Fight Aging!

The commentary in a couple of recent posts by Randall Parker over at FuturePundit should be of interest to readers here:

X Prize For DNA Sequencing Announced:

I am all for orders of magnitude faster and cheaper DNA sequencing. However, I question the granularity of this prize. I'd rather see prizes for advances in microfluidics and other technologies that would be for goals that can be achieved more quickly and which could be done by smaller groups. Multiple research teams could very easily make contributions that get used in the final effort to win this prize and yet not be the actual team that travels that final distance. University groups with limited resources that are working on various aspects of the larger problem but not on pieces big enough to solve the entire problem aren't going to be incentivized by this prize.

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Of course, the coolest prize with the most relevance to the eventual stopping and reversing of the aging process is the Methuselah Mouse Prize for finding ways to make laboratory mice live longer. The latter article above even quotes Methuselah Mouse Prize cofounder David Gobel who some of you have noticed posting in the comments section of FuturePundit posts. The general buzz big new prize announcements helps promote each prize.

I, too, had comments to make on this X Prize announcement. It seems a touch odd to be encouraging something that clearly needs little encouraging - few branches of research are moving as rapidly as the present pace of bioinformatics (questions of organization aside). But onwards; have a look at these posts too:

Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Labs Very Isolated:

My expectation is that this is the new status quo on human embryonic stem cells (hESC) research in the United States. We'll have a group of isolated human embryonic stem cell labs working away on human pluripotent stem cells derived from hESC for years to come. Eventually the barrier between these researchers and the rest of biomedical research community will break down due to one of two reasons: A) research advances will lead to ways to make pluripotent stem cells without using an egg as a starting point or B) the value of hESC for producing therapies will become so clear to the public at large that a large majority will decide that their ethical reservations aren't all that deep and that it is in their own self interest to accept therapies made from embryonic stem cells.

Immune System Rejuvenation May Partially Rejuvenate Brain:

The brain is the organ in the body which is going to be hardest to rejuvenate. We will not be able to replace the brain since it contains our individual identity. By contrast, some day we'll be able to grow replacements for other organs in the body such as the liver, kidneys, heart, or pancreas. Since the brain is the hardest target for rejuvenation I'm always heartened by any research that suggests avenues to explore to develop brain rejuvenation techniques. A team of researchers in Israel have made discoveries that suggest rejuvenation of the immune system might some day provide a way to partially slow or partially reverse the aging of brains.

I'm not alone in the opinion that dealing with the aging brain is going to be one of the toughest challenges facing the development of radical life extension within our lifetimes. Groundwork taking place today -like the Allen Brain Atlas - will prove essential, but present methodologies of medical research and development must yield to a better approach:

This prospect of unending discovery of new failure modes - and the long development of a cure, all too late to save those unlucky enough to be at the head of the queue - is one of the reasons that an engineering approach to fixing age-related disease is so attractive. Rather than play catch-up and research with ever more complex consequences of age-related cellular damage, let's identify, repair and prevent that damage. Strike at the root, in other words, by taking the path of greater effectiveness and least complexity. If we can do that, there would be no need to determine and decipher the fatal neurodegenerative conditions that follow Alzheimer's - no-one will ever accumulate the damage required to suffer from these presently unknown killers.

Technorati tags: biotechnology, life extension