Bid in a Charity Auction For a Portrait of Aubrey de Grey
One of the fine folk at the Immortality Institute has painted a good-looking portrait of Aubrey de Grey, and is auctioning it at Ebay.
The auction proceeds are presently planned to go towards the Institute's matching grant for laser ablation of lipofuscin.
The Immortality Institute is excited to announce a new matching grant for anti-aging research. The Institute will match every contribution up to $8,000 for the study of laser ablation of lipofuscin - research that will be conducted by Nason Schooler [at] the SENS Foundation Research Center in Tempe Arizona.
The science underlying the use of lasers to this end is explained in a presentation from the Understanding Aging conference archived at Future Current. In short: lipofuscin, a mix of metabolic byproducts and other compounds that our cells cannot easily break down, builds up in our cells with age. It causes recycling mechanisms to falter and cells to fail, and is one contribution to age-related degeneration. If researchers could get safely break down the dominant forms of lipofuscin, however, we could remove it every couple of decades and thus eliminate this one portion of aging. With this goal in mind, on the one hand you have the LysoSENS approach of searching for bacterial enzymes that will do the job, and on the other hand you have approaches such as the use of pulsed laser light to very selectively break down specific types of molecule without harming anything else nearby. One virtue of the laser approach is that it will be comparatively cheap to establish whether it is in fact useful in this case; perhaps a few tens of thousands of dollars.
So if you've ever felt the urge to own artwork from the engineered longevity community, now is your chance to both obtain the art and help advance the science. The auction will run for the next ten days, so don't wait too long to decide.