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 mimics resveratrol, which has been linked to longevity, Sirtris scientists said. The ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...