Fight Aging!

Over at Depressed Metabolism, cryonics luminary and "inveterate scribbler" Ben Best reports on the recent SENS4 longevity science conference. He appears pleasantly surprised by the level of interest in cryonics amongst the younger generation of advocates for engineered longevity and researchers:

SENS conferences attract scientists who are eager for science to achieve rejuvenation, and who have a strong belief that science has the capacity to do so. Not surprisingly, such people are often receptive to the idea that future science may be capable of reanimating humans who have been well cryopreserved.

Recently I have heard regret expressed about the aging of the cryonics community and the absence of a next generation of cryonics activists to replace the current ones. My experiences at the 2009 SENS conference dispelled much of my concern about this.

...

I was astounded when a British student approached me and said that he would be devoting all of his graduate school work to the problem of cryoprotectant toxicity.

...

A number of people from KrioRus were at the conference, notably Igor Artyuhov, who is their technical guru. The group also does life extension research. Igor showed me their poster showing extended lifespan of mice administered heat-shock protein through nose-drops.

...

To my surprise, one of the presenters, Dr. Gunther Kletetschka, had a poster and an oral presentation dealing with eliminating the cracking problem in cryonics.

Cryonics is important yet sadly much underdeveloped as an industry. It is the only presently available method of providing even a chance of cheating death, in this case through the low-temperature preservation of the fine structure of the brain. The many hundreds of millions who will die prior to the advent of true rejuvenation biotechnologies might be given a shot at a longer healthy life in the future through cryonics, were the industry a thousand times its present size and influence.