Fight Aging!

Way back when, Ray Kurzweil put in a good word and modest donation to assist the early growth of the Methuselah Foundation and SENS rejuvenation research. He was one of the first to do so. Since then, however, I really don't recall seeing mention of SENS or specific branches of SENS-like biological repair research from Kurzweil in public media appearances, through you'll certainly find that sort of material in his books. He generally focuses on applied neuroscience, strong AI, mind-machine interfaces, and that sort of thing.

So this article caught my eye, and those of you who are waiting to see what Google's Calico venture will do can add this to your collection of hopeful prognosticator's tea leaves. Here Kurzweil gives a layperson's overview of the SENS approach of allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA, a way to make the age-related accumulation of damage to mitochondrial DNA irrelevant and thus remove it as as a contributing cause of degenerative aging:

Google's Kurzweil says the machines will think for themselves by 2040, and oh - we'll be immortal

Kurzweil is also involved in one of Google's other side projects, Calico, which is about as far from the company's core search-revenue business model as possible. It's doing medical and genetic research with the goal of ending aging. It's something Kurzweil thinks is possible to do through genetic re-engineering.

The example he gave here is mitochondria, a component of every living cell that metabolizes energy and is critical to life. Mitochondria started out as a kind of bacteria that were captured and consumed by living cells many, many eons ago, Kurzweil said. Consequently, they have their own genome separate from the rest of the body, stored in separate DNA from the cell's nucleus.

Mitochondrial DNA is more prone to errors as the cell replicates itself, which can lead to a host of health problems. Kurzweil said that nature actually addressed this by moving much of the mitochondrial genetic code into the nucleus where it could be stored in less error-prone DNA. But because of the way natural selection works, this process stopped before it moved some bits of the code which only come into use later in life, after a person would have normally reproduced. Kurzweil thinks humans can finish this process and solve some of the deleterious effects of aging.

One would hope that there are also other advocates for aspects of SENS inside Google these days, though so far the known hires to lead Calico are people with far more sympathy for the doomed mainstream approach of drug development after the calorie restriction mimetic model, aiming only to slightly slow aging, and with no hope of significant progress towards longer lives on the timescale that full funding of SENS could provide.