Longevity Advocacy at TEDMED 2009 and BIL PIL

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

TEDMED 2009 and the BIL:PIL unconference will be held at the end of this month in San Diego, California:

The fifth in a series created by Marc Hodosh and Richard Saul Wurman, TEDMED celebrates conversations that demonstrate the intersection and connections between all things medical and healthcare related: from personal health to public health, devices to design and Hollywood to the hospital.
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The BIL:PIL 2009 Healthcare Innovation Conference will bring together over 200 entrepreneurs, health professionals, technologists, and laypeople to describe the future of healthcare. BIL:PIL will be held in the unconference format. For those unfamiliar, unconferences are free of charge, with no sponsored presentations, and the proceedings are open to all who wish to present. To ensure that the agenda is not dominated by any one interest, and to help with scheduling and room placement, registered attendees will vote online for the talks that they most wish to hear. Our goal is to make sure that every speaker is heard.

If you're in the area, you should definitely take time to drop in on BIL:PIL. I notice that folk from the LifeStar Institute will be attending both events, and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is presenting:

He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks the aging problem down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies 'longevity escape velocity.'

You'll find a few other interesting speakers in the TEDMED lineup, such as David Sinclair of Sirtris and Anthony Atala, the tissue engineer, who is giving a presentation entitled "Can we grow organs instead of transplanting them?"

In addition to the speakers, these conferences are a great place to network with potential movers and shakers of the next generation of the aging research community - such as the LifeStar Institute group mentioned above. Foundations are being laid and opinions shaped, spurred on by tangible progress in longevity science in the laboratory.