On Maintaining the Longevity Meme
I spent a little time cleaning up the Longevity Meme website content yesterday, focusing on the Take Action! activism section. Maintaining a website is a little like maintaining a mansion - there are always too many rooms to clean and too little time to do the work. So you polish the areas that people look at most frequently and work on the rest as you can. Slick, relevant, useful content has a way of getting stale and dusty even with the best of future-proofing - and no-one wants to be perusing a stale, dusty website.
Having brought that area up to some semblance of respectability, the next project is to revamp the way in which I present the concepts of healthy life extension, regenerative medicine and anti-aging research (of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) variety). Much of the introductory writing on the Longevity Meme was originally drafted prior to my association with Aubrey de Grey and the Mprize team, at a time when I was very much more focused on early battles over stem cell research. While the content has been tidied up and improved since then, the original thrust - that regenerative medicine is the best way forward for healthy life extension - has been rendered a little dated ... or at least, my present understanding of the possibilities of research has improved. One or the other. Clearly regenerative medicine is necessary and important, but SENS-like research forms an entirely separate program, and is a better path forward for near-term progress in radical life extension. This is a distinction that I need to make apparent and clear in the Longevity Meme introductory and supporting material.