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IT CAN create a buzz around an up-and-coming rock band, and is great for reuniting with friends from college. But can it help investigate the causes and treatment of serious diseases? That's the question surrounding attempts to use online social networking Read More...
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Via Betterhumans, Anne C.'s essay on attitudes towards fundamental truths and our ability to enact change: "Given the current (nascent) state of true longevity research, it remains to be seen whether tangible advances in life extension medicine will result in the depopularization of the 'death is natural' argument. Either people will decide that their sense of identity requires the 'aging into death' story lest they risk profound existential confusion, or they will concede that, now that we can actually 'do something' about aging, they're not actually all that keen on undergoing senescence. From the standpoint of longevity advocacy, the second outcome is certainly the preferred one -- for the same reason that most of us would consider it better for a friend contemplating suicide to determine that life is worth living after all and not go through with the act of killing himself. When a person has spent enough time in the healthy life extension community, it is quite likely that even poetic-sounding arguments like 'death is natural, it's part of the circle of life' will start to sound indistinguishable from statements like, 'I have a death wish for myself and everyone else in the world.'"
View the Article Under Discussion: http://betterhumans.com/blogs/anne/archive/2007/05/20/trends-in-attitudes-toward-life-death-and-progress.aspx
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Via Betterhumans, Anne C.'s essay on attitudes towards fundamental truths and our ability to enact change: "Given the current (nascent) state of true longevity research, it remains to be seen whether tangible advances in life extension medicine will result in the depopularization of the 'death is natural' argument. Either people will decide that their sense of identity requires the 'aging into death' story lest they risk profound existential confusion, or they will concede that, now that we can actually 'do something' about aging, they're not actually all that keen on undergoing senescence. From the standpoint of longevity advocacy, the second outcome is certainly the preferred one -- for the same reason that most of us would consider it better for a friend contemplating suicide to determine that life is worth living after all and not go through with the act of killing himself. When a person has spent enough time in the healthy life extension community, it is quite likely that even poetic-sounding arguments like 'death is natural, it's part of the circle of life' will start to sound indistinguishable from statements like, 'I have a death wish for myself and everyone else in the world.'"
View the Article Under Discussion: http://betterhumans.com/blogs/anne/archive/2007/05/20/trends-in-attitudes-toward-life-death-and-progress.aspx
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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RU Sirius interviews Michael Anissimov at 10 Zen Monkeys, discussing radical life extension and other topics: "Think of ten possible lives you could live, and then think that you don't necessarily need to choose between them. You could live them back to back. ... Recently Peter Thiel, former CEO of Paypal, offered three million dollars in matching funds for projects related to [repairing aging]. And [the Methuselah Foundation] started coming up with ways to actually use over a million dollars, I believe. They have the MitoSENS project and the LysoSENS projects. ... lysomal junk is this stuff that builds up between cells. And our natural metabolism doesn't currently have any way of breaking it down. So researchers are trying to exploit the law of microbial infallibility - the notion that no matter what organic material you?re talking about, you're going to be able to find a microbe that can eat it. ... some of these researchers have even gotten permission to get soil samples from the people that run graveyards because that's where you'd expect to find the bugs. Basically, they're looking for specialized microbes that can dissolve that lysomal junk."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/05/18/give-me-immortality-or-give-me-death/
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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The Advances in Human Cryopreservation conference, sponsored by Suspended Animation Inc, starts on May 18th. As I noted at the end of last year, some bold claims are being made, and I'm pleased to see signs of progress in the cryonics field: "Major scientific breakthroughs will be revealed [followed] by demonstrations of advanced cryopreservation equipment ... This event will feature the first details about a revolutionary research project to achieve perfected human cryopreservation. In the short-term, this research will lead to advanced methods of cryopreserving terminal patients for future revival in good health and vigor. In the long-term, it will lead to human suspended animation. ... conference banquet on Saturday night will feature internationally acclaimed cryobiologist Gregory M Fahy, PhD, who will announce a major grant to fund research to perfect whole body vitrification, which is a method of cooling organs, tissues, and entire organisms to super-low temperations without damaging ice formation." No-one wants to die, but all too many of us are going to do just that before real longevity medicine arrives. The choice between cryopreservation and the grave should be an obvious one.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.prlog.org/10016890-advances-in-human-cryopreservation-first-cryonics-conference-in-south-florida.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Anders Sandberg searches for scenario planning resources for healthy life extension and finds the cupboard comparatively bare: "Yesterday I held a ExtroBritannia scenario planning event with the theme of life extension. As a warm-up I did a quick survey of papers related to scenarios of life extension. Overall, I was surprised by the lack of good scenarios: this ought to be a great area to explore, but likely many researchers shy away from the imagined radicalness of life extension. That will likely change over the next years. Right now most people are making scenarios merely of current demographic trends, not willing to assume any effective life extension." Sandberg lists a selection of papers and works that are probably worth your time, or at least worth being aware of. Not that I see this absence of policy-forming work as a bad thing. The less policy making, the more room for progress - there's nothing quite like getting government involved early to flatten the growth and inventiveness of a prospective field of development.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2007/05/life_extension_scenario_planning_bibliography.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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In this PDF document, the Longevity Dividend viewpoint on aging research is filtered through the Kronos Longevity Research Institute: "Scientists are making discoveries every day about how aging works and how to keep it from slowing us down so that we stay healthier and feel younger longer. Dietary changes, genetic engineering and hormone activity can all play a role in the aging of the body's systems. Scientists are discovering that the aging of those systems can be delayed and thereby delay the onset of deadly diseases. Slowing the aging process is not a new idea, and there is no quick fix or magic mirror ... We're not trying to increase lifespan so we add 20 years of life at the end when you're frail. We want to increase the middle part - the healthspan. ... The belief that aging is an immutable process, programmed by evolution, is now known to be wrong. ... In 2002, Cambridge associate and biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey developed the radical idea that reversing cellular aging could extend life. De Grey predicted that the next great social debate would occur when aging research matures to the point that public funds can be used to speed effective aging treatments. That future is now."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.kronosinstitute.org/state_of_science.pdf
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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From the Daily Sundial, a high level profile of biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), and the past couple of years of public discussion on the topic: "Speaking at conferences in Europe, the U.S. and China, and interviewing with major media outlets such as '60 Minutes,' the New York Times, and Popular Science, De Grey has sent ripples, and sometimes waves, through the technology and scientific community by claiming that he has developed an age-reversal model that may feasibly work in as little as a decade in mice and 20 to 30 years in humans." Conditional on large-scale funding and growing research community, which people often miss out. "I'm convinced that de Grey's strategy for achieving life extension is the best that has been proposed. We have a comprehensive list of the types of age-associated damage that kill people in a normal life span, and a corresponding list of therapies for treating each type, which are widely supported by experts in the relevant fields ... Scientists find things out for the sake of finding things out. Engineers find things out in order to solve some problem so they are always looking for ways to minimize how much they need to know to implement a solution or ways to sidestep their own ignorance. This is antithetical to the scientist's raison d'etre, so scientists constantly overlook it."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://media.sundial.csun.edu/media/storage/paper862/news/2007/05/07/News/Fantasy.Or.Fountain.Of.Youth-2896479.shtml
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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You might have noticed the reworked Methuselah Foundation website: "The golden age is before us, not behind us." Quite true, albeit in ways that Sallust could only have dreamed of; the ancients had a keen vision for longevity and health, but never the tools to attain it. This new design places a sharper focus on the mission and present activities of the Foundation: "a non-profit 501(c)(3) volunteer organization dedicated to raising public awareness of the near-term potential for evidence-based interventions in the aging process. To this end, we perform research focused on repairing the damage that accumulates at the cellular and molecular level with time causing age-related dysfunction, and offer the multi-million dollar Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize) for significant, scientifically reproducible life extension in already aged lab mice." Degenerative aging will one day be defeated through the development of more advanced biotechnology, and the Foundation serves as a rallying point for those willing to help make it happen sooner rather than later.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.methuselahfoundation.org
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Anne C. comments further on a petition for all our deaths to be scheduled at 70 - the petition is the opinion of one individual, but sadly redolent of the opinions of many others: "So, that's it, senior citizens. Never mind that novel you were writing, that dollhouse you were building for the grandkids, or that new computer you were in the process of putting together. Your existence is threatening the "wonders of the next generation", so it's high time the world stopped wasting resources trying to keep you alive and healthy. I'm hoping that the writer of this petition wasn't actually serious, but I'm guessing he probably was. And sadly, his attitude is only the tip of a very large iceberg. As far as we've come in our ethical evolution, even over the past few decades, there are still plenty of unfortunate memes making the rounds. It has always amazed me how close the ties are between resource-based arguments and discrimination. Feel free to call Godwin's Law on me here, but I think most semi-educated people in the world probably know what happened last time the idea that some people were 'unworthy of life' due to the supposed 'drain' they were on society took hold."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://rationallongevity.blogspot.com/2007/01/if-you-are-over-70-these-folks-want-you.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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