Wrapping Up the Science at SENS 2
As reported by Frank Rummel, the second Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence conference (SENS 2) held this week is wrapping up - all bar the traditional dinner and punting, that is. Rummel is coming back with goodies for those of us watching online:
In retrospect, I've made new friends and learned much about ageing research and SENS. I've got some ideas for how I can promote the curing of aging, but there is much work to be done.When I get home, I'm going to store the interviews I've gathered along with one complete Powerpoint presentation video that I captured in the Internet Archive for posterity. I'll keep you posted.
I have it on good authority that some of the Mprize volunteers and other interested folks will be bringing back multimedia as well.
In an earlier post, Rummel comments on the largely missing mainstream media:
The Longevity Meme reported an article about SENS 2 in Guardian Unlimited this morning and I spoke with a film crew (http://www.arte-tv.com/) that was reporting for German and French language TV yesterday. Other than that, big J journalism was absent from SENS 2. One can only conjecture the underlying causes of the failure of media to pick up on the importance of this historic event.
It has to be said that I'm also surprised. Admittedly, yes, it's a hard science conference, but when you have Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk, Michael West of Advanced Cell Technology and many others of equal note - such as Ellen Heber-Katz and Amit Patel - all coming to the same Cambridge conference on advancing a cure for aging, it is suprising to me that only the Guardian turned up to see what was going on. Thankfully the economic barrier to entry for journalism has fallen to the point at which there really is no excuse for any event of note to go uncovered. Thanks go to Frank Rummel for spending the time and resources to get the job done.
Only a relative few take the trouble to keep up with important research. Most people, including major media, are content to sleep while the future of their world is being determined all around them. Media organizations believe in the "gatekeeper" theory of news. If the gatekeepers don't think it's news, the rest of the sheepish media won't report it. The media gatekeepers are rather stupid too. They couldn't recognize actual news if it fell from the sky at their feet.
The problem we have in this country and many others are that the main media only focus on bad news or something that is totally irrelivent to our lives. It seems that reporting on something like Svens relationships and mangaging career is more important than curing Pain and death...
This is why science isn't the most popular subject around, people are not inspired because they don't hear all of the amazing research and breakthroughs going on all around the world.
There is so much good that people in science are trying to do, but it gets ignored by the big media.
I feel unless a big life changing breakthrough announcement is going to be made at SENS, real anti-aging research wont get the recognition it deserves.
One of the main reasons I don't really watch mainstream news anymore and just search the web is because mainstream just report on the same crap everyday.