How do you interpret the following situation: we have a life extension technologist whose all endeavors is about pushing this issue to its very limits and making things possible but on the other hand this very life extensionist himself is not driven by actually living as long as he can.
It seems that SENS theorist Aubrey de Grey, who is chronologically 45, (BioBarCampphoto by Ricardo) is taking roughly the above position in a recent interview. Aubrey is a good and wittyinterviewee and of course the interpretation of what he is saying is strongly context dependent so here is the full question and answer:
Question: One hundred years of life can wear you down physically, but it can also wear you down emotionally… perhaps even existentially. For you, is a desire to live long accompanied by a desire to live long in a much-improved human civilization, or is this one satisfactory?
Aubrey de Grey: I’m actually not mainly driven by a desire to live a long time. I accept that when I’m even a hundred years old, let alone older, I may have less enthusiasm for life than I have today. Therefore, what drives me is to put myself (with luck) and others (lots and lots of others) in a position to make that choice, rather than having the choice progressively ripped away from me or them by declining health. Whether the choice to live longer is actually made is not the point for me.
Let’s see 2 possible and extreme interpretations of this answer (neither of them is my own interpretation) and I hope my readers can find fine-tuned arguments in between while thinking a bit about this still rather philosophical topic:
1., Saying that we want the process (a robust healthy lifespan technology) but not necessarily the product (a robust healthy lifespan) of our own business is a disaster Read the rest of this entry »
A new, completely rewritten, integrated nature.com website blogs.nature.com has been launched by the Natureplex people – informed his Twitter pals Euan Adie:
Also, blogs.nature.com v1 is live! Tequila and donuts all round. Early n’ often release v2 coming on the 18th so get any bug reports in now.
Suggest good science blogs that are not listed on the Nature Blogroll yet.
Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation topic remained rather implicit (ok, close to zero) and there was not much room to discuss it in the lack of other fellow life extensionists.
In my opinion the whole point of unconferences is to form the good aggregate of people with a common interest & similar/complementer message to join forces in order to draw enough (intellectual) attention for their topic. In this context, an unconference is about topics at the first place, not just about people. Idea networking is as important as social networking.
And if something fits 100% with the idea of SciFoo it is life extension/aging just as handling terrantic scientific datasets, open science or climate change as all these topics are utterly complicated and quite urgent screaming for the attention of the smartest people.
So I emailed Timo Hannay, SciFoo organizer:
“One thing I’ve noticed is that it would be very good to organize a session on scientific life extension technologies and consequences, because the SciFoo people are ideal to see and discuss all angles of this really important topic.”
So here is a short analysis and an answer of mine to this most important philosophical question from the point of view of a life extension supporter:
1. premise: this question could be answered only if it not about the general meaning of all life, but the particular meaning of individual human lives.
2. analysis: let’s fill the question up to show the variables in it: ‘what is the meaning of an individual human life (x) for somebody individual (y)?’Read the rest of this entry »
The Economist print edition (Jan 3rd) has a summary article on the current healthy and scientific life extension scene starting with Aubrey De Grey’s engineering, umbrellaSENS approach and talking about anti-oxidants, mitochondria, sirtuin activators and stem cell based regenerative medicine amongst others.
To my positive surprise the unknown writer of the article (do you know who wrote it?) is using the term partial immortalisation when talking about regmed’s chance to extend healthy lifespan with a link to Pimm saying “Pimm is a blog focussing partial immortalistaion” in the web version:
Stemming time’s tide
One way that might let people outlive the limit imposed by disposable somas is to accept the machine analogy literally. When you take your car to be serviced or repaired, you expect the mechanic to replace any worn or damaged parts with new ones. That, roughly, is what those proposing an idea called partial immortalisation are suggesting. And they will make the new parts with stem cells….
Some partial immortalisers seek to abolish the Hayflick limit altogether in the hope that tissue that has become senescent will start to renew itself once more. (The clock that controls it is understood, so this is possible in principle.) Most, though, fear that this would simply open the door to cancer. Instead, they propose what is known as regenerative medicine—using stem cells to grow replacements for tissues and organs that have worn out. The most visionary of them contemplate the routine renewal of the body’s organs in a Lincoln’s axish sort of way.
The term Pimm – Partial immortalization was introduced by me in this blog referring the idea, gradual and continuous replacement process and future technology of systemic regenerative medicine aiming indefinite life extension. There is a compelling logic behind I explained it many times here. The difference is in the letters, the sense is the same: ‘immortalisation’ is a British English ‘s’ version while ‘immortalization’ with a ‘z’ is rather American English (see the Google Fight graph on the right). Enough said, it is an ad hoc translation from the Hungarian “részleges immortalizáció” by me.
The source and short history of the term: For my MA thesis in philosophy (in Hungarian) I chose the term “weak immortalization” to address the philosophical problems of a though experiment of an unlimited healthy life extension technology through regenerative medicine which would eliminate problems concerning ageing (ageing related physiological problems), while strong and (technologically impossible) immortalization would eliminate death related problems. Later I replaced the weak – strong opposition to the more proper partial – whole opposition and the credit here goes to János Kis philosopher who suggested the term “partial immortalization” for me instead of the more metaphorical ‘weak’ and the modified version of my thesis was published in a book using ‘partial’. You can download the pdf here.
Since then I totally switched back to science and today I am more inclined to use the term systemic regenerative medicine (I adopted this ‘term’ used first by Maximum Life CEO David Kekich in a life extension blogterview for Pimm) which denotes the future branch of regenerative medicine focusing on otherwise ‘healthy’, aged, ‘normal’, ‘physiologic’ people instead of the characteristically and FDA approved diesased and catches the technology that is needed to reach reversible unlimited healthy lifespan, that is partial immortalization. Systemic regmed is a rather immature from a scientific point of view without an established experimental basis, I admit and more of a theoretical frame of my thoughts on the science I am practicing right now. Nevertheless it gives a fruitful, heuristic and holistic angle on regmed.
As in the case of my old iPod, I’d like to use myPhone to access the scientific world and web from everywhere, not just as a tool of coolness. (Warning: Macbook shots, bad quality pictures on a good quality experience).
Pimm launched 1 year ago, and now it’s time to say a big “Thank you” to you, readers. In order to avoid the typical self-evangelism of bloggers and in the spirit of radical transparency I compiled a worst of Pimm and a best of Pimm, the latter is a list of my favourite 2 posts (sometimes 3) month by month.
Upon a discussion with Anna 1 month ago, the question arised whether life extension might be interpreted as a green idea. She offered, that if people have the opportunity to extend their life significantly, paralell with this situation they find themselves in a more or less environmentalist position. Now back 2 steps: the question of environmentalism concerning life extension emerges 3fold:
1. the very technology of life extension is green enough,
2. the consequences of grand scale life extension are pro or antigreen (the overemphasized overpopulation topic), and
3. attitudes, mentality, psyhce of would be life extended people
I guess Anna thought of the latter, mentality tpye environmentalism: if we are extended, we take care of our environment more since its value will multiply with the bigger scale.
The Coalition to Extend Life launched today an online petition to U.S. Congress and President in order to make the technological possibility of Indefinite Life Extension a national priority and public policy goal of the United States. They ask the power people to create the 4 main conditions that will make it possible.
1. a National Institute for Life Extension be created with sufficient revenues to fund research in this area.
2. the Food and Drug Administration classify aging as a disease.
3. a National Commission be organized to study the social and economic impacts of this new reality.
4. a “Manhattan Project” to cure the terminal disease of aging.
What’s new here? Indefinite life extensioncould be addressed as an independent political issue with a bunch of supporters. If you are pro, sign the petition, if you are not, never mind but do not oppose – says the background assumption. Well, I am definitely pro, so at first I felt tempted to sign the petition, because I liked point 2 and 4 from a technological point of view. But I don’t think that at this point the address is right and it should be a mail to the U.S. Congress and President with this subject. If I were the sender of a letter with a similar content like that I would write the names of tech savvy power people, Silicon Valley big guns and venture capitalists in the address field and try to motivate them in an economical fashion. On the other hand I agree with Reason in that the right for indefinite life extension falls into the category of positive rights so it is not the best move to put it into the government’s hands. Even if this positive right can be derived from our strongest, universal, concrete human and negative right, the right for life.
To sum up: If you feel yourself tempted to sign, I encourage you to do that, although I am reluctant in this respect. The idea of this online petition can become a very useful PR tool for our very niche Issue, if a critical mass of people is reached.
My favourite signature and comment from the list: Amos Avon Cooper: “I’m almost 86 years old. I’m thankful to hear your message.”
1. Currently the biggest grants in life sciences are in regenerative medicine and stem cell biology. 2. The rate of progress is very fast (if not the fastest) in stem cell biology, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine comparing to the other branches of life sciences due to the growing number of researchers and grants in the field. 3. Early disruptor candidate stem cell therapies will make regenerative medicine economically and generally acceptable in society. 4. Systemic regenerative medicineis a coherent and inclusive engineering approach to eliminate all aging related problems indefinitely. Definiton: Systemic regenerative medicine theoretically means the continuous, gradual and consecutive regeneration of every tissue and organ of the human body n times by combined regenerative medicine approaches, i.e. tissue engineering (in vitro grown organs and tissues implants or parts of them), systemic (via circulation) and locally targeted stem and progenitor cell transplantation, and endogenous stem cell niche activation with proper growth factor delivery aiming to maintain the physiological turnover and condition of the human body.
5. Taking the above premises into consideration it is very rational to assume that systemic regenerative medicine has a real chance to reach its goal in itself within the next decades. /If the current rate of progress will remain stable and will be focused throughout these decades/
Check out Grailsearch.org, which was started at the end of January and is hosted by software engineer Jim Craig with a deep interest in aging and bioinformatics. Grailsearch is a “community web portal intended for use by biogerontologists, students of biogerontology, software engineers, biochemists or anyone else interested in working towards the search for systems solutions to the diseases of aging.” Jim was interviewed at Pimm in November, 2006, and said that: “I have adopted life extension as a hobby. I now study microbiology, proteomics and molecular design about 20 hours per week and plan to guide the next 20-40 years of my career through bioinformatics and eventually into de novo drug design with an emphasis on aging solutions.”
The initial set of blog posts on the site seems really exciting for the multi-disciplined systems biologists of the future. As my point of view on indefinite life extension technology is systemic regenerative medicine, I am strongly committed to all the computational based large scale model approaches and quantitative aspects of the human body on which I had an interesting correspondence with Jim last year.
With Grailsearch the geeky IT side of aging research and life extension has at last got a quality representative on the web!
Most of us believe that the massive spreading of an idea through the channels of society, say, ‘big-scale life extension technology is possible and worth realizing’, depends on highly influential people’s production and characteristics. So hardcore life extension supporters tend to think if Aubrey de Grey or Ray Kurzweil will hold another 120-120 presentations in front of highly influential people this year and the next and so on and so forth… then this fact will guarantee that one day we wake up, and see that the majority of people support our former niche topic, eager to do something for it. Make no mistake, these guys are doing their best for life extension, but according to Duncan J. Watts and Peter Dodds network researchers, it is not enough for this idea to become mainstream. What we need is a critical mass of easily influenced people to make some real great progression in life extension support. And in that respect, the Web is a par excellence medium for all of us, when everyone with a bandwidth and a computer can do their best. In the light of the above I hope soon there will be a critical mass of easily influenced life extension bloggers, wikipedians, other content generators, and so “global cascades”(see below) for LE. The responsibility is ours.
Watts and Peter Dodds are publishing their work on Influentials, Networks and Public Opinion Formation in Journal of Consumer Research, but it will be in press only in December, 2007. Nevertheless you can read the text in html or download in pdf now. Their theory on the role of the so called Accidential influentials was listed as the No. 1 in the Harvard Business Review list of Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 and here are some enlightening excerpts out of it to make the above application clear /warning: the theory was originally applied and invented in a marketing context/: Read the rest of this entry »
As many other heavyweight bloggers Derya Unutmaz has an A life and a B life. His A life is focusing on the molecular machinery of T cell activation, differentiation, survival and its explotation by HIV as he is an Associate Professor at Department of Microbiology at New York School of Medicine. Briefly, he is an immunologist researcher. In his B life he edits Biosingularity, which – according to the subtitle – is a weblog on advances in biological systems. It gives an uptodate and detailed review of the current biological research from a very broad range on a quality level rare in the blogosphere. As in the case of lucky science bloggers, Unutmaz’s A life motivates his B life and vice versa. I am now pleased to report that he was kind enough to answer some life extension questions as he is really supportive of that topic (emphasis added by me). Fortunately the degrees of freedom in the blog genre is higher than in mainstream journalism, so although I realized that my old questions (they were sent in last October) are not enough, the answers were so deep, that I publish them now, and set some other questions later. I am really happy to share my point of view with Professor Unutmaz concerning the role of systemic regenerative medicine in indefinite or big-scale life extension. I’d like offer his words for every life extensionist: “The most important thing to remember though is to filter the hype from truth and solid science while both raising the awareness about the possibility of human life extension and also brain storming about the ideas on how to do this best.”
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? The story of my commitment to life extension began as I became passionate about biology and science while I was still a kid. I realized then, (about 25-30 years ago) the technology was going to keep advancing and started to think why we could not come to a point when we have the knowledge to treat all diseases, and then why not stop aging? During medical school as I learned more about the physiology and pathology I realized the complexity of biological systems. It seemed intractable but at the same time biology followed rules, it wasn’t something magical that we can not conquer. I decided my life long commitment was going to be try to figure out how biological systems worked and how we can eventually master them to a point where we can reprogram our biology.
Now we are after the Steve Jobs Keynote introducing the iPhone at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. I don’t know if the iPhone line will be the ultimate portable digital device everybody is dreaming about, but I do know, that when partial immortalization as a technology will be first introduced it will be by definition the ultimate one concerning the end result, an adult human being indefinitely fixed by continuous regeneration treatment in a constant physiological age. Of course the technology will be under perpetual improvement, but this end goal never changes, preventing and fixing all the aging related bugs, set the overall cellular turnover. This is the deepest PR problem of any healthy maximum life extension technology: even if it has worked on a human being, ie. there is a man, whose all organ and tissue were regenerated at least one time via systemic regmed, even if it is the case how do you present it to the public??? Because all they will see is a healthy adult human being standing on the stage and appears to be in a common chronological age, say 40.
So Ladies and Gentleman, let me show you how iPimm or indefinite partial immortalization works on one man….
All the apps you need are integrated into one complete regeneration treatment completed in every 25 years, for example a new tissue engineered liver and kidney made from the artificial protein scaffold XYZ and predifferentiated amniotic stem cells with the revolutionary iVitro technology:
Incredible and supercool, the first immortalized man ever and as easy to make another leg module with the 3D live printer as make a steak. You can upgrade and gradually replace your cerebellum with 150 million hematopoietic turned neural stem cells just within half year with the iBrain drag and drop transplantation technology. Read the rest of this entry »
The Edge Annual Question — 2007 for science and technology driven people is: What are you optimistic about? Why? In my opinion it seems rational to be optimistic about things which are in my range or at least I can do something for them. So being a stem cell biologist I am really optimistic about the prospects in front of stem cell research and regenerative medicine and specially the future possibility of systemic regenerative medicine which theoretically means the continuous, gradual and consecutive regeneration of every tissue and organ of the human body n times by combined regmed approaches, i.e. tissue engineering (in vitro grown organs and tissues implants or parts of them), systemic (via circulation) and locally targeted stem and progenitor cell transplantation, and endogenous stem cell niche activation with proper growth factor delivery aiming to maintain the physiological turnover and condition of the human body. For that we do not need gene therapy or nanotechnology, just to develop the existing and aforementioned branches, methods and technologies of regmed. Systemic regenerative medicine applied to one patient indefinitely is partial immortalization. It follows from the very concept of regenerative medicine and is just the logical extrapolation of it. Although scientists and technologists in stem cell research and regenerative medicine do not realize this, they implicitly do it and every dollar supporting this science is also (partly) going for extending healthy human lifespan indefinitely. It would be good to know how the systemic repair approach works on animal models, but for that we need to overcome a whole lot of difficulties, the most problematic part will be the proper control of transplanted cell fate and the exclusion of tumorigenic transformation. Of course 2007 won’t give us the answer whether it is feasible, but it’s time to think about it and by that I mean think about experiments and set up computer models.
For me it is important to introduce here people with different professional background who are life extensionists, but being a biotech blogger I would like to focus more on life scientists, stem cell researchers, biologists, biotechnologists, medical doctors, since they (we) are the ones who have a chance to realize any little piece of life extension technologically. In my opinion this is the stable way to make life extension acceptable in front of decision makers and the public. So I’ll continue the interviews, try to evoke mature scientists, and try to be more and more disciplinal except when I am not.
Forget about governmental funds for a minute. According to you which companies have the chance to develop an indefinite life extension technology? Let us assume that even today there exists a company, or a predecessor of it which can eventually realize indefinite LE and customize it. Will it be a biotech company, like Genentech, Geron, ACT, or a big pharma, like Eli Lilly or an IT Giant from the other high tech sector, like Google? What are the institutional, financial, human conditions that must be suffice for that task?
Now I start to answer my blogterview questions concerning life extension. Here is the first:
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? since the age of 15. I started my first offline diary at that age with a sentence something like this: I have eventually find the aim and meaning of my life which is the extension of human life, understanding the aging process and eliminating aging-related problems. The key for that is in mitochondrial DNA mutations, which must be reversed, here is an idea how..followed by some childish argumentoid how to repair them. And I have a sharp memory about the formulation of the argument that led me to this “aim” conclusion: I, A.Cs. would like to become a good scientist, but I need 50 years for biology, 50 years for physics, 50 years for mathematics and so on…and the only way to achieve this is not concurrently but consecutively, so I need more time, a lot much more than my evolutionarily fixed biology allows me to expect. (Of course today, if I had the chance to live as long as I can, I would prefer to become a little more than a pure scientist, say 50 years for web technology, 15 years for journalism, 15 years for travelling, 20 years for playing go …any way I can fully develop my own capacities, abilities let it be mental, physical, or moral. The list is mildly determined by Zeitgeist.) Next thought was to extend the range of this possibility to family members, friends…and people all over the world, because everybody has the right to live as long as they can. Oh yeah, this business is about eliminating ageing, get enough time to explore individuality and has nothing to do with eliminating death once and for all. I don’t want to become a wholly immortal person, and my motivation was not exactly the childhood fear of death and dying.
In the early 90s, when I was a school boy, the most exciting buzzword in life sciences was molecular biology, not stem cell resesarch nor whole genomes or omics or system biology. My definite professional motivation traces its roots back to a Scientific American article with the name (for me it was in Hungarian) Sense and nonsense DNA. The basics of molecular biology (replication-transcription-translation) were crystal clear and well established and conceivable at the first sight for a teen, and the aesthetic simplicity behind it was amazingly attractive. So I decided to become not a medical doctor but a molecular biologist. Read the rest of this entry »
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, a movie-long effective presentation on climate change and crisis has made him the chief environmental evangelist of U.S. Incorporation. (I liked that he is doing his Keynotes himself, my Apps.) Now I have a better offer for Al Gore: be the first networking-presentation man of healthy life extension and an official aging crisis oracle. The facts are given, and the truth is unfortunately more inconvenient, specially from the mouth of a Baby Boomer. More inconvenient because unlike weather it is something that concerns our very physical make-up. But the technologies are within range.
Here is a not very well known Al Gore documentary made by Spike Jonze himself. Part 1:
Yesterday I was at the Eagle by accident with András and Krisztián, and a Cold Guinness, an Abbot Ale (Aubrey‘s favourite), an Old Speckled Hen… Then suddenly my iSight saw this:
Maximum life extension is deeply in your mind, people, on the search level and on the intention level too. The old school term, anti-aging also got 5,470,000 results. And the term ‘longevity’ is the most popular on the market: 16,800,000 results. With GoogleFight. Just do it.
A question today for every maximum or indefinite life extensionist: Are you a 100% lifelong life-extensionist? Can you imagine that for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years you are equally committed to continue your life in your present physical make-up with the help of a more and more perfect life extension technology? This question catches the somewhat paradox nature of being an indefinite life extensionist in every decisive moment of your coming life. Or the term ‘lifelong’ cannot be interpreted properly, when the concrete human life in question is indefinitely elongatable? I think we can gain slightly different answers formulating the question this way, then to ask: what is or could be the meaning of an indefinite life?
Without any doubt the commitment is not worth a dime.
Mark Hamalainen is a young PhD student at Cambridge University at the mitochondrion lab of Ian Holt. Mark received a Bachelor of Science Honours degree in biochemistry and computing from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He also had research training as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Mark’s research project is MitoSENS, the artificial transfer of mitochondrial genes to the nucleus in order to defend mitohondrial DNA from the high mutation rate. The technical difficulties of such a project are characterized in this article. The idea generator behind is Aubrey de Grey. I met Mark yesterday at the Eagle Pub and we had a very nice conversation on life extension technologies, strategies and philosophies.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? From a very early age (before I can even remember for myself, my family has informed me indirectly), I’ve had a strong fear of death and love of life. Later on, I discovered science fiction and realized that other people had ideas about overcoming death. In high school I began investigating how close science was to implementing life
extension, first in popular non-fiction books, then in scientific journals. This search inevitibly led me to the work of Aubrey de Grey, and shortly thereafter I became involved with SENS research for the Methuselah Foundation.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension? Maximum. Though I prefer the term ‘indefinite’.Read the rest of this entry »
Huber R. Warner is a biochemist by profession andhe initiated and participated in the development of many research areas including: cellular senescence, oxidative stress, apoptosis, functional genomics, the intervention testing program, and premature aging models. He currently serves on the editorial board of Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, is the editor of the Journal of Gerontology: Biological Sciences, and is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America. In latest Rejuvenation Research there is a valuable discussion between Warner and de Grey about the SENS project.
1. What is the story of your contra maximum life extension commitment?
I worked at the National Institutes of Health in the USA managing a grant program to fund research on the biology of aging for 21 years (1984-2005). As a member of the Federal government, I learned to be careful when speaking about science and health issues so as not to mislead the public about what had been experimentally proven vs. what was merely promising, hypothetical, or in progress.
2. Do you support moderate life extension? If not, what are your arguments against it?
I’m not against life extension, as numerous experiments with animal models have shown that increased longevity is routinely accompanied by increased health span, something that probably no one is against. However, we felt we had to be careful how we framed our goals, especially when speaking to legislators, as life span extension can conjure up the image of an exploding number of older frail people hanging around draining the resources of the government.Read the rest of this entry »
David A Kekich is a heavyweight venture capitalist and investment expert. In 1999, he founded the Maximum Life Foundation, a corporation dedicated to curing aging related diseases. His LIVES™ financial strategy will finance the research needed to profitably develop life extending technologies. Kekich, who is also a lifestyle life extensionist, and very aware of current technological possibilities, answered the Pimm blogterview questions:
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? I have basically committed all my professional efforts to help reverse aging within the next 25 years. My commitment was a by product of watching my parents relatives slowly deteriorate and die off due to aging related conditions. Life extension was also a strong interest of mine since my late 20’s, about 35 years ago. My total commitment happened as a result of a productivity and goal reaching exercise designed to show how much productive time I had left to accomplish my goals. My conclusion was, I needed to live longer.
James Clement is an attorney and serial entrepreneur. He is the Chief Operating Officer ofMaximum Life Foundation which supports aging and life extension research with a mature and secure VC fund strategy (next blogterviewee, David Kekich, C.E.O. of MaxLife).
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? I have been interested in life extension ever since I first learned about death as a child. During school, I was always more interested in science than any other subject; but my high-school chemistry teacher was a political activist and encouraged me to study law and change “the System.” Unfortunately, it did not occur to me that I could actually practice life-extension research until I was in law school in the 1980’s, and read Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw’s “Life Extension Handbook.” I continue to read constantly in diverse scientific fields, especially regarding anti-aging and life-extension, neurophysiology, artificial intelligence, and space. I take about 40 to 50 pills a day, mostly from the Life Extension Foundation, which I believe is the premier vitamin/supplement company in the U.S. I joined the Maximum Life Foundation about a year ago as its Chief Operating Officer, and help its Founder, David Kekich plan and implement strategies for the Foundation to help facilitate anti-aging research.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension? I am definitely committed to maximum life extension. I appreciate the views of Hans Moravec and others, popularized by Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity Is Near,” that technological change is happening at an exponential rate. While too many people think that super longevity won’t be practical during this century, I believe my generation of Baby Boomers will be the last humans to experience involuntary aging and death from old-age.
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?Not only will the suffering of disease and aging be alleviated, but human society will be transformed by continuous learning, and a deeper appreciation for the value of life (human and animal) and the environment in which we live.Read the rest of this entry »
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I did not think much about the topic until I learned about various possible enabling technologies, and concluded that life extension is feasible. I suppose I was “committed” from that point on.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
For whatever is attainable. Ideally, death should be voluntary. I am assuming we’re talking about extension of health span. I am not committed to indefinite extension of life in a very poor state.
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
I’m in favor of research into anti-aging medicine for precisely the same reasons that I’m in favor of cancer research, heart disease research, and diabetes research: because it might prevent or cure disease and save lives.Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Reader, if You are stem cell researcher, life scientist, medical doctor, scholar, activist, bloggers, IT professional, venture capitalist, philosopher, economist, politician, decision maker, businessman, biotech- or big pharma manager, plastic surgeon, hairdresser… who support life extension, please answer the questions below and send me to [attilacsordas][at][gmail.com] to get blogterviewed. Read the rest of this entry »
John Cumbers made the Drosophila CHiP protocol video. He is a graduate student at the Tatar lab in Brown University, USA. Below are his answers to the blogterview questions and through answer 5 you can take a fresh look at the bottom-up approach of synthetic biology. Read the rest of this entry »
Briefly: A lot. As you might have noticed, for me as biotechnologist/life extensionist, the most important reference group is the group of IT people, because of the engineering approach, software-hardware tools, intuition concerning technology and funds. After Reason and Chris, our next answerer is Jim Craig, who published his answers here as a comment first by accident. This democracy of comments and reader generated contribution is so welcome. Jim is a lead architect and director of a software team, and the type of IT guy, whose interests can easily be as valuable concerning life extension as biotechnologists, and not exclusively in the long run.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I have adopted life extension as a hobby. I now study microbiology, proteomics and molecular design about 20 hours per week and plan to guide the next 20-40 years of my career through bioinformatics and eventually into de novo drug design with an emphasis on aging solutions.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
Here is Chris’ answer to question 4, for me it was the most important because of its critical edge. Question 2 was about moderate or maximum life extension commitment and the question below is not restricted to maximum LE and unlimited lifespan but includes modest trials too.
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest?(regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
In a hundred years, we won’t be able to look back and answer that question in a clear way. People who are committed to extending their lifespans will have taken multiple strategies. One can’t point to a life and say, these ten years were from exercise but these five were from resveratrol.
I think the first really useful technological life extension will have a very familiar form, e.g., “take this pill and call me in fifty years when you’re still alive.”Drugs that activate sirtuins and related pathways are very promising (I can’t spill the beans but I saw some amazing data at Cold Spring Harbor suggesting that there are already several working drugs). Once we’re better able to get our brains around calorie restriction, I think that CR mimetics will be right behind the sirtuin-based drugs. To the extent that these sorts of drugs will help prevent acknowledged illnesses like Type II diabetes, there’s already a clinical indication for them, so they should sail through approval on that basis.Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
I don’t like the idea of decaying, suffering and dying. I reached the point in life at which you realize you can make a difference.The rest is just logic.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
As much as possible. I endorse the concept presently known as actuarial escape velocity (de Grey), a bridge to a bridge (Kurzweil), the step by step approach, etc. The essence of the idea has been around for longer, but it’s getting more press these days; if the next advance increases your healthy life span enough, then you will be able to benefit from the life extension granted by the advance that follows. At some point, the ability to repair the damage of aging increases more rapidly than the damage accrues – and then we are ageless.
It is an open question as to whether this process will get underway soon enough for those young today. But it certainly won’t if we fail to organize and accomplish meaningful goals. None of the science, advocacy or fundraising is particularly hard or strange; it’s “just” going to require a great deal of work, money and infrastructure to get the job done. That fact didn’t stop the cancer research advocates, and it shouldn’t stop us.
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
That it is possible, that it harms no-one, and that some people want to do it. No action needs any further argument or justification. Read the rest of this entry »
My plan is to make short interviews using the same 6 questions with today’s life extension supporters/bloggers around the blogosphere. The first answerer will be Reason, the engine behind Fight Aging! and Longevity Meme.
Here are the questions:
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?
3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?
4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)
Hello everybody, let me introduce myself: I am the first full-time biotechnologist at Google Inc. My job at Google is fascinating: I have to plan and build a comprehensive regenerative database/map of the complete human body which will be the input of the ultimate human regenerative software. It is so, because in the long run, Google Regeneration Clinic will open its doors to offer a continuous regeneration treatment for its patients, aka partial immortalization or pimm. No surprise, that my nickname here at G is: the Pimmer. The aim of regenerative medicine is to regenerate all tissues and organs of the human body with the help of stem cells’ regenerative potential. Theoretically, if all tissues and organs of an adult body were regenerated once, then it could be regenerated two and eventually n times. This technological possibility is called partial immortalization.
Even my bosses do not really understand how the continuous regeneration treatment will work, but they placed their confidence in me. Although not being biotechnologists, they caught the brand-new concept of regenerative medicine, the science and technology built around stem cells’ regenerative capacity: the aim here is to facilitate and amplify or simply replace the native regenerative potential of the organism, the targeted tissue or organ. Regmed does not care about the causes and the detailed effects of the injury, but about the replacement, and the renewal of the damaged function.
So I have the tremendous opportunity to build Google BioLabs and thanks to the cooperation with California Institute of Regenerative Medicine our new experimental lab is about to open. What we need: smart geek biotechers, engineers and 20 years of masturbatory intensity of concentration (the words of Michael Chabon) to fulfill the task. What we already have: the money, the most innovative corporate environment and the lifetime commitment.
Questions for the would-be Google BioLabs members (but I promise there won’t be 7 interviews for 14 hours with 28 Googlers): 1st With an ordinary FACS machine, how long does it take to count 10-100 trillion cells which is the order of magnitude of the human body? 2nd: Delineate a non-invasive method capable of counting so many cells within a day. 3rd Plan the algorithm of the consecutive order of a complete tissue and organ regeneration.
How do you interpret the following situation: we have a life extension technologist whose all endeavors is about pushing this issue to its very limits and making things possible but on the other hand this very life extensionist himself is not driven by actually living as long as he can.
As many other heavyweight bloggers 
Mark Hamalainen is a young PhD student at Cambridge University at the mitochondrion lab of 
the research needed to profitably develop life extending technologies. Kekich, who is also a 
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? I have been interested in life extension ever since I first learned about death as a child. During school, I was always more interested in science than any other subject; but my high-school chemistry teacher was a political activist and encouraged me to study law and change “the System.” Unfortunately, it did not occur to me that I could actually practice life-extension research until I was in law school in the 1980’s, and read Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw’s “Life Extension Handbook.” I continue to read constantly in diverse scientific fields, especially regarding anti-aging and life-extension, neurophysiology, artificial intelligence, and space. I take about 40 to 50 pills a day, mostly from the Life Extension Foundation, which I believe is the premier vitamin/supplement company in the U.S. I joined the Maximum Life Foundation about a year ago as its Chief Operating Officer, and help its Founder, David Kekich plan and implement strategies for the Foundation to help facilitate anti-aging research.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?
In a hundred years, we won’t be able to look back and answer that question in a clear way. People who are committed to extending their lifespans will have taken multiple strategies. One can’t point to a life and say, these ten years were from exercise but these five were from resveratrol.
Hello everybody, let me introduce myself: I am the first full-time biotechnologist at Google Inc. My job at Google is fascinating: I have to plan and build a comprehensive regenerative database/map of the complete human body which will be the input of the ultimate human regenerative 
Sand Hill Road Venture Capitalist about life extension as business
Posted by attilacsordas on November 7, 2006
There was a very interesting comment dialogue last week apropos of Aubrey de Grey‘s TED talk, and the host was Baris Karadokan’s blog called From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road subtitled High-tech, venture capital, creativity and innovation. Here are some details. Link
storytelling idea source
Posted in aging, anti-aging, Aubrey de Grey, Bay Area, blog, business, california, Chris Patil, comics, comments, concept, industry, life extension, longevity, partial immortalization, pimm, presentation, US, USA | 3 Comments »