An interesting exchange of views on longevity research is taking place on the GRG mailing list, as I noted when I posted some of Robert Bradbury's thoughts on the matter a few days ago.

Derya Unatmaz is the researcher behind the Biosingularity blog, and a good illustration of the younger generation of scientists: optimistic, realistic and thoughtful on the topic of longevity research and healthy life extension. You might recall that Unatmaz was interviewed by Attila Chordash of Pimm earlier this year:

I am going to be blunt and say that it is nonsense that we have to make an argument for life! ... Treating or controlling indefinitely all chronic deadly human diseases should be achievable within the next 25-30 years ... I anticipate continuous body regeneration soon after that within the next 40 years.

Here is a mail to the GRG list from Unatmaz, reproduced with permission:

I fully agree that there is no biological reason why human life can not be extended indefinitely and at some point in future (hopefully near one) in my opinion it is almost a certainty this will be achieved.

The point that I disagree with (if I understood correctly) is that the current biological research somehow can be directed, made less wasteful and if the money were to be spent "wisely" we can then achieve the above goal much quicker.

Research by its nature, especially in biological sciences because of enormous complexity, is very wasteful. This is simply because we have not yet identified all the components of the system we are studying, let alone have the capability to put it together from it's individual pieces. I think this is a common mistake made, especially by non-biologists, that the scientists working on biological systems can be more efficient by working on the right solutions and if there was a top down approach on defining the areas to research then we can figure out the solution to aging pretty quickly. This far far from the reality.

It is true that having more money available is critical and advances surely will move much quicker with more funding available, especially nowadays with declining federal support. However, amount of information generated reaches a plateau at some point no matter how much more money is available and you simply start to increase the waste to productive knowledge ratio. Why is that? Because we are still trying to figure out how the system works, and solving difficult problems depend on development of future technologies, which we don't really know where they will come from. There is also limited pool of talent that can work on these problems. For example, as Robert B. pointed out, we would have needed trillions of dollars to sequence all the genomes we have sequenced now if we attempted this just 15 years ago, that would not be the best way to spend your money. You have to let the technology mature and cost come down to reasonable levels before you can ramp up with such advance!

In addition, you simply cannot predict a priori where the major breakthroughs will come from. If they were so obvious, they wouldn't be breakthrough in the first place. Somebody makes a discovery studying fruit fly basic RNA regulation mechanism then that discovery just opens up a whole new frontier of technologies and capabilities (such as RNA interference). Somebody tries to understand how viruses work, then that allows ways to deliver genes into cells using viruses as hosts (retroviral vectors for gene therapy). I can go an with these examples ad nauseam.

My point is this: if you have a lot of money to spend and you want to make a difference in aging research, the best way is still the way NIH grant system works, i.e. distribute your money based on scientific merit to the best scientists and labs you can find who are working in related areas. Don't limit your focus narrowly, they could be working on yeast, worms, turtles, or humans, you or I simply don't know where the next discovery will come from and how it will impact human longevity.

You give out 100 grants to 100 scientists with million dollar each, if 10 of these generate a breakthrough that would be considered spectacular success in research. You can of course look at it as wasting 90-95% of your money, but that's the price you pay to make the major technological discoveries that will leapfrog us forward. What one has to be careful is not to spend too much on brute force approaches in areas where the technology is still not mature (as I gave the sequencing example above). Once you have cost effective ways to look at millions of parameters parallel, as information and other technologies co-advance, then it becomes highly cost effective way of discovery based science, where you look for things without preconceived hypothesis. That's risky science but the payoff can be very big. This can be a especially good area for private funding since even NIH grants are too much dependent on hypothesis and directed research.

Howard Hughes Institute is a great example. Only the best of the best scientists become HHMI investigators. They spend 300-400 million dollars a year, no strings attached, scientists decide what they want to do. In the end you have several breakthroughs every year from HHMI researchers that become the locomotive of biological research. Directed research decided especially by people who are not on the bench doing the science is a bad idea and a great way to waste your money, in my opinion. There is of course merit to highly focused and directed research and that is in development of already identified products. But then that's why we have a whole profit-driven industry for that.... my two cents.

As I see it, this is a perspective on the knowledge problem, but I think it conflates the following:

• an attribute fundamental to research: risk based on lack of specific knowledge
• issues of investment: risk of investing poorly based on having less knowledge of the field than those who work in it
• an attribute of central control of resources: the inability to plan

Scientific research is no more inherently risky or unplannable than starting a company; both are forms of research for those doing the work. Will business plan X work to bring in money; will understanding and intervening in biomechanism A help slow or repair aging. It's much the same thing - and so investment is just as open to planning, risk management and the setting of goals.

The real problem with massive expenditures on research that come from government - as opposed to massive expenditures on research that are sourced from private funds - is an utter lack of accountability for results at all levels of the process. Where there is no accountability, there are no real goals, and thus progress is incidental and slow - relying as it does on individual drive and goodwill rather than more pressing economic incentives.

This is another fundamental difference between the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence and the mainstream of gerontology - for the most part, the mainstream relies on government funding, has not set goals, has no accountability for progress, and hence has no pressure to produce. You can throw as much money as you like into a system with no incentives, but you're not going to get much out it. The NIH is like NASA, or any other huge, unaccountable arm of government - a huge and wasteful sinkhole for resources and talent that could have been achieving great progress if held accountable for their work and inventivized to set a path towards definitive goals.

Technorati tags: aging, economics, gerontology, life extension, research

Posted by Reason at 9:29 PM
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"Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime" is out in bookstores, real and virtual, all too soon. The book by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae is one of a series of initiatives aiming to illustrate the plausibility of near-term healthy life extension to enough people - and gain enough widespread support and understanding - to spark a revolution in research.

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

The goal of greatly extending the healthy, vigorous human life span through repairing the damage that causes aging is very plausible. It is plausible to attain that goal within a few decades of work by a large research establishment. But that establishment doesn't yet exist - resources and people must be gathered and persuaded.

So: one step at a time. We must raise support, and we must help make each new initiative to that end more successful than it would have been if we stood to one side and merely watched. What can we ordinary folk do to help make this book successful? Publishing a book is best thought of as two entirely separate activities: a big gala party up front, a burst of publicity and sharing, followed by a long conversation and building of community across years. The publishing industry is all about the party, while the craft of advocacy and activism is all about the years afterwards.

But let's talk about the party, first things first: how can we help to get this book out there and talked about? Well:

• The obvious: pre-order a copy at Amazon.com, as Amazon rankings matter in this gala process
• Tell your friends, write about the book - make some noise!
• Help circulate the popular videos of Aubrey de Grey's presentations
• Post the excerpt at Amazon.com to the noticeboards you frequent

Then a second line of thought began to form in my mind - idly at first, just as a notion. The real issue, surely, was not which metabolic processes cause aging damage in the body, but the damage itself. Forty-year-olds have fewer healthy years to look forward to than twenty-year-olds because of differences in their molecular and cellular composition, not because of the mechanisms that gave rise to those differences. How far could I narrow down the field of candidate causes of aging by focusing on the molecular damage itself?

Well, I thought, it can’t hurt to make a list . . .

There are mutations in our chromosomes, of course, which cause cancer. There is glycation, the warping of proteins by glucose. There are the various kinds of junk that accumulate outside the cell (“extracellular aggregates”): beta-amyloid, the lesser-known transthyretin, and possibly other substances of the same general sort. There is also the unwholesome goo that builds up within the cell (“intracellular aggregates”), such as lipofuscin. There’s cellular senescence, the “aging” of individual cells, which puts them into a state of arrested growth and causes them to produce chemical signals dangerous to their neighbors. And there’s the depletion of the stem cell pools essential to healing and maintenance of tissue.

And of course, there are mitochondrial mutations, which seem to disrupt cellular biochemistry by increasing oxidative stress. I had for a few years felt optimistic that scientists could solve this problem by copying mitochondrial DNA from its vulnerable spot at “ground zero,” within the free-radical generating mitochondria, into the bomb shelter of the cell nucleus, where damage to DNA is vastly rarer.

Now, if only we had solutions like that for all of this other stuff, I mused, we could forget about the “butterfly effect” of interfering with basic metabolic processes, and just take the damage ITSELF out of the picture.

Hmm.

Well, I thought, why the bloody hell not?

Why the bloody hell not, indeed. The aging research establishment needs a kick to the rear and the drive for near-term goals sorely lacking in past years - how else is progress to be made on an aggressive timeline? Over at the Immortality Institute some folk have other good ideas for helping things along:

I contacted of my favorite libraries offering to donate a copy of Ending Aging. I mentioned that Aubrey will be on Good Morning America on September 17th. The library has two sites. After the librarians consulted each other, they checked out the Amazon site then decided that they would match my book contribution, by purchasing another copy or copies so both libraries would have.

They also want to put a display with the book and info about Aubrey and his work in the front of both libraries.

Also at the Methuselah Foundation forums:

I put together a Powerpoint brief (Attached) for the librarians to help them be informed, and they can use in the display.

Be sure to check out the Powerpoint attached to that post. As is noted, Aubrey de Grey will indeed be on the talk show circuit in September; whatever we can do to increase the buzz before then is grist for the mill.

The more people who learn about de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), the more support we'll see for plausible research to repair the damage of aging. More support means faster progress, and faster progress means a better chance for all of us to live much longer, much healthier lives, bringing an end to the frailty and age-related diseases that presently kill 100,000 people every day.

Technorati tags: activism, advocacy, book, life extension, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:12 PM
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I noticed today that Rejuvenation Research, the journal of real, actual anti-aging medicine based on the repair of age-related cellular and molecular damage, is going bimonthly next year.

That's a strong continuation of the interest shown in this publication on the scientific path towards reversing aging. Last year, editor Aubrey de Grey noted:

The 2005 impact factors were announced yesterday, including the inaugural impact factor for Rejuvenation Research. I'm pleased to tell you that we obtained the very agreeable ranking of 8.571. This puts us at No. 1 in the "Gerontology and Geriatrics" category by a large margin, even including Aging Cell at 6.013 (which, for whatever reason, is not listed in that category). For a wider comparison, we would be No. 20 in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and No. 17 in Cell Biology, ahead of such prominent titles as Human Mol Genet, NAR, FASEB J, MCB, MBC, JCS, and Oncogene. ... Moreover, a rough calculation based on available data suggests that this is not a fluke arising from our conveniently small denominator this year -- we will be around the same level next year.

This year, indeed, the impact factor is around the same:

We are pleased to announce that our new impact factor is 8.353 - 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports

A great showing, and congratulations are due once more:

Aubrey de Grey, at the helm of this multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, seeks to understand and ultimately defy the mechanisms of aging. He was featured in a recent 60 Minutes segment titled "The Quest for Immortality"; in a cover story on de Grey, MIT's Technology Review said, "His tireless efforts...have put him among the most prominent proponents of antiaging science in the world. ... De Grey has become more than a man; he is a movement."

Dr. de Grey and his outstanding international editorial board have the opportunity to further explore and advance the science, and perhaps achieve the ultimate goal of slowing or reversing the process of aging.

Rejuvenation Research, the Methuselah Foundation, the SENS conferences - these are all seeds for a mighty research community to come. The future I want to live to see is one in which a massive and thriving longevity research infrastructure exists, flush with the will and resources to match the cancer establishment of today - many overlapping and competing groups taking advantage of and driving the advance of biotechnology in order to defeat age-related suffering and death.

This is very plausible. How fast it comes to pass is up to us, as the speed of this progress depends on our vocal and material support. Do you want to live a much longer, healthier life, untroubled by the conditions that killed your ancestors? Then get up and help do something about it.

Technorati tags: aging, gerontology, life extension

Posted by Reason at 9:34 PM
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Following up on a recent post, I should note that Ouroboros weighed in on the latest Wnt research:

As Wnt activity increases during aging, muscle cell progenitors switch from a myogenic (i.e., regenerative) mode to a fibrogenic (i.e., inflammatory) mode; this can be prevented with specific blocking antibodies. It is easy to that the resulting increased fibrogenesis, at the cost of regenerative capacity, could cause muscular weakness and sarcopenia in late life.

Here's a few thoughts from elsewhere in the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago:

What does this mean for us? Well, if you block the wnt pathway you could very well promote tissue healing. The truism that you heal slower when you're older would no longer hold true. More interesting however is that many of the obvious signs of aging are due to imperfect cellular maintenance--what if selective wnt pathway suppression could change that? The wnt pathway is crucial so this is something that you're want to only block on a selective basis but it's a very interesting area of research.

This latest round of Wnt-related discussion has focused on aging and cancer, but the last round was all regeneration.

Wnt and Innate Regeneration:

vertebrate regeneration is under the control of the powerful Wnt signaling system: Activating it overcomes the mysterious barrier to regeneration in animals like chicks that can't normally replace missing limbs while inactivating it in animals known to be able to regenerate their limbs (frogs, zebrafish, and salamanders) shuts down their ability to replace missing legs and tails. ... In this simple experiment, we removed part of the chick embryo's wing, activated Wnt signaling, and got the whole limb back - a beautiful and perfect wing

Continuous Tooth Regeneration:

mice have retained incipient potential for continuous tooth generation and that it can be unlocked by activating Wnt signalling. It is reasonable to conjecture that the potential for continuous tooth generation may also have been retained in humans

Delving Into Mammalian Regeneration:

We've found that we can influence wound healing with wnts or other proteins that allow the skin to heal in a way that has less scarring and includes all the normal structures of the skin, such as hair follicles and oil glands, rather than just a scar ... By introducing more wnt proteins to the wound, the researchers found that they could take advantage of the embryonic genes to promote hair-follicle growth, thus making skin regenerate instead of just repair. Conversely by blocking wnt proteins, they also found that they could stop the production of hair follicles in healed skin.

Human biochemistry is packed with systems like this - vital and influential in regeneration, cancer, aging and other equally important processes and systems. Biology is complex in ways that only an evolved system can be; evolution encourages reuse and multiple purposes for the same component. That in turn leads to balances and trade-offs in longevity, health and evolutionary fitness.

More importantly for us, this complexity makes reengineering our biochemistry a tough job indeed; we're only just getting started, and it's already enough to keep the bulk of the world's medical research community occupied. They won't be finished up any time soon. That's one of the reasons I believe repair strategies like SENS to be a far superior path forward to healthy life extension. Don't struggled through the endless morass of bringing change to the complex systems of our biology: rather, learn how those systems work, and how to repair the specific types of damage that lead to aging. That's a monster of a job in and of itself, but a job that can be achieved rapidly enough to benefit those reading this today.

Technorati tags: medical research, Wnt

Posted by Reason at 9:13 PM
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Robert Bradbury posts a great deal of very interesting material to the Gerontology Research Group list. Like Aubrey de Grey, he has a "get it done" mindset that focuses on the end goal of healthy life extension, and raised money to make an effort back in the 90s - all of which is somewhat rare in aging research, sad to say. Not enough decisive action, not enough attention to raising funds and changing minds, and far too little straight talk.

It's always worthwhile to note that present best efforts are the next step on a long stairway; looking back, one can always find analagous previous best efforts. Progress is a matter of each round of initiative and fundraising producing greater impact and results than past efforts.

Just recently, Bradbury responded to a fellow looking for advice on fundraising for longevity research in the face of an adverse reactions from potential funding sources ("longevity research is bullshit", "no-one knows why we age," and so forth), from which these thoughts are excerpted:

For example there are books like Caleb Finch's "Longevity, Senescence and the Genome" (922 pages, 160 of which are the bibliography) which clearly documents variances in longevity of many species and goes into some of the causes of aging and why some species may live longer than others. There is Steven Austad's "Why We Age" (244 pages) which explains the evolutionary biology of aging.

Aging and longevity research is not "bullshit", but it should be realized that for a number of reasons one can view "aging research" as a situation similar to that of the 1986 movie with Tom Hanks and Shelly Long, "The Money Pit".

One thing that Aubrey has done a good job of pointing out in various ways is that indefinite longevity does *not* violate any physical laws. And as Steve Austad is good at pointing out (based on Medawar & Williams) there are reasons that "nature" has not handed us a genome which allows us to live indefinitely. And as I like to point out achieving the "impossible" tends to be a matter of timing. No amount of money in the world could buy you your personal genome sequence in 1990, yet today the $1000 personal genome sequence is on the "to be developed" list of the NHGRI (at NIH) (as well as a number of companies who see it as a $$$ milk machine).

I will be more than happy to stand in front of anyone claiming that pursuing "indefinite longevity" is "bullshit" and rip them to shreds (there are some images that were probably cut from Sopranos episodes that come to mind here...).

...

It is useful to keep in mind that Larry Ellison, through the Ellison Medical Foundation, has probably personally dumped between $100 and $200 million into aging research and it could easily be argued that there is little to show for it. One of the key reasons for that, IMO, is that the money was spent within a "research" framework rather than a business (solution) framework. If we had days for discussion we could examine how much of the money ($500-800 M/year???) being spent by the NIA is being spent "effectively".

One way to prevent money from being spent wastefully is to have a clear goal up front to *produce* a deliverable -- where the deliverable is *not* a set of words on a piece of paper (the byproduct of most "research"). There should be a well defined set of steps to get from the current science to that deliverable. It could be argued that a lot of the "sunk" funding into aging and longevity research was spent before the science was as robust as it currently is so claims regarding "longevity bullshit" (which even I may have made a decade ago) are no longer valid.

...

I strongly urge you to *not* specify "research of (or on) longevity". The science and theoretical basis of "longevity" is well understood. The mechanics of how it is accomplished in specific species (tortoises vs. sequoia trees) is less well understood. And you could easily dump tens to hundreds of millions of $ into researching how each long lived species achieves longevity (bats, elephants, whales, tortoises, lobsters, geoducks, etc.) and have very little to show with respect to extending human longevity.

Technorati tags: aging, gerontology, medical research

Posted by Reason at 9:44 PM
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The latest Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology contains a collection of interesting papers on the biology of aging. Interestingly, nothing on the role of oxidative damage or mitochondria in aging, but many of the other major areas of present mainstream biogerontology are covered.

Endocrine regulation of ageing

Over the past 15 years it has become clear that mutations in genes that regulate endocrine signalling pathways can prolong lifespan. Lifespan can be increased by altered endocrine signalling in a group of cells or a single tissue, which indicates that crosstalk between tissues functions to coordinate ageing of the organism. These endocrine pathways might serve as targets for the manipulation of the ageing process and prevention of age-related diseases.

The role of nuclear architecture in genomic instability and ageing

Eukaryotes come in many shapes and sizes, yet one thing that they all seem to share is a decline in vitality and health over time - a process known as ageing. If there are conserved causes of ageing, they may be traced back to common biological structures that are inherently difficult to maintain throughout life. One such structure is chromatin, the DNA-protein complex that stabilizes the genome and dictates gene expression. Studies in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have pointed to chromatin reorganization as a main contributor to ageing in that species, which raises the possibility that similar processes underlie ageing in more complex organisms.

How stem cells age and why this makes us grow old

Recent data suggest that we age, in part, because our self-renewing stem cells grow old as a result of heritable intrinsic events, such as DNA damage, as well as extrinsic forces, such as changes in their supporting niches. Mechanisms that suppress the development of cancer, such as senescence and apoptosis, which rely on telomere shortening and the activities of p53 and p16INK4a, may also induce an unwanted consequence: a decline in the replicative function of certain stem-cell types with advancing age. This decreased regenerative capacity appears to contribute to some aspects of mammalian ageing, with new findings pointing to a 'stem-cell hypothesis' for human age-associated conditions such as frailty, atherosclerosis and type 2 diabetes.

We are complex networks of interacting, self-modifying, slowly damaged systems. Scientists are still in the process of describing human biochemistry in enough detail to manipulate it in ways we would like. Understanding and intervening in the aging process is a task and a half, that much is sure. But what else could be the rational response to suffering and death on a massive scale? We can see that something can be done, and so must act.

Technorati tags: aging, medical research

Posted by Reason at 9:41 PM
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Every age-related neurodegenerative condition presents researchers with a vast and complex problem to solve; biochemistry is a real challenge, even in this age of rapidly advancing biotechnology, as illustrated by the vast sums required to build scientific infrastructure and win progress from the mysteries of the brain. Even seemingly simple questions remain unanswered, and there are never enough resources to explore every aspect of a biochemical process as well as we'd like.

Here are a couple of pieces illustrative of that state of research: so much to do, small but significant victories in the form of new knowledge, and the vast spaces yet to be explored.

Study Puts 1 Alzheimer's Theory in Doubt:

In prior studies, examination of the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's found some defects in an enzyme produced by the cytochrome c oxidase ( COX) gene, which is important for mitochondrial energy production.

In addition, so-called "free radicals," which cause oxidative stress, are produced in the cell's mitochondria, Moraes noted. "It was assumed that when you have a problem with the COX gene, you have more free radicals being formed," he said.

To see how the gene worked, Moraes's group removed the COX10 gene in mice engineered to develop Alzheimer's disease. "We expected to see that these animals would have more amyloid plaques," Moraes said. "But we got the opposite result," he said. The animals without the COX10 gene actually developed fewer brain plaques than those with the gene, Moraes said. "Those animals also had less free radicals," he said.

...

"The results are consistent with other evidence that reducing free radicals can limit Alzheimer amyloid plaque pathology," Cole added. "Examples include reducing caloric intake or increasing antioxidant intake. So, even though clinical trials to treat Alzheimer's with [antioxidant] vitamin E have been disappointing, earlier and more effective reduction of free radical damage could mimic the success of this genetic approach and should still be pursued,"

Recovering Lost Memory

Fischer and his colleagues found that while environmental enrichment did not substantially replace the lost hippocampal neurons, it significantly increased the number of connections, or synapses, between the hippocampal neurons that remained. This increase in connectivity, apparently compensating somehow for the previous death of neurons, led the mice to recover the memories that had apparently disappeared with the loss of the neurons.

...

Amazingly, the researchers identified a chemical that -- in mice -- mimicked the effect of environmental enrichment. They found that the environmental enrichment modifies the function of proteins that regulate the activity of genes; a substance that blocks an enzyme called HDAC (histone deacetylase) seemed to have a similar impact on the gene activity involved, and tests subsequently showed that this HDAC blocker could allow the recovery of lost memories.

If common forms of neurodegeneration can be repaired from the state of memory and function loss - if memories are stored in ways that persist through the early stages of Alzheimer's, for example - hundreds of millions more lives might be saved at the future cusp between merely advanced medicine and the ability to rejuvenate the aged.

The same would be true if everyone adopted the practice of calorie restriction, by the look of the human studies presently taking place, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. Most folk would rather not think about the future, or trust themselves to advances in science; while those advances are certainly on the way, it doesn't seem wise to bet on their arrival soon enough to rescue you from any particular fate.

Technorati tags: medical research, neurodegeneration

Posted by Reason at 10:31 PM
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The everyday philanthropists of the Methuselah Foundation's Three Hundred will be getting an early look at signed copies of Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae's "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime". From an email presently sitting in my inbox:

As a major supporter of the Methuselah Foundation, you are set to receive a free advance copy of the new book, "Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime" by Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D, and Michael Rae.

I have nearly 100 copies of "Ending Aging" sitting here in my living room right now, all hardcover and signed by Aubrey de Grey. The Methuselah Foundation would like to make sure that all "300" members receive their books as soon as possible.

UPDATE: a picture of the living room in question and thoughts on the book from Anne C.

And the Amazon editorial syopsis:

A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity’s greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging.

Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely -technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future - is now within reach.

In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine’s fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

Just so.

Technorati tags: aging, book, life extension, SENS

Posted by Reason at 9:24 PM
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With the addition of a generous donation from entrepreneur Brian Cartmell, the Methuselah Foundation now has seven six-figure pledges to its name, the other foward-looking supporters of healthy life extension research being Gary Hudson, Brad A. Armstrong, David Fisher, the Scott B. and Anne P. Appleby Charitable Trust, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research and one anonymous philanthropist. Above that, two seven-figure pledges, from Peter Thiel and an anonymous philanthropist. Below that, 140 or so $25,000 pledges from members of The Three Hundred, of which twelve have donated five-figure sums already.

I point this out because I realized it wasn't all that long ago that the five-figure pledges were beginning to roll in to the Foundation on a regular basis, and I marked it as a real sign of progress at the time. Six figures are the new five figures as the Methuselah Foundation continues to grow - we should all be pleased to see resources attracted at an increasing rate to the best of efforts to defeat age-related degeneration, suffering and death.

The Methuselah Foundation has a real shot at growing into a large, sustaining, influential and shaping body in aging research, steering not just its own research funds to best effect but lighting the way for millions and then billions of dollars more from other organizations. Convincing the mainstream of research funding that repair of aging is in fact very plausible and comparatively close at hand, given large-scale funding - now there's a goal. Every boulder is a pebble at the head of a larger avalanche, and revolutions start with a single idea spoken out loud and single dollar on the table to fund the first step.

The stranglehold of conservatism on a field of science is broken by obtaining enough independent resources to move down the path ahead - at which point the rest of the field will follow, loudly declaiming that they knew you were right all along. Which I'm happy to suffer, provided they get started soonest; there is a great deal of work to be done if we are to live in good health for as long as we'd like to.

Technorati tags: activism, aging, life extension, science

Posted by Reason at 9:11 PM
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I, and many of you folk no doubt, rest my optimism for the potential of longevity medicine atop our hard-won knowledge of physics. The physics of molecules and atoms, the building blocks of our biology is very sound, very proven - and it tells us that there is no reason why we can't build cells from scratch and nanomedical robots to repair the molecular damage of aging in those cells. The path is clear, we can read the nearest waysigns, but we have some walking to do. As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it:

Consider the statement "It is physically possible to construct diamondoid nanomachines which repair biological cells."  Some people will tell you that molecular nanotechnology is "pseudoscience" because it has not been verified by experiment - no one has ever seen a nanofactory, so how can believing in their possibility be scientific?

Drexler, I think, would reply that his extrapolations of diamondoid nanomachines are based on standard physics, which is to say, scientific generalizations. Therefore, if you say that nanomachines cannot work, you must be inventing new physics.  Or to put it more sharply:  If you say that a simulation of a molecular gear is inaccurate, if you claim that atoms thus configured would behave differently from depicted, then either you know a flaw in the simulation algorithm or you're inventing your own laws of physics.

It is rational to believe, on the basis of solid evidence, that possible beneficial technology will be built. Which is not say that any particular beneficial technology will be built to a defined schedule - schedules, like the work of building, require those notoriously ornery humans to be organized and willful. There are any number of possible technologies that could exist today, but have yet to be built.

And so on to this rather interesting remark:

there are people who apparently believe "Medical interventions aimed at immortality are, therefore, a potential source of evil." That has got to be the worst version of Stockholm Syndrome ever seen. And it's utterly beyond my comprehension. I say to those folks: if you don't want to live a long time, you're free to jump out of a skyscraper any day you want. Please let the rest of us encourage, and maybe benefit from, anti-aging research.

Stockholm Syndrome indeed; we are brutalized by the human condition, yet you'll find its defenders everywhere. The world is seemingly full of people aging to death yet willing you and I to suffer and die on the same schedule:

Nuland also devotes a chapter to the work of Aubrey de Grey and others who believe that aging is simply an engineering problem that can be solved, allowing humans to live for centuries if not forever. He questions the wisdom of striving to extend life beyond its natural limits (approximately 120 years) and stands by the view that "both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do."

If one agrees with this perspective (as I do), then the task for each of us is to live a long and healthy life not because we are afraid and want to live forever but because we love life, we embrace the cycle of generations and we value the future of those who will live long after we are gone.

I find it hard to get inside that mindset - "life is good, so die already." Not to mention the odd and entirely false idea that 120 years of life is in any way a natural limit, or the errant Malthusianism and hints of old pagan memes inherent in a concept of "ecological balance" that requires human sacrifice. It suffices as a reminder that our fellow travelers are strange folk indeed.

Technorati tags: life extension, science

Posted by Reason at 8:04 PM
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