Fight Aging!

SENS4, the 4th Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence conference, is almost upon us: "The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, but instead enumerating the accumulating molecular and cellular changes that eventually kill us and identifying ways to repair - to reverse - those changes, rather than merely to slow down their further accumulation." Let me direct your attention to the long list of abstracts for presentation; you'll find a lot of very interesting research in there. For example, the Gavrilovs' examination of demographic changes likely to result from the slowing or reversal of aging: "A common objection against starting a large-scale biomedical war on aging is the fear of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation). This fear is only exacerbated by the fact that no detailed demographic projections for radical life extension scenario were conducted so far. What would happen with population numbers if aging-related deaths are significantly postponed or even eliminated? Is it possible to have a sustainable population dynamics in a future hypothetical non-aging society? This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging."

Link: http://www.sens.org/index.php?pagename=sens4_abstracts