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 ...

The popularity in the press of articles explaining a bonus of an extra year here and a year there to your life span (through some mundane circumstance or lifestyle choice) stands in stark contrast to the comparative unpopularity of articles discussing the serious prospects of engineering additional decades - and then centuries. People are ...

As noted at Ouroboros, the latest issue of Wellcome Focus is evidence for the wider spread of positive thinking on scientific intervention in the human aging process. ''As one can immediately grasp from the title page, the tone of the coverage is very favorable to anti-aging therapy and lifespan extension as a concept. There are multiple articles ...

The Speculist gives some space to discussion of the old canard of overpopulation; some people like to use it as an argument against healthy life extension. Interestingly, Randall Parker appears to fall into the ''something must be done'' school. But Malthusianism of any sort has always been wrong; a good example of the way in which most people ...