The fourth Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence conference will be held in Cambridge, England, this coming September. By way of a reminder, the early registration and abstract submission deadline is quite soon:
This coming Monday, June 15th, is the deadline for discounted registration and abstract submission for the fourth Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, to be held at Queens' College, Cambridge, England on September 3rd-7th 2009. After the deadline, both student and standard registration fees rise by £150.00. Also, after that date, we cannot guarantee that submitted abstracts will be considered for oral presentation or that they will be included in the conference abstract book....
The conference program features 45 confirmed speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As with previous SENS conferences, the emphasis of this meeting is on "applied gerontology" - the design and implementation of biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans) to the physical and mental robustness of young adults.
You'll recognize many of the names in the program and list of accepted abstracts from past discussions here at Fight Aging!. You should also take a look at the materials from the last few SENS conferences - there's a great deal of video and many fascinating presentations:
The core concept of SENS - fix or work around biological damage to reverse aging rather than manipulate metabolism to only slow the rate of damage and thus also slow aging - becomes increasingly important as researchers move ever closer to actually implementing the necessary technology. The SENS approach to mitochondrial damage and its contribution to aging, moving vital mitochondrial genes into the cell nucleus, is plausibly within a few years of technical implementation, for example. That means that a decade from now we may know exactly how great a benefit to longevity it produces in mouse studies. These are exciting times.
Marisol Corral-Debrinski's Methuselah-funded group in Paris in [cracked] the problem of hydrophobicity of the proteins encoded by mitochondrial DNA. This obstacle, which had for over a decade completely stalled progress in the 20-year-old idea of making mitochondrial DNA redundant by duplicating it in the nucleus, is now largely solved, and there is great hope that this strand of SENS can be brought to complete fruition within only a few more years.