An interesting paper on aging in bacteria illustrates some of the present thinking on the evolutionary roots of aging; in this case, that aging seems to be an inevitable consequence of the cellular model of life.

Experimental evolution of aging in a bacterium:

Aging refers to a decline in reproduction and survival with increasing age. According to evolutionary theory, aging evolves because selection late in life is weak and mutations exist whose deleterious effects manifest only late in life. Whether the assumptions behind this theory are fulfilled in all organisms, and whether all organisms age, has not been clear. We tested the generality of this theory by experimental evolution with Caulobacter crescentus, a bacterium whose asymmetric division allows mother and daughter to be distinguished.

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Our results confirm that late-acting deleterious mutations do occur in bacteria and that they can invade populations when selection late in life is weak. They suggest that very few organisms - perhaps none - can avoid the accumulation of such mutations over evolutionary time, and thus that aging is probably a fundamental property of all cellular organisms.

Inevitable until that cellular life becomes smart enough to develop medicine and learn how to repair itself sufficiently well, in any case. That time is just around the corner.

You might recall that aging in bacteria was demonstrated back in 2005; previously it was thought that bacteria might be effectively immortal. This hypothesis of aging as an inevitable consequence of evolution in cellular life versus present studies of those forms of cellular life that might be immortal will make for good science in the decades ahead - but it is largely irrelevant as to how aging in humans proceeds from here on out. Evolution's days are all but over, and the invisible hand of the market will take over as technology enables individual humans to shape themselves rather than be shaped.

When people can choose between degenerative aging or no degenerative aging, I imagine there won't be a great deal of degenerative aging in the world - much the same as for the smallpox/no smallpox choice that became available in recent times, for example.

Technorati tags: aging, evolution

Posted by Reason at 9:02 PM
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As gleefully noted at the Methuselah Foundation blog, the latest award from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research brings their support for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) into the six figure range:

We here at the Methuselah Foundation are pleased to announce our receipt of a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging: a further $50,000 towards the presently ongoing SENS research aimed at extending healthy human longevity, and funded by our generous donors.

As for all SENS research contributions, this award is matched by $25,000 from the $3 million fund set up by Peter Thiel in late 2006. It will help to extend Foundation research into bioremediation of damaging age-related byproducts in tissue, the protection of fragile mitochondrial DNA and future programs for other aspects of SENS, each tackling one form of age-related biochemical and cellular damage.

This latest award brings contributions from the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research to $120,000, more than $100,000 of that in the last year. Many thanks from all of us for this aid in our efforts to repair the damage that causes aging. We've set a fine pace of growth in the past twelve months, and we fully intend to keep it up!

We can all help the Foundation continue its growth and expand its success in raising funds for SENS research by continuing to donate. Even small amounts serve to illustrate the breadth of support for the scientific quest to reverse aging, and thereby make more large donations possible. Those folk who manage large sources of funding for research like to see just that sort of support from the public: it's an important validation, and that validation is exactly how the Methuselah Foundation obtained its first large donations just a few short years ago.

How things have grown - and no slowing the pace yet. You should all take a moment to think about those folk who are working hard to help you live a much longer, healthier life. What's that worth to you?

Technorati tags: activism, life extension, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:17 PM
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In addition to the first (with a focus on radical life extension) and second articles on Transvision 2007 from Ronald Bailey at Reason Online, a few other folk have stepped up to tell us how things went:

TransVision Tuesday Keynote Presentation (Aubrey de Grey) Notes:

Too little biomedical funding (perhaps less than one percent) is going into reversing aging. Euphemisms for aging like "healthy aging" and "aging is not a disease" are being promoted. If it's not a disease, why fund fixing it? Aging is not less bad when postponed. We should admit that our goal is elimination of aging. How do we give this credibility?

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Progress is being made in longevity science, both in lysosomal enhancement and in allotopic expression. Funding is increasing. The Mprize is at 4.5 million, which is starting to encourage some research for the purpose of the prize. SENS credibility improving.

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Various groups, including theologians, are making documentaries and otherwise marketing the ideas. With enough money, the experts needed to develop therapies are ready to work on the problem. Funding is ramping up. Our action today can save many lives by accelerating the introduction of first therapies. Mealy-mouthed messaging has been tried, so now is time to be tougher. People were irrational about aging, but that is becoming decreasingly justifiable.

Crafting the practical case for life extension in Chicago:

Rather than choosing to wax philosophical about the ethical imperatives in favour of life extension, the organizers of the IEET symposium specifically geared the event around the work of Jay Olshansky and his efforts to frame the discussion in more practical terms.

In other words, money.

Indeed, the case for a longevity dividend – the idea that prolonging life will save not just lives, but oodles of cash -- is beginning to take shape. As Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey noted, “It's a way of rebranding the quest for extending human lives in a politically palatable way.”

That piece above is from George Dvorsky, who notes in another post the realities of being in the early stages of a growth movement of futurists:

TransVision 2007: the good, the bad and the ugly

Attendance, I am quite certain, was well below expectations. The number of empty seats was disturbing. ... Even more disturbing is how some of the most important ideas and thinkers of our time are largely being ignored by the general public. Watching Aubrey de Grey explain to a small audience how he’s going to conquer death created no small amount of cognitive dissonance in my brain; the room should have been packed. Hell, the room should have had people lined-up out front pounding at the door demanding to be let in.

It is true there are comparatively few people who spend time on transhumanist goals in a serious fashion - compared to, say, the number of people willing to form local sports clubs. The process of garnering attention even for demonstrably true concepts and meritous actions is slow and arduous. We'd all like to see more progress; we'd all like to see the healthy life extension movement match the spectacular growth of AIDS patient advocacy, for example, or generate a goliath research community the size of those working on Alzheimer's or cancer. That will take work and years, but compared to the state of affairs a decade ago, we've improved a hundredfold the level of funding raised and spread of awareness for directly attacking the aging process. We can and will keep that up.

Lastly, I should note Ronald Bailey's third and final report from the conference:

Kurzweil believes that humanity will accelerate itself to utopia (immortality, ubiquitous AI, nanotech abundance) in the next 20 to 30 years. For example, he noted that average life expectancy increases by about 3 months every year. Kurzweil then claimed that longevity trends are accelerating so fast that the life expectancy will increase more than one year for each year that passes in about 15 years. In other words, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy could be indefinitely long. He projects that by 2030, AI will be ubiquitous, and most humans will be physically melded to information and other technologies. Kurzweil argued that we must reject the fundamentalist desire to define humanity by its limitations. "We are the species that goes beyond our limitations," he declared.

Which is quite true, though as I've noted before, I think Kurzweil's timelines for the next couple of decades are too optimistic, for reasons relating to the incompressibility of human interactions in business cycles. One can of course conceive of technologies (like strong artificial intelligence) that get around that limitation, we being the species that treats limits like red flags, but you have to get them through the process of development first.

I would be very pleased to see us make the advances needed to achieve indefinite life expectancy - even in the laboratory, in mice - by 2022, but color me skeptical. I think it'll take a couple of decades more unless some very big players decide to jump into rejuvenation research money-first within the next few years.

Technorati tags: conference, life extension, transhumanism

Posted by Reason at 9:53 PM
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I would hope that regular readers are by now wary of chronic inflammation - the tentacles of causal relationships link inflammation with almost all well-known age-related conditions. Those conditions are the most visible end points of accumulated damage, as aging is nothing more than just that - damage at the cellular and molecular level. In this worldview, inflammation is a process acting as a source of damage. For example, we have this recent research on inflammation and age-related (type 2) diabetes:

It has long been known that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. The body attacks the islet cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. In recent years, the immune system has also been implicated in type 2 diabetes - in particular imbalances in cytokines, an immune system component that causes inflammation.

These imbalances become especially marked as people become obese. Dr. Jerry Nadler and his colleagues are investigating the role of a key gene - 12/15-LO (12/15-lipoxygenase ) - that has been implicated in the immune-system induced inflammatory effects linked to both forms of diabetes and their complications.

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Macrophages appear in high concentrations in fatty tissue. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Nadler has traced the mechanism by which the presence of large numbers of fat cells stimulate the macrophages to activate the 12/15-LO gene, and has documented the cascade of inflammatory reactions that results. He has found that the 12/15-LO gene produces two proteins that convert fatty acids into cytokines.

A nice demonstration of a plausible mechanism to link excess body fat with chronic inflammation, and then to diabetes and all the other conditions brought on by that inflammation. All the more reason to keep yourself in shape and take care of the health basics - if you don't let your body go to seed, then you'll accumulate cellular damage at a slower rate, and be better placed to benefit from the longevity medicine of the future.

We don't know how rapidly we'll be able to create medical technologies of rejuvenation and longer, healthier lives. It's foolish to think that advanced medicine will be developed fast enough to save you from neglect - why take the chance when there is so much at stake? Even the young adults amongst us should be concerned about missing the boat, and that's a wise position to take. We should all do our best to reach that future intact and healthy, and to help bring the development of real anti-aging technologies closer.

Technorati tags: diabetes, health, inflammation, medical research

Posted by Reason at 9:53 PM
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A new blog dedicated to longevity advocacy and healthy life extension science came to my attention just today:

To get people understanding and pushing for life extension technologies, its paramount that you become a good communicator.

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If you ask people on a long enough time line, they will say life spans will extend but most people believe that at some point things will change, not in their lifetime. Part of this is due to there being are very few of the major diseases which have been eradicated, most are treated as ongoing concerns. I feel that this is a factor leading to people’s apathy towards aging.

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The current perception of the general population is that aging is as constant as taxes. If you ask someone on the street they will say that not much can be done, or that it is natural. This state of mind has to be changed into accepting that something can be done and should be done, and finally energizing them to do something about it.

I'm always pleased to see more people putting their keyboards to good use and speaking their mind on the topic. Welcome aboard.

Think about the initiative and time it takes to put together the first few posts of a blog, and the value of that effort. If thousands or millions put in just that much effort to the broader effort to build an effective longevity research community - and the public awareness needed for such a venture - then imagine just how far we could advance on that wave of support.

The Methuselah Foundation came to where it is today through the actions of just a few thousand people, from the core volunteers and the few 6- and 7-figure donors to the generous donors and members of the 300, and out to the halo of bloggers, journalists, supporters, advocates. A near future of tens of thousands of volunteers and dozens of equally noteworthy and effective longevity research patient advocacy groups is not unreasonable. Look at the progression of cancer research advocacy and support for a model, for example.

It's just a matter of getting out there and putting your contribution into the ring. If we all do it, progress will result.

Technorati tags: advocacy, activism, life extension

Posted by Reason at 9:02 PM
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Transvision 2007 is presently underway; there's already a good report online from the Longevity Dividend meeting held yesterday. So with that in mind, why not a look at the some of the first steps towards the medical technology of tomorrow:

There's kind of a revolution going on right now in the neurosciences and biomedical engineering. People are trying to take engineering approaches for directly interfacing with the brain.

"The hope is we can cure more immediately a variety of diseases."

Researchers have been able to decode brain activity for years using electroencephalography. Referred to commonly as an EEG, this technology involves placing a sensor-wired net over the head to measure brain activity through the scalp. But the technology wasn't quite sensitive enough to allow researchers to decode brain signals as precisely as needed, Sanchez said. Now researchers are focusing on decoding signals from electrodes placed directly into the brain tissue using wires the width of a strand of hair.

"(Scientists have) realized that by going inside the brain we can capture so much more information, we can have much more resolution," Sanchez said.

The chip UF researchers are seeking to develop would be implanted directly into the brain tissue, where it could gather data from signals, decode them and stimulate the brain in a self-contained package without wires. In the interim, UF researchers are studying implantable devices in rats and are evaluating an intermediate form of the technology - placing electrodes on the surface of the brain - in people.

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The day may not be too far off when patients can control a prosthetic hand or leg just by thinking about it, Sanchez said.

"It's becoming a reality," Sanchez said. "We're designing electronics that we can interface with biological systems and we can use that to help people."

You might also recall a Popular Science article on more ambitious research along the same lines as well. Remember that a mere half century ago, computers were clumsy and the size of a room; consider where medical biotechnology will be another half century from now. Today's proto-interfaces to your biology will have shrunk from clunky electronics visible to the naked eye to devices the size of a cell - to devices made of assembled macromolecules, just like your cells, but better designed.

The eventual future of medicine is not perfect control over biology - although that is a step along the way - but rather an industry producing machinery to better serve and improve upon the purpose of biology. It will be just as complex as biology, but wholly designed by humans rather than evolution and happenstance. It will be far more reliable and cost-effective, in the same way that a plastic fork beats out a pointed stick. It will be built upon the very early work in nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing taking place today.

Your biology is the house you live in: why live in a cave over a wood cabin, and why live in a wood cabin when a modern house in the city is just as affordable? There is a lot to be said for the obvious future of nanomedicine and computation; we will have the choice of augmentation and ultimately replacement for the tissues of our body, with every step bringing greater capacity, reliability and life.

Why live in a body that can grow old and become cancerous when you don't have to? That will be a serious question not too many decades from now.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, futurism, transhumanism

Posted by Reason at 9:43 PM
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Anne C. attended the recent Future Salon debate between Aubrey de Grey (for more healthy life and the defeat of aging) and William Hurlburt (for the continuation of death on a massive scale) and wrote up an excellent account. A couple of high points from the report:

Aubrey de Grey began by noting two mutually exclusive positions (associated with science and ethics) that tend to come into play when people state opposition to longevity research:

Position 1: "I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is feasible, because it is clearly not desirable."

Position 2: "I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is desirable, because it is clearly not feasible."

Two argumentative frameworks tend to be associated with the above two positions, according to de Grey: the "Argument from Superficial Authority", and the "Argument from Personal Incredulity".

My impression is that people taking Position 1 most often tend to argue from superficial authority. I would imagine that this includes people who invoke "Nature", the words of conservative bioethicists, or possibly their deity of choice when attempting to explain why seeking to extend the healthy lifespan is a bad idea.

People taking Position 2, on the other hand, tend to argue from personal incredulity -- that is, they consider it a foregone conclusion that human lifespan is basically fixed at a particular point, and that our chance of moving this point outward is so small as to be functionally negligible.

I - and I'm sure any of you who take the time to talk to folk about healthy life extension - have seen a great deal of Position 2, the argument from personal incredulity. It's a real challenge to talk points with someone who has already fully vested their position in "no." In terms of making headway in the marketplace of ideas, I think Position 2 is a bigger problem than Position 1, the argument from superficial authority. Superficial authorities - pro-death advocates, bioconservatives and the like - seem to more readily understand that significant healthy life extension is, in fact, plausible for the near future. I'm not sure how much of that stems from the very human action of bolstering a threat in order to strengthen one's own position, but there you have it. Deathist bioethicists are often just as convincing as advocates for healthy life extension when it comes to the plausibility of and timeline for healthy life extension technologies.

Technorati tags: life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:51 PM
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A short news piece on cancer stem cell work caught my eye today:

According to the "stem cell theory", only a minute number of cells within each tumour can multiply enough to keep the tumour growing and spreading. The vast majority of the cells cannot do this so were viewed as passengers. The Melbourne researchers, however, found that many tumours are fuelled to grow by a substantial portion of the tumour cells - sometimes even the majority. "(This) suggests that the proportion of cells that can propagate tumours was previously grossly underestimated," the institute said. Determining whether most cells in a tumour, or only a rare population, can maintain its growth has important implications for therapy, they say.

Very true: we'll all be very lucky indeed if it turns out that a majority of cancers are sustained by small, distinct, characteristic populations of cells. Scientists are becoming very good at safely destroying distinct populations of cells, and any research at the extremely well-funded intersection of cancer and stem cell research will move rapidly.

I chased the news above back to the scientific paper in question:

The cancer stem cell hypothesis postulates that tumor growth is driven by a rare subpopulation of tumor cells. Much of the supporting evidence for this intriguing idea is derived from xenotransplantation experiments in which human leukemia cells are grown in immunocompromised mice. We show that, when lymphomas and leukemias of mouse origin are transplanted into histocompatible mice, a very high frequency (at least 1 in 10) of the tumor cells can seed tumor growth. We suggest that the low frequency of tumor-sustaining cells observed in xenotransplantation studies may reflect the limited ability of human tumor cells to adapt to growth in a foreign (mouse) milieu.

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Determining whether the growth of various tumors is sustained by most of the tumor cells or by a rare subpopulation has important ramifications for the design of novel therapies. Therefore, the cancer stem cell hypothesis merits more rigorous tests. For human tumors, ultimately this will require transfer of tumor cells into mice installed with all the requisite human support cells.

Unfortunately, we're likely to see more of this sort of thing in the next couple of years; there are good reasons to believe that the cancer stem cell hypothesis will not hold for more than a few types of cancer.

Cancers are characterised by extremely rapid mutation and adaptation as the result of their fast growth and aggressive cell replication. This is one of the reasons cancers are so hard to treat with more brute force techniques such as radiation and chemotherapy - cancer cell populations very quickly evolve resistance to most of what can (reasonably) safely be tried as a therapy in this arena. There is no reason per se that this rapid mutation cannot include the mutation of normal cells into stem cells or stem-like states sufficiently empowered to support the cancer. It is possible that many combinations of a small number of mutations exist to produce cells sufficiently stem-like to support a cancer - and are therefore likely to be created in a rapidly mutating cancer.

We can hope, however. Sometimes we get lucky, and an age-related condition really does have narrow, distinctive roots waiting to be discovered. At the present blistering pace of research, I don't see uncertainty surrounding cancer stem cells continuing for many more years.

Technorati tags: cancer research, stem cell research

Posted by Reason at 9:00 PM
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The Methuselah Foundation is looking to the community with a contest to design the new Foundation logo:

Can you design a logo for the Methuselah Foundation? Would you like to see your work leading the charge in the fight to defeat age-related degeneration? We are upgrading our websites and outreach material, and as a part of this effort need a distinctive new logo that encapsulates and conveys the meaning of our mission and the essence of the Foundation.

The Methuselah Foundation has been built by the dedication of volunteers and donors of all stripes, and so we reach out to the same community in search of a new logo. Think you have good idea and a designer's hand? Fire up the scanner and send in your work!

Entries will be judged by Foundation chair Dr. de Grey with help from graphic design experts. The winner and two runners up will each receive an autographed copy of Dr. de Grey's book "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Biotechnologies That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime", which is published by St. Martin's Press on September 4, 2007.

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The closing date for this contest is August 15th, 2007. ... Best of luck, and tell your friends!

I don't think I can add much to that beyond repeating that it is the community of volunteers, supporters and generous donors who lead the Foundation to success in fundraising, education, research and advocacy. It is a real demonstration of the will to achieve far longer, healthier lives in the world today - and a measure of the potential for growth and greater goals in the years ahead.

Technorati tags: activism, life extension

Posted by Reason at 9:53 PM
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Healthy life extension technology that can grant extra years or even reverse aging is on the horizon. Aging is no more than biochemical damage, and damage can be repaired. We can visualize the necessary science today, and directed work on the fundamentals is taking place at low levels of funding.

We are a fair way from the goal, standing on the ground where the ramp has yet to be built, the workers yet to be gathered, the crowds yet to arrive. Everything accomplished, every dollar given by those of us active today will snowball over the years ahead - now is the fulcrum time for growth in the research community and public support for serious longevity research. Every person to step forward catches the notice of more eager helpers, and success attracts success - witness the growth of the Methuselah Foundation from a gleam in Dave Gobel's eye to more than $8 million pledged, accomplished by the early volunteers here where the ramp is to be built.

Here is another slope, running in the opposite direction: the cost of biomedical research. Biotechnology is tied to advances in computational hardware - and what a slope that is! It is a slope that leads to sequencing genomes for a handful of dollars apiece, simulations of laboratory animals and biochemical interventions at a fraction of the cost of real world research, more data on our biochemistry than all the present stored data in the world combined, and much more. Everything of note in medicine will be faster, cheaper and better, riding on the engine of ever faster computers.

Switching back to growth trends, let's think about your net worth. If you're sensible and look ahead, live within your means and diversify your investments, then the passage of time will be kind to your wealth. Compounded gains are the path to riches - but only if you don't tap into your saved capital along the way.

Here's another trend: the decline in your remaining life expectancy and quality of life with advancing age. Aging is an ugly reality. Would you rather stick your head in the sand, or do something to help make the situation better?

The obvious action when it comes to making the situation better is to devote some of your resources to support plausible longevity research, or those groups working to encourage plausible longevity research through advocacy and engagement with the scientific community. But when and how much would you give? Look at all those crossing curves and trendlines:

• a dollar given today is not saved, and so cannot be two dollars given ten years from now
• a dollar given a decade from now will result in more research accomplished than a dollar given today
• a dollar given today will advance the cause today, rather than a decade from now

But on to the deliberately provocative question from the title: when would you donate 90% of your net worth to advance longevity and rejuvenation research? If you care more about posterity than your own survival, would you wait as late as possible? Or does this critical time for the present nascent longevity research community mean that 1% of that same "late as possible" investment in research and support would better serve the future if donated now? If you care deeply about your own survival, where do the curves and trends cross for greatest effect in your opinion?

There is no right answer in consideration of personal economic choices, but these are all questions we should ask ourselves. Wealth at any level is worthless to the dead, and being alive and healthy allows you to generate more wealth: logically we should all be willing to devote most of our net worth to longevity research at the most effective time. If we can buy time with money - and we can begin to now in earnest, for the first time in history, by supporting the research that will lead to the first healthy life extension medicine - then we should all be in that market.

That all said, and as I'm sure you're all aware, it's hard to be right and optimal in financial matters. Life is uncertainty, and risk is everywhere. What is the risk of being wrong in your estimations, and how can you hedge that risk? No-one wants to devote their wealth to a vital cause, only to see later that it was the wrong time for best effect. One way to reduce the risk is to spread out your support for research across time; you won't be absolutely efficient, but then it would probably require a great deal of luck or knowledge to be so. Another is to do the research necessary to satisfy your own economic calculations - that now, for the now that interests you, is the right time.

A final thought: if we all hold back for later, there won't be a longevity research community of any size and accomplishment later. People have to get the ball rolling if we're to see construction of the ramp underway.

Technorati tags: economics, life extension, personal finance

Posted by Reason at 9:08 PM
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Thoughts from FuturePundit:

Some oppose the development of therapies to reverse aging because they argue that aging is a beautiful and dignified natural process. In this Panglossian view of aging the silver in one's hair is akin to a measure of accumulated wealth of wisdom and understanding. But the reality is a much uglier accumulation of losses - most notably including cognitive losses.

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Aging is an accumulation of damage and loses. We should defeat aging. The breakdown and decay of our metabolisms is a bad thing. We need rejuvenation therapies. Such therapies are on the horizon but we should push harder to pull that prospect closer in our future.

Quite true. Aging is the unpleasant slope down into a real chamber of horrors: frailty, pain, the inability to care for yourself, and death. That the benefits of experience come with time is no reason to whitewash the ugly reality - that the systems that form you, the individual, are slowly breaking down as you read this.

But we live in the early years of a revolution in biotechnology and its inherent possibilities for regeneration and rejuvenation. Aging is merely biochemical damage, and the laws of physics show us nothing to say that we cannot learn to repair that damage - like all our technologies, the medicine that will put a halt to aging is just a matter of putting the molecules in the place you want them to be.

You do know that you can presently help to support and advance medical research that could plausibly put us on the way to halting aging within our lifetimes, right? The fight to cure aging is not a mythical beast - it's underway today.

Technorati tags: aging, life extension

Posted by Reason at 8:14 PM
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A slow and presently irreversible process takes place inside your body, day in and day out: vital proteins are gummed and shackled into obstructive and sometimes toxic compounds by sugars and related chemicals from food. These byproducts of your metabolism are called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs, and are one root cause of aging. Year after year, this biochemical junk builds up; some forms accumulate faster than they can be broken down, and others your body is incapable of removing. Eventually, the levels of AGEs rise to the point of degrading the biological systems your life depends upon. Here is an informative review paper on how this all comes to pass:

The road to advanced glycation end products: a mechanistic perspective:

Protein glycation is a slow natural process involving the chemical modification of the reactive amino and guanidine functions in amino acids by sugars and carbohydrates-derived reactive carbonyls. Its deleterious consequences are obvious in the case of long-lived proteins in aged people and are exacerbated by the high blood concentration of sugars in diabetic patients. The non-enzymatic glycation of proteins occurs through a wide range of concurrent processes comprising condensation, rearrangement, fragmentation, and oxidation reactions. Using a few well established intermediates such as Schiff base, Amadori product and reactive a-dicarbonyls as milestones and the results of in vitro glycation investigations, an overall detailed mechanistic analysis of protein glycation is presented for the first time. The pathways leading to several advanced glycation end products (AGEs) such as (carboxymethyl)lysine, pentosidine, and glucosepane are outlined, whereas other AGEs useful as potential biomarkers of glycation are only briefly mentioned. The current stage of the development of glycation inhibitors has been reviewed with an emphasis on their mechanism of action.

It is noteworthy that glycation in the body is comparatively well-understood at this time, and disappointing that so few initiatives are presently underway to develop the means of safely breaking down and removing AGEs before they rise to the level of causing damage.

The review above, for example, focuses on slowing the process of glycation; as for any therapy aimed only at slowing the processes of accumulated damage that cause aging, this will prove less valuable and effective than a therapy aimed at repair. Repair can be performed over and over again, and the underlying medical technology is not necessarily any harder to develop in the first place. This is a good specific example of a general problem in the approach taken by much of the mainstream at the present time.

Technorati tags: aging, medical research