Ouroboros is a weblog mainly for people in the life sciences focusing on the different aspects of aging research through scanning articles published in peer-review journals. The blogger behind is Chris Patil, a postdoctoral fellow, currently working with Judith Campisi in the Life Sciences division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, California. If Fight Aging! is the life extension movement itself, than Ouroboros is the high-end scientific basis of it. The second part is about the technological question of LE, and the third is the answer to what can blogs do for LE.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I got interested in the prospect of life extension very early in my undergraduate education, before I knew much about biology and before I was even sure I wanted to be a biologist (I had originally planned to study chemistry or chemical engineering).
I had read a few articles about DNA damage, mitochondria and aging, which had of course convinced me that mitochondrial DNA damage was the causative force in all human aging (18-year-olds with no scientific training are remarkably easy to convince of anything), and it seemed obvious that all we’d have to do is go in and repair mitochondrial DNA in every cell of the body, and cure aging. Et voilà. It seemed painfully obvious and trivially simple to me.
Meanwhile I’d realized that most of what had interested me about chemistry was actually about biology, so I decided to become a biologist instead of a chemist. Over time I developed the idea of eventually working on the biology of aging with an eye toward life extension research. I’ve taken a lot of detours along the way but never strayed too far: I worked on DNA repair, and then cellular stress, and finally I’m studying cellular senescence. Read the rest of this entry »
