taguchi is involved in a number of professional ventures that have grown out of the transhumanist community in past years. These include the Future of Humanity Institute and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence; Taguchi is quite the hub.

Successful fundraising in any field has a great deal to do with the arcane talent of networking - with the generation and use of a web of connections to better enable the flow of information, reputation and trust. Now that the Methuselah Foundation has now moved into the realm of expecting - and being expected - to raise millions of dollars in research and advocacy funding over the next couple of years, strands in the network are the coin of the realm. Seven-figure donations don't just happen; a great deal of work and energy lies behind each success.

Folk like you and I can continue to help in this process by showing that we care deeply about serious research aimed at the rapid defeat of aging. Doors to the realm of networking and million dollar donations were opened by the actions of hundreds of ordinary people, those who took the initiative to support the Foundation in the years since its creation in 2003. As more of us step forward to demonstrate that we are willing to help eliminate age-related frailty and suffering, more million dollar doors open, and the network of potential wealthy donors grows - and so the faster the scientific community will turn to effectively engage aging.

Success is the greatest predictor for more success - we pebbles are crafting the start of a mighty avalanche, and soon we'll see the huge boulders join in. Let's keep up the good work!

Technorati tags: activism, fundraising, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:36 PM
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Today, a tale of two book reviews, both of "How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality." But let us look upon them as two knees - for my, how the left knee jerks.

Wake me up in a hundred years:

Bryan Appleyard's How to Live Forever or Die Trying offers an intriguing look at the geeky, freeze-dried, pill-popping world of people who want to go on and on

...

see when he has to swallow his next handful of life-preserving pills. Unruly hair, an uncoordinated body and a wretched dress sense are, of course, the unmistakable indices of intellect, as every senior common room in Oxford testifies. But would you really want to share eternity with freaks like these?

...

Appleyard himself seems unsure. Personal testimony about his childhood dreams and adolescent traumas make clear his dread of death; nevertheless, the experts he interviews are shysters. The immortality they peddle is a specifically American fantasy, the product of a culture infatuated by newness and hostile to the very notion of history.

It seems to me that the right knee, sadly shielded behind the firewall of failing publishing models, has thought things through a little more carefully - diverted further from that grand human tradition of deriving truth from the gut within rather than the much more productive realms of fact and endeavor without.

Death, be not proud:

The title of this book, and the cover, which depicts the Reaper in a bow tie, look like they are trying to make you laugh. This is a book about the possibility of immortality, and, when you pick it up, you imagine fun being poked at mad scientists with their potions and regimes and freezers full of body parts. But it’s not a mocking book, even though, by the end, you might wish it were. This is a serious, frightening, at times brilliant book on immortality. 'Death,' as Appleyard tells us, 'is being attacked on many fronts.'

Most people, when faced with the possibility of immortality, have two immediate thoughts - first, that it’s a good thing, and second, that it’s impossible. Appleyard will make you question both of these convictions. He has spoken to scientists who have studied the science of mortality and found it lacking. They are not mad - or only as mad as, say, Crick and Watson must have sounded, or Heisenberg with his proof that things change when you look at them. Of course, reading about people like this does make you smile sometimes, because challenging death sounds so naive. But soon you will be smiling on the other side of your face.

There is Bruce Klein, of the Immortality Institute, whose aim is 'conquering the blight of involuntary death'. Klein calls death 'the Silent Tsunami'; he explains that 100,000 people die every day, and yet we accept it. His point is that if this was an actual tsunami, people would get their act together. There’s also Ray Kurzweil, who describes nature as 'dramatically suboptimal'. Perhaps most fascinatingly, there is Aubrey de Grey, the long-haired, beer-drinking genius who is applying an engineer’s approach to the problem of death, and whose organisation is called SENS, which stands for 'Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence'.

Oh yes, very funny. Let’s all have a good laugh at these nutters. That’s how many of us will want to feel. As you read this book, your willingness to laugh will tell you something, namely that you are rather more attached to death than you thought you might be. One becomes defensive when death is challenged. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

"Immortality" is such an abused word these days, loaded with meanings. Aging, and the frailty and death it brings, are the real targets of the coming biotechnology revolution - understand the human machine and you can repair its worn parts. Why do people defend death by aging and the suffering of billions, or say that aging is impossible to tackle, all the while believing that the biotechnology revolution will soon defeat the complexities of cancer - a similarly challenging problem? It is indeed interesting, the attitudes that exist towards longevity - and a life of years and health - in an era so close to engineering agelessness.

Technorati tags: immortality, life extension

Posted by Reason at 9:43 PM
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I've been discussing advances in cancer research a fair bit over the past couple of months. Cancer is a big, bad part of the aging process; a haywire form of uncontrolled biochemical rot in the gears of your body. It's waiting for all of us if we manage to engineer the medical technology to evade heart disease, neurodegeneration and all the other failure modes of age-damaged biochemistry that kill before cancer can.

Here is a question for the floor: to what degree is a robust cancer cure sufficient for a future of ongoing, step by step healthy life extension leading to the defeat of death by aging?

What do I mean here? By a robust cancer cure, I mean a foreseeable level of medical technology whereby cancer is neither fatal nor greatly expensive to deal with in the degree to which it occurs in the old today. It can be detected early, eliminated in any but the latest of stages, and doing so will not dramatically increase the patient's expenditures on healthcare. I envisage technology based on microarray scans of blood for the earliest signs of cancer, and targeted, highly efficient therapies capable of eliminating cancer cells without damaging healthy systems in the body - the widespread technology base of 2015 to 2025, give or take a few years, in other words.

By "sufficient" I mean this: if ever more sophisticated refinements on the above themes are all we have to work with, would that be enough to stave off cancer for almost all people if other first generation rejuvenation technologies - in combination with general improvements across the board in medical technology - increased life span by two or three decades?

We envisage healthy life spans to increase in steps; a old person taking advantage of each new step might beat the curve, a little rejuvenation at a time, to live into an age in which aging was truly defeated. The first step, consisting of first generation attempts at most of the repair technologies outlined in biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), might plausibly provide a couple of decades of additional healthy life. That would mean a couple of decades in which medical science can further advance and improve - and so on, a step at a time.

The risk of cancer in any tissue increases with age - and as for most failing machines, quite dramatically so in later life. This stems from underlying changes in biochemistry and the simple rules that determine failure rates in machinery based on gradual wear in component parts - possibly the shortening of your telomeres, possibly damage to stem cells, possibly something else, possibly all of the above. Is it good enough to have a good after-the-fact cure on hand when the risk of occurance is increasing enormously with each passing year? Is there a point past which a good therapy is just overloaded by sheer weight of new cancer bursting from your cells, and where does that point occur?

Ultimately, we would want to change our biochemistry so as to prevent cancer from occuring at all. Like all projects aiming to safely re-engineer a very complex system, this will be challenging indeed - but it will get easier with time. At what point will we need to have absolute cancer prevention in hand to beat the curve of aging, and thus remain alive and in good health to take advantage of the next anti-aging technology in line? At what point does a cure for cancer fail us?

Technorati tags: cancer research, life extension

Posted by Reason at 4:27 PM
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If you are one of the hundreds of millions unfortunate enough to face death by aging prior to the advent of medical technologies capable of rejuvation - of reversing aging by repairing age-related cellular damage - there is still one option remaining to give you a chance at renewed life in the future. This option is cryopreservation: paying a service provider such as Alcor to vitrify your body immediately following clinical death for indefinite low-temperature storage.

Cryonics is the only option for life extension open to many older and seriously ill people: those who cannot wait for the promised therapies of the next few d