A View of Aging and Longevity Research
Here's a piece from Legion Magazine I missed earlier this year: a high level view across the voices and aspects of aging and longevity research. "De Grey believes it will be possible to postpone aging indefinitely - even up to the age of 1,000 - by adopting an 'engineering' approach to taking care of our bodies. In his approach, the cellular damage that occurs as a 'side effect' of being alive is allowed to occur, but it is then repaired using interventions such as stem cell therapy ... Additional significant increases in life expectancy can only come from advances in biomedical technology that alter the course of aging itself ... Perrott believes such advances are around the corner, and that they will relieve the suffering and social burdens brought on by age-related diseases and frailty. ... There's just an awful lot of hope. People like to get old; they just don't like falling apart. Right now, the priority is to get people healthy. Then we can work on life extension. ... Whereas it used to be thought that aging was 'way too complex' to tackle as a whole, and that different diseases were caused by a host of different things going wrong, he points out that in the last 15 years, science has shown that 'there may be only a few causes of many diseases,' and indeed only a few causes of aging."
Link: http://www.legionmagazine.com/features/healthlifestyle/07-07.asp