Life extension people are happy: keep living, please!

I found this picture of Aubrey de Grey with his book Ending Aging on his head at the BIL conference in Quinn Norton’s Flickr Stream. Quinn Norton is a bodyhacker technophiliac journalist photographer. Robust, healthy lifespan extension can easily be interpreted as an extreme body-, life- and biohack so no wonder that more and more geeks are turning their attention to this little, unsolved hack. Maybe with time they will learn not just how to write the names properly but how to set up a private lab and isolate DNA and stem cells, at home. (blogging pictures = not enough time to write posts)

Second Annual Maker Faire this weekend and expecting the First BioMaker Faire…

Builders, Hackers, Do-It-Yourselfers are gathering around this weekend at the most visible embodiment of the Maker spirit, the Maker Faire 2007 at San Mateo Fairgrounds, California. I remember the inquisitive and incredulous eyes of the traditional tech makers, coders, engineers while presenting my placental stem cell project at Euro Maker Faire last year. Now imagine a similar Faire for Biotech DIYers with open lab spaces… If you can imagine it, you can make it! Links: Make Blog, Phillip Torrone’s Flickr Stream, Maker Social Network, Wired.

Content of Ending Aging, Aubrey de Grey’s coming life extension book

You can now pre-order Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Biotechnologies That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime at Amazon written by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae which is the most detailed, although popular exposition of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) plan to defeat aging.

Aubrey was kind enough to mail me the content of the book, so you can find out which SENS point is fitted with the chapters of Part II (little help: Edmonton Aging Symposium: full video, audio and presentation access)

Aubrey’s first big move in science was a monograph on mitochondria called The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging.

Life extension: body hack and/or life hack?

In recent culture, technological life extension is considered to be a form of hacking, as 2Dolphins says a “hacker is someone who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations — someone who makes things work beyond perceived limits through unconventional means or skills.” In hacking there is also a DIY element too.
There are now 2 broader hacking terms applied for physical life extension technologies: body hacking and life hacking. For first, see my previous post about Bodies in the Making book which handles a diverse range of practices that aren’t usually linked: tattooing, cosmetic surgery, body-building, life extension technologies, self-cutting as exemplars of the body hacking concept. Body hack in that context is something extreme, something very experimental. How extreme form it will take, that depends on the chosen technology. In the old school permalink-free blog Notes from Classy’s Kitchen it is said for instance in the November 26, 2005 post: “What Aubrey de Grey was proposing was the ultimate bodyhack, engineered immortality (or 1000 year life span at least).” Body hack also includes a form a DIY, for instance Nikolaj Nyholm of O’Reilly Radar blogged on the “protocol for “isolat[ing] stem cells from your baby’s placenta in a rent lab or at home” for the upcoming EuroOSCON Make Fest, which also plays well with one emerging theme at this year’s FOO Camp, body hacking — engineers and copper wire paired with doctors, psychologists and neurologists.”

On the other hand there is the emerging life hack movement popularized by blogs as Lifehacker or 43 Folders or Lifehack.org. According to Wikipedia “the term life hack refers to productivity tricks that programmers devise and employ to cut through information overload and organize their data.” And it is also Nikolaj Nyholm, who calls Aubrey de Grey an extraordinary life-hacker concerning his SENS-esque plan to defeat aging. Why life extension counts as a life hack? Long story short: it’s all about hacking time. The narrowest bottleneck of productivity is time, and indefinite life extension’s main ambition is to abandon this final limiting factor, to make time pressure out of time. But can indefinite or maximum life extension (and especially the here supported continuous regeneration treatment through systemic regenerative medicine called Pimm) really be interpreted as a life hack? I think yes. Indefinite life extension is the biggest scale life hack as it amplifies human capacities indefinitely, because it is the only possibility for a human and mortal individual to fully explore his/her own individuality, to develop his/her own abilities let it be mental, physical, or moral.

There is also the term biohacking, which refers mostly to synthetic biology or creating public awareness of human genetic information and in this context biohacker is a synonym for biopunk, and the term is not applied recently to life extension, although in the future it could considering the broad semantic field of the bio prefix.

To sum up: life extension is a form of extreme body hack which is the most extended life hack, although a body hack is rarely a life hack and vice versa. (In the movie Memento Guy Pearce (picture), who lacks short-term memory, uses tattoos on his body as fact memos, which is also a body and life hack, although most tattoos are just ornamental.)

Bodyhack’s merging with Wired Science Blog

Bodyhack, Wired’s pioneer biotech and stem cell focused blog is folding into Wired Science Blog. Thank you Kristen et al.

The bodyhacknorati profile:

Next big thing at Darpa after the Internet: biology, of course!

When ordinary folks hear the name of Darpa, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Pentagon’s science division, the next association is usually not a military one, but the the insituiton’s role in the nascent Internet. Indeed as Wikipedia inform us: “its original name was simply Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)…and had a major impact on the world, including computer networking (starting with the ARPANET, which eventually grew into the Internet).”

Recent days, Darpa researchers are into the next big thing in high technology, which is not pure information technology, but rather biotechnology and bionics. Wired magazine has an article on the topic by Noah Shachtman called Be More Than You Can Be: “The agency had mostly avoided the life sciences. Darpa’s directors in 1980s and 1990s weren’t interested — and were happy to avoid the tangled ethical issues that often go along with research on human beings. Then, from June 2001, under Tony Tether’s guidance, Darpa’s embryonic biology efforts began to multiply and expand. Research on biodefense led to research on the immune system, which led to more general research on the human body.”

The report emphasizes the amazing Cooling Glove project (see cartoon) and the hibernation project on “metabolic flexibility”.

Unfortunately I did not see a word on probable stem cell and regenerative medicine projects at Darpa, although it is known for example, that there was an awarded a $3.7 million Darpa grant to the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine on wound healing and tissue regeneration.

Bodyhack redesigned

Bodyhack, Wired’s stem cell focused biotech group blog, written at least by Kristen Philipkoski, Brandon Keim, Randy Dotinga, Mark Woodman and Scott Carney, has got a new dress:

In recent weeks Bodyhack has paid more attention to other Wired blogs and sexuality as well, so content can go through a radical change too. I hope stem cells will remain on the top. Here are some categories with post numbers in brackets:

• Life Extension (11)
• Sexuality (33)
• Stem Cells (221)
• Surgery (25)

Questions to contra life extensionists: rational pitfalls

Critical thinking is crucial to every successful scientific and technological project. In order to consider any attempt to the extension of life in details,we have to take a look at the other side of the coin. So in the future I try to blogterview some experts, scholars, philosophers, activists, …who are opposing some concrete points concerning life extension with the questions below:

1. What is the story of your contra life extension commitment?

2. Is it against moderate or maximum life extension?

3. Do you support moderate life extension? If not, what are your arguments against it?

4. What is your (strongest) argument against maximum life extension?

5. What are the problems with moderate life extension technologies concerning humans and why?

6. What are the problems with the present technological drafts of maximum life extension?

7. What can You do against life extension?

Bodies in the Making book, essays by UC Santa Cruz professors

A new book coedited by UC Santa Cruz Literature and Anthropology professors Helene Moglen and Nancy Chen, Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations, explores a range of practices that aren’t usually linked: tattooing, cosmetic surgery, body-building, life extension technologies, self-cutting. The common denominator is intended to be body hacking, modification and our fascination with altering our bodies. “Is there anyone not at some time obsessed with aging?” asked Moglen. “Is there anyone over 40 who is not at least thinking about what it might be like to get some kind of cosmetic surgery? Is there anyone over 60 not interested in hearing about life extension technologies? Link

Sounds like real Californian to me and real human. Agree fully with that: thinking about eliminating the effects of aging is as natural (I know it is a controversial and philosophically overloaded concept) and universal for every human being as thinking about love.

 

Wired’s bionic tour over your body

Today’s bioWired story is What if bionics were better on what-if scenarios in body hack by Chris Oakes.

Bionic in the present sense refers to having particular physiological functions augmented or replaced by electronic or electromechanical components. The article covers recent bionic projects like Cyberhand the European multidisciplinary hand prosthesis for amputees, and EyeTap, an always-on eye-cam that has been adapted for control via signals sent from the wearer’s occipital lobe. What are the similarities and differences comparing bionic trials to the continuous regeneration treatment called partial immortalization, the eventual stem-cell therapy? First, the pattern of future acceptance: the distance between denial and acceptance could turn as much on what current machines can and can’t do, as it does body image. Second it is interesting to see which option is more radical body transformation: bionics, electronic devices, Wi-Fi implant in your ears or maximum life extension treatment via regenerative medicine. The similarity is that both treatments could have deep psychological consequences. Both kind of treatments require early adopter character, and self-experimenting skills. Consider the Kurzweil case and the new kind of body awareness 250 supplements/day equals to.
Main difference is that in the case of partial immortalization the aim is to maintain body function with the same tools (molecules, cells, tissues, organs) evolution itself uses while in bionics, replacements come from silicon and not from carbon. There is a distinction in the focus of the treatment: pimm is just about feeling yourself indefinitely cool in your present make-up while bionics is into changing your very physical constitution.

Similar psychology and different physiology.