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April 23 (Bloomberg) -- GlaxoSmithKline Plc , Europe's biggest drugmaker, agreed to buy Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc. for about $720 million, adding an experimental treatment derived from red wine that's thought to slow the effects of aging. SRT501 Read More...
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A good example of absolutely the wrong way to look at what is happening in longevity and medicine can be found at Newslink: increasing longevity is "happening" and we must marshall our resources to "address" it. This is nonsense - we humans are making our own longevity, creating additional years of healthy life through investment in medical research and development. We don't need to run around babbling about society and organization and coping. Instead we should recognize that people are dying of aging in vast numbers each and every day, and that it is well within our power to make the present slow inroads into fighting aging proceed a great deal more rapidly. "While life expectancy continues to increase at its current rate, we must wake up to the fact that we are living a 29-hour day. have 24 hours to use now, and we are putting by five hours away for later." This is nothing compared to what we know to be possible in the decades ahead - but we won't get there by thinking that longevity just happens, and that longer lives must be "addressed."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/newslink/?ref=1177503543
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Eric Mahleb illustrates the trend to a future of great and increasing longevity by way of reviewing Rapture: "For many years, scientists have tried to disassociate themselves from what has been perceived by many as the extravagant rants of a few delusional individuals whose only purpose is to become immortal ubermensch. Yet, in the past 15-20 years, words such as cloning, gene therapy, designer babies, artificial intelligence, stem cells, and nanotechnology have taken their place in the everyday language of millions of people. And many scientists are no longer afraid to state that they are working on ways to stop disease, aging, death, and on how to improve human performance and appearance. Whether you are against them or for them, these technologies are slowly becoming part of our lives. ... There is a counter movement, naturally, that tries to warn humanity of the perils of such a direction. ... For them, disease, sadness, death, all are part of our human nature. Try telling this to someone whose son or daughter are in a wheelchair or were born with an incurable disease that will prevent them from living past the age 30. The future can be scary, but the future is inevitable. Part of our 'nature' is to continuously move towards it, good or bad. I am prepared." People want health and life; if we can but illustrate how close we are to technologies of rejuvenation, support and resources directed towards research will increase greatly.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.yume.co.uk/rapture-a-raucous-tour-of-cloning-transhumanism-and-the-new-era-of-immortality
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Thoughts from Anne C.: "It might be necessary, at times, to invoke primarily economic arguments when dealing with people whose own main argument in opposition to healthy life extension is that "older" old people will decrease the amount of resources available for activities not related to health crisis management. Here, the economic argument is appropriate in the sense that it corrects what is more than likely factually untrue from an economic standpoint -- it is obvious that if a person doesn't get heart disease, nobody is going to need to spend any money to treat heart disease in that person, which means that money is free to be used elsewhere. But the reason we want to prevent heart disease -- at least, the primary reason -- isn't an economic one, but one that I hope stems from compassion. Heart disease left untreated will most likely kill you. Aging left unaddressed will definitely kill you, whether indirectly or directly. So of course I'm in favor of things like longevity research -- because it has tremendous potential to save many, many innocent lives. Sure, it might end up having a particular economic effect that will make some people happy, but even if there was no chance of that, I would still support such research."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://rationallongevity.blogspot.com/2007/04/longevity-disability-and-economic_11.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Following on from a discussion on priorities and healthy life extension at Fight Aging!, more thoughts from Infidel753: "If I chose to be flippant, I might argue that the number of people who say they would not take advantage of life-extension technology if it were available refutes the proposition that life extension would reduce the death rate to near zero ... Observed behavior is a much better predictor of future behavior than verbal statements are. Many of the dramatic medical innovations of the twentieth century were at first viewed with suspicion as hubristic meddling with nature, but later widely accepted once people got used to them. ... As anti-aging technologies become available, I believe the same process of general acceptance will happen -- probably quite quickly. ... There is a vast difference between contemplating aging and death in the abstract, and confronting them as immediate realities. In fact, almost all humans in situations where they are faced with the possibility of imminent death react by taking any necessary measures to survive. I can't prove it, but I think that almost any person on his deathbed, if offered access to treatment that would restore his health and allow him to return to a normal life, would seize the opportunity, not wave it away."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://infidel753.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-stand-for-life-revisited.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Here is another characteristically mixed article from the Herald; There is progress in awareness of present scientific backing for healthy life extension, but the default position still seems to be to "reach for the off switch," as Aubrey de Grey puts it. "Pupils will gather in Edinburgh tomorrow for the Scottish finals of the Institute of Ideas' Debating Matters competition. The motion? 'Attempts to extend radically the human lifespan should be welcomed, not feared.' Naturally, as a judge I'll be assessing how well they argue their case and stand up to cross-questioning, but I know which side I'd prefer to be on. It may be easier to support the motion. Expanding lifespans are a fact, after all. In 1899 there were probably about 10 centenarians in Scotland and we know nothing of their frailty or mental capacity. When I set out to track down Scotland's "super-old" in 1999, there were more than 1000. ... The point was that we are not just getting older but staying fitter for longer too. Today about 35% of our over-75s do some volunteering work. Seen in this light, what we emotively call 'the demographic timebomb' looks like a blessing in disguise. But hang on. Just because some people's longevity defies our expectations, just because we CAN stretch lifespans, doesn't mean we should."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.1259939.0.0.php
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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For all the progress that has been made in healthy life extension advocacy, it's still taking a good long time to move ideas, knowledge and expectations into the mainstream. Take this half doom-and-gloom piece, for example, from the LA Times: "And it's not just an extension of working years that individuals will have to accept. We can also expect health problems to multiply, at least temporarily, as people live longer in bodies that didn't have the benefit of the latest in nutritional knowledge, new treatments or better working conditions. The good news is that science is going to be offering better cures faster than most expect. ... Pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs to fight the crisis of obesity, which leads to diabetes, heart disease and premature death. British bio-gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and others are pursuing a goal of 'engineered negligible senescence' - which would in theory eliminate most of the physical damage of aging and lead to indefinite life spans." The most basic of basics regarding modern longevity science - that extended healthy lives are possible, plausible, and closer than you think, provided the work is funded - are still to be communicated to the majority of people. Only when the man in the street responds to aging in the same way as cancer will we be fully underway on the road to defeat aging.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-arrison13mar13,0,3383835.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Russell Blackford walks us through some of the - to my mind at least - sillier debates in mainstream utilitarian thought on healthy life extension. The punchline: "When we look at what we actually value, there is no need to adopt any paradoxical theory such as the total view. Think of it like this. The future society with life extension technology, as depicted in Singer's scenario, will not contain people whom we should feel sorry for. Nor need it be a society that lacks complexity or creativity, even it is smaller in its space-time population than the alternative society without life extension technology. The people who live in this society will be glad to do so, and glad of the enhanced lives that life extension technology will enable them to have. In short, no important value should lead us to try to avert such a society - all we need to do is abandon total-view utilitarianism, which gives a crude and unhelpful picture of what actually underlies our moral thinking." People, life and individual choice, in other words, not airy and overconstructed principles, and not regulation of the many by the few. Too many have died for a slavish devotion to that in the past few hundred years.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/03/utilitarianism-life-extension-and-total.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Via Spiked, a look at attitudes towards aging and medical progress: "the future is one of transformation and adaptation, not extrapolation. This is the statistical distinction between 'projections' and 'forecasts', which invariably get mixed up in everyday discussion. This confusion is a boon to those who make fearful speculations about the future. ... more research can accelerate building upon the existing indications of scientific and medical progress in this area. But this gets a little lost in the hyperbole. ... The general trend is that in most countries a symptom of living longer healthier lives is that the age of onset of particular illnesses is postponed. The average 65-year-old today is much healthier than one in 1950 due to a combination of improvements in living standards and medical progress; healthy life expectancy is growing with increases in overall life expectancy. The only uncertainties are the pace of improvements in healthy life expectancy and total life expectancy - and the relation between them. ... All this pessimism about the human success story of people living longer older tells us more about society's collective sense of uncertainty and anxieties about where we are heading, than it does about a rational understanding of any of these age-related issues."
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2915/
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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Picking out the high notes from writer David Ewing Duncan at the MIT Technology Review: "You and I and our children may soon be living in a world where damaged hearts and shattered spines are routinely regenerated, or spare ones are regrown using stem cells; where a human egg containing a person's DNA can be engineered by adding and subtracting genes; where genetic fixes or perhaps a pill can be popped that extends lifespan, and keeps one young, fit and lean up to age 150, or longer. ... I believe this is the greatest story of our time, perhaps of all time. A species is developing the tools to redesign itself, to self-evolve in a way Charles Darwin never imagined." I can't say I agree with his message on the risks of progress, however. The greatest risk we face is the certain suffering, degeneration and death of billions should we fail to engineer greater and more rapid progress in the biotechnologies of longevity. What could be worse than everyone you know suffering and dying? Yet that is exactly what will happen if we don't get our act together.
View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/duncan/17542/
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/
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