Quietest SENS Conference Ever
SENS5, the fifth biannual conference on the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, took place last week. Researchers working on ways - or the foundation of ways - to intervene in the aging process gathered together to talk about progress on the road to rejuvenation through biotechnology.
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.
It seems, however, that the participants were so caught up in the conference schedule that they largely failed to post reports or commentaries online. There's a little Twitter activity, and a couple of videos for one of the presentations, but that's about it. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity for the internet: later years in which eager self-publishers feel they can let their hair down and stop trying quite so hard. Material will be posted online in the weeks ahead by SENS Foundation volunteers, and that will hopefully include a video archive to match those for past SENS conferences. Meanwhile, you might take in the YouTube videos posted to date:
The videos are for this presentation, which is a discussion of one approach to finding a cheap and effective way of keeping telomeres from eroding without making them too long in the process - a complex and challenging problem that has kept a number of research groups and startup companies occupied over the past decade.
Ah, this was actually the most exciting and optimistic SENS conference ever! There were more presentations on research directly related to the SENS agenda than before. Mike Kope, the CEO of SENS, reported that funding for all 7 of the SENS components will be active by next year. This contrasts with 3 now and perhaps 1.5 as of SENS4. Sonia Arrison (100 +) was interviewed by Aubrey on stage. This represents a huge step towards the mainstreaming of life extension in the public consciousness. The excitement was palpable.
SENS5 was my first, but by all accounts was the most scientifically solid. It was not only highly informative but a great networking environment and also tremendous fun. Aubrey did an excellent job of bringing in the right people and of keeping them on schedule. The conference staff also did a fine job. Thank you!
I was pleased at the response to my talk on "Cryonic Life Extension". Since maybe half the audience were not from the self-conscious life extension community, I was expecting more tough or even hostile questions, but received none. Instead, a number of people say they would stop delaying and get signed up.
--Max