You are cordially invited to participate in the scientific conference "Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches," which will be held from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA. The conference includes a free symposium for the general public on June 27th focused on public policy implications of successfully postponing aging. The scientific conference, on June 28th and 29th, will be focused on the science and technology of aging and its postponement.

The opening symposium has its own website; the scientific conference is much like the influential Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference series of past years, while the symposium is intended to catch the public eye and draw attention to this very important field of research:

AGING The Disease - The Cure - The Implications (ADCI)

Applying the new technologies of regenerative and genetic medicine, the engineering approach to aging promises to dramatically extend healthy human life within the next few decades.

How do you and your loved ones stand to benefit from the coming biomedical revolution? Are you prepared? Is society prepared?

At ADCI you will engage with top scientists and advocates as they present their findings and advice, and learn what you can do to help accelerate progress towards a cure for the disease and suffering of aging.

The Methuselah Foundation volunteers are working hard in the background to make this all as successful as past SENS conferences; if you are in the Los Angeles area, why not dive in and help out?

The very short summary: mitochondria inside your cells produce fuel to power cellular machine, but side-effects of that process tend to damage the DNA the mitochondria carry within them - quite separate from the DNA in the cell nucleus, and much more fragile. An accumulation of damaged mitochondria over the years leads to more free radicals in the body, which in turn cause all sorts of varied destruction to molecular machinery and important molecules. That contributes to, and some would say is the dominant cause of, aging and age-related disease.

The best way to deal with all this? Either replace all the mitochondrial DNA with fresh undamaged versions every few decades, a feat demonstrated in mice a few years ago via protofection, or make the damage to mitochondrial DNA irrelevant by blocking its ability to generate more free radicals. This latter approach is used by Methuselah Foundation funded researchers, amongst others, and is a part of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.

So, with the background out of the way, I can now point out some interesting research via FuturePundit. It seems that not all human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA for short) is created equal: some leads to a more rapid accumulation of age-related damage than others. Perhaps not in all tissue in the body, and perhaps not of great enough relative significance to spend a lot of resources investigating, but take a look and see what you think based on this evidence:

Genetic variation in the DNA of mitochondria - the "power plants" of cells - contributes to a person’s risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD)

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Variation in the mitochondrial genome reflects human migrations and different environmental exposures. Changes in the mitochondrial DNA can alter the efficiency of energy generation and lead to over-production of "reactive oxygen species" - free radicals that can damage the cell.

"By identifying genetic changes associated with the mitochondria, our results lend additional confirmatory evidence for the role of oxidative stress in AMD. This supports study of interventions that attempt to bolster our antioxidant defenses."

The interesting question: if you're going to use protofection to replace your mitochondrial DNA every few decades, is it worthwhile to replace it with the best of breed, most efficient human mitochondrial DNA? Since you're wiping the slate clean every time regardless, and the normal course of human life suggests that 30 years is a fine length of time to be carrying a set of mitochondrial DNA without replacement, the answer might be "no," unless the additional cost is very small.

Looking at research priorities, identifying best of breed mitochondrial DNA, or manipulating our mitochondrial DNA to look more like it via some form of gene therapy, is clearly nowhere near as important or impactful as wholesale replacement and repair of all our mitochondrial DNA.

Encapsulating a large collection of islets has been difficult, he says, because the material to make that capsule has never been designed for that purpose.

"This device differs because its polymer membrane has been designed to have the optimal properties for encapsulating islets," Rosenthal tells C&EN. "It allows for free movement of insulin and glucose but restricts access of immune molecules that might attack the encapsulated islets." Likewise, any viruses that might be piggybacking on the islets are trapped behind the membrane.

"Because of that, we can use pig cells, and the only thing that communicates between them and the patient are the small molecules and small proteins," Rosenthal notes.

The polymer can also sequester oxygen from the environment, thanks to its silicone-based components. This oxygen nourishes the encapsulated islets cells. "These membranes are biocompatible, flexible, transparent, autoclavable, and they're easily synthesized and relatively inexpensive," Rosenthal says.

Those room sized computers were pretty clunky and dedicated; the real challenge was in integrating such a beast with the processes and organization it was intended to help. The same is true of medical implants and helper devices, as we're just not very good at putting things in the body yet, measured on the grand scale of what is possible. It's tough, expensive and often damaging to the patient. But take a look at the computer you're using to read this post. Sixty years ago, you'd have had to build a city of rooms to match its power. Integration of that power for use in specific tasks is easy now, and an entire infrastructure exists to handle the tasks that are beyond one person's time and energy.

So to the future of bioartificial organs. A computer doesn't look much like a brain, a slide-rule, or a typewriter. The bioartificial pancreas of the future won't look a whole lot like the pancreas you're carrying around with you at the moment. In parallel to work on regenerative medicine and repair of aging - aiming to maintain the body we have - we will see a great breadth of development in semi-organic prostheses and other functional replacements, and the growth of support infrastructure for that technology.

There is a certain logic here that suggests bioartificial bodies as an end-point: consider that researchers can build a bioartificial pancreas, but it's still that case that long-term use of implants is a burden in the best cases, and simply impossible in most others. The problem is the integration between systems we have built and evolved systems in the body: everything from matching blood vessels to dealing with the immune system response is a challenge. So instead of hooking your new bioartificial organ up to a body, wouldn't it be easier to hook it up to another collection of bioartificial organs, where it is perfectly feasible to control all the interactions? The end of that line of thinking is a comprehensive support machinery for the human brain, an entirely different form of body and technology base in beneficial competition with regenerative medicine. Choice is good; mix and match.

It's a challenge to say what will be hard and will be easy 20 years from now, never mind further out. Maybe controlling the body to accept long-term implant use is trivial in 2030, and everyone queues up for the latest blood filter device from a Japanese fashion house, as it's substantially better than the one you were born with. But if you're interested in living for a long time, it's a benefit to keep up with what is happening today, and think about what is plausible in the years ahead.

Ethically, what is the correct thing to do when medicine encounters a difficult problem? Stablize the patient until a solution can be found? Or throw people away like garbage? Centuries from now, historians may marvel at the shortsightedness and rationalizations used to sanction the unnecessary death of millions.

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Cryonics does not involve the freezing of dead people. Cryonics involves placing critically ill patients that cannot be treated with contemporary medical technologies in a state of long-term low temperature care to preserve the person until a time when treatments might be available. Similar to such common medical practices as general anesthesia and hypothermic circulatory arrest, cryonics does not require a fundamental paradigm shift in how conventional medicine thinks about biology, physiology, and brain function. Although current cryopreservation methods are not reversible, under ideal circumstances the fine structure that encodes a person’s personality is likely to be preserved. Complete proof of reversible vitrification of human beings would be sufficient, but is not necessary, for acceptance of cryonics as a form of long-term critical care medicine. The current alternative is death; or for persons who are at risk of suffering extensive brain injury, loss of personhood.

For very old and fragile patients, meaningful resuscitation would require reversal of the aging process. Obviously, the objective of cryonics is not to resuscitate patients in a debilitated and compromised condition, but to rejuvenate the patient. Ongoing research in fields such as biogerontology, nanomedicine, and synthetic biology inspire optimism that such treatment will be available in the future. The fortunate thing for cryonics patients is that even if fundamental breakthroughs in these fields will be the result of long and painstaking research, the cold temperatures allow them time - a lot of time.

EP: There have been a lot of advances in the realm of cosmetics or so called cosmeceuticals. Partially this has been because of the relaxed approval process compared to traditional drugs. Do you believe, as age defying cosmeceuticals get more powerful, that these regulations will be tightened?

Aubrey de Grey: Hard to say. I don’t really see why they should, because there are no powerful groups with vested interests in making that change occur - but also, there’s only so powerful that cosmetics are likely ever to get against aging, because if people are crumbling on the inside the it gets progressively harder to patch up the outside.

EP: As a follow up, do you think that advanced, highly effective cosmetics could have the same effect on breaking the "pro-aging trance" that successful mouse rejuvenation would have?

Aubrey de Grey: No. I think cosmetics have their place in enhancing people’s self-image and quality of life, but they don’t fool the wearer whose joints are hurting and who can’t run up the stairs any more, and that won’t change.

As I've pointed out in the past, the massive "anti-aging" marketplace sometimes looks as though it could provide great benefits to the healthy life extension community - a group of enthusiastic people and their delivery and marketing networks, flush with money, just lacking any product that actually works. But in practice, it just doesn't work out that way. Merchants focused on making money from things that don't work will keep doing just that and no more. The people buying the products show little to no sign of crossover to support of real longevity science.

If there really was a significant spill-over of sentiment and support from consumers of "anti-aging" brands to meaningful, scientific anti-aging research - or even between different "anti-aging" brands in the marketplace - I don't think we'd be seeing quite the same sort of hostile confrontation between brand-holders and scientists as takes place today. More to the point, I suspect that volunteer organizations like the Methuselah Foundation would be having far less of an uphill struggle than has been the case to attain their present level of success, and scientists backing rapid progress towards working anti-aging therapies would not be struggling to raise large-scale funding and fight conservatism within their ranks.

In essence, if there was any benefit to be had from the millions of Revlon customers, any tendency for these enthusiastic purchasers of potions to stand up for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence research or similar efforts to repair aging, we'd have seen the signs by now. The "anti-aging" marketplace is its own closed world, ultimately irrelevant to the road to a cure for aging.

My own thoughts on the matter are that people aren't stupid. They know these potions don't do anything other than paper over the cracks (on a good day), and they're paying for a chance of papering over the cracks. That's an entirely different proposition from extending healthy life span, or actually repairing the damage of aging through medicine. The majority of the world is still firmly set on the idea of aging to death as something set in stone, but they want to look as good as possible while doing it.