Researcher Attila Chordash is back from last weekend's Aging 2008 conference, and he's posted his video of biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey's presentation from a vantage point at the pre-conference public event.
This is how my Macbook saw Aubrey de Grey’s talk exactly 1 week ago on the [preconference] at UCLA.
I am minded of the concert bootleg scene, except with scientists instead of musicians, and no bouncers chasing down the camcorders - you'll see what I mean when you watch it. I am told that conference video will be forthcoming from the Methuselah Foundation in due course - it takes a little time for the volunteers to pull all that raw footage together and get it online.
The conference was a great success, just like prior conferences under the Methuselah Foundation umbrella, and congratulations are due to the volunteers who worked very hard over the past months to make it so.
The presentation by Trevor Marshall of Murdoch University and the Autoimmunity Research Foundation (which was given at 5pm Sunday) was also filmed. The HD version is at
http://www.vimeo.com/1270611
and a lower resolution version is at
http://vimeo.com/1268542
Abstracts and preprints of Marshall's published papers are available at
http://www.trevormarshall.com/papers.htm
Reason,
Any word on why there was so little press coverage of the event? I was really hoping this thing would gt some exposure.
The instantaneous press coverage was good, in fact. You don't get much better than Wired and Slashdot in conjunction. The turnout for the symposium was excellent.
Historically, the real benefit of these conferences for slower-moving media matters has manifested over the months and years afterwards, as an edifice of legitimacy that swells ongoing mainstream attention, and broadens the flow of articles and knowledge. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Thanks for posting this. Looking forward to the complete official footage to be released.
Wow. I emphatically disagree. You get much, much better than Wired and Slashdot. A conference on this scale should have garnered far greater coverage than it did.
I agree about the long term benefits of a conference like this, but it was also a huge, one off opportunity for some media carpet bombing, and something seems to have gone wrong.
As much as this campaign to will be waged in the lab it must be waged in the worlds press. It's a propoganda war, and we're still at a point where most people don't even know this stuff is being attempted. Rome may not have been built in a day, but we can afford to be more ambitious with this stuff.
BTW, does anyone know if there is/will be a PDF of the conference Proceedings booklet available, along with the eventual transcripts?
Thanks.
We should be doing more research on moving these remaining thirteen mitochondria genes in to the safer environment of the nucleus. I would also like to see these species (some turtles for example) that appear not to age sequenced.