Archive for November, 2007

Sunday Chat With S. Jay Olshansky at the Immortality Institute

November 29th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

Researcher S. Jay Olshansky will be the guest at the next Sunday chat hosted by the Immortality Institute:

I am happy to announce SJ Olshansky will be joining Imminst for the Sunday Night Chat this Sunday December 2nd at 6:30pm CST U.S. If you are not familiar with Professor Olshanksy...you should be. He was researching methods to slow aging while most Imminst members were still in diapers. He has seen all the hype, the successes, and failures. His latest endeavor is the The Longevity Dividend, which proposes to set aside 3 billion (that's billion with a B) dollars a year of NIH funding for the study of aging.

Chat Room: http://www.imminst.org/chat

Sun December 2nd
- 4:30 Pacific
- 5:30 Mountain
- 6:30 Central
- 7:30 Eastern

You can look back in the archives here for much more on the Longevity Dividend:

As far as I can see, Olshansky is in the camp of "metabolic re-engineering and slow but solid progress in slowing aging is the way ahead, but it'd be wonderful if things that worked far better were demonstrated to be plausible." Which is hopefully a transitionary stage on the way to "I always thought that the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence was a great idea." We'll see.

Biology: Always More Complicated Than First Thought

November 29th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

One of the constants of our present age of change and progress is that biology is always more complex than first thought. It's a given. Evolution is under no constraint to produce designs that fall within the bounds of complexity we feel comfortable taking in at one sitting.

The scientific community will still master our biology - reverse-engineer it, replicate it, and ultimately greatly improve on it - but we shouldn't be surprised when hoped-for simplicities in biological mechanisms fail to materialize. That's all the more reason for greater support and funding for efficient, goal-driven medical research.

MIT: Stem-cell therapies for brain more complicated than thought:

MIT scientists report that adult stem cells produced in the brain are pre-programmed to make only certain kinds of connections - making it impossible for a neural stem cell originating in the brain to be transplanted to the spinal cord, for instance, to take over functions for damaged cells.

...

"A stem cell that produces neurons that could be useful to replace neurons in the cerebral cortex (the type of neurons lost in Alzheimer's disease) will be most likely useless to replace neurons lost in the spinal cord. [Moreover], because there are many different types of neurons in the cerebral cortex, it is likely that we will have to figure out how to program stem cells to become many different types of neurons, each of them with a different set of pre-specified connections."

"In the stem cell field, it is generally thought that the main limitation to achieve brain repair is simply for the new neurons to reach a given brain region and to ensure their survival. Once there, it has been assumed that stem cells will ‘know what to do’ and will become the type of neuron that is missing. It seems that is not the case at all. Our experiments indicate that things are much more complicated."

Meanwhile, Over at the Immortality Institute …

November 27th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

The Immortality Institute volunteers are upgrading; always a painful process with a large forum and a content management system extensively customized over the years. If you haven't stopped by the Institute forum in a while, you should do so. Where else are likely to be able to participate in a discussion on the first recorded practitioner of calorie restriction - and noted author of the Renaissance - with researcher S. Jay Olshansky and other noteworthies?

A noble idea is a noble idea, and we shouldn't be surprised to find people from the past with constructive contributions to make on the topic of healthy longevity - taking into account the state of scientific knowledge in their time:

Sixteenth century Venetian Ambassador and Renaissance Christian Luigi Cornaro was celebrated in his time for his stance on dietary self-restraint, moderate living, and living to the age of 103. For these hundred of years his classic book has survived as a renowned text on longevity and an inspiring treatise on the path of temperance that the author believed could lead anyone out of a state of illness and into a healthy long life. The Art of Living Long contains Cornaros four discourses, respectively concerned with demonstrating his ideas through his own example, exploring the necessity of temperate habits, assuring a happy old age, and exhorting mankind to follow his rule. With introductions by Dr. Gerald Gruman and Joseph Addison, and additional essays by Lord Bacon and Sir William Temple.

To take a contrary point of view, however, is this really any different - important names of centuries past aside - from the standard mainstream media coverage of centenarians today? The form requires the journalist to ask for the centernarian's thoughts on longevity, but living for a long time doesn't make you an expert on how to live for a long time. Everyone has an opinion on how it is they've lived so long, but opinion isn't science.

When you're wandering through the vast libraries of writing on the topics of aging and longevity, remember that the scientific method is how progress is made. Opinions can be good, can be well-thought, can even be right as it later turns out, but opinions alone are not the foundation for a path forward.

Planning for my Move

November 26th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

I am getting ready to move out to Southern California in the new year, Orange County to be exact. It is really amazing planning for such a big change (I am currently in NYC). Besides planning for the million and one things you would normally think of I need to plan for one very important thing that not many people would think of, a new personal trainer. I have had a local personal trainer for the past 4 years and workout twice a week with him and twice a week on my own. Four years ago I had a huge beer belly and weighed in at 325 pounds. Today I am a lean 210 pounds and in the greatest shape of my life, so I want to make sure I have continuatiy with my personal training regiem for my move down South. I got hold of a local phone book and did a quick search for Orange County personal trainers, then I did the same on the web. I made up a short list of 5 local trainers and I will be going down next weekend to meet them. So the next chapter of my life will definately invovled Orange County fitness training because I want to stay slim and healthy!

A Nice Turn of Phrase

November 25th, 2007 / Uncategorized / Comments Off

This caught my eye while I was meandering my way through PubMed; a nice turn of phrase in this way of looking at the mechanisms of aging and the future of aging in a world shaped by human action.

Senescence Viewed through the Lens of Comparative Biology:

Although mortality and longevity are inherently biological phenomena, their study has historically been the purview of demography and the actuarial sciences. An infusion of biological thinking into these disciplines transforms demography into biodemography and provides expectations and coherency to observations on age-determined mortality that would not be explainable otherwise.

Comparative biology teaches us that reproduction is life's solution to the inevitability of death in the hostile environments of Earth. That solution, however, places a higher priority on investing physiological resources into reproduction that could otherwise have been used to maintain the soma (body) longer. As such, aging is an inescapable but inadvertent byproduct of imperfect maintenance and its attendant surveillance and repair. Biology also reveals that while bodies are not designed to fail, neither are they designed for extended operation. In other words, bodies are subject to biological warranty periods for normal operation. For sexually reproducing species, that warranty period includes the time from conception to sexual maturity, the production and nurturing of offspring, and a period of grand-parenting in some species.

Humans are the only species capable of exploiting the loophole in the biological contract of life (bodies that are not designed to fail). Human ingenuity (science, medicine, public health) has produced interventions that manufacture survival time by delaying death, and in so doing, has created a phenomenon never before seen in the history of life - population aging (and all the societal and health consequences that go with it).

Aging and individual death might well be the inevitable consequence of evolutionary pressure on cellular life, but it's far more noteworthy that we have the capacity to do something about it. Intelligence and technology are a loophole big enough to created physical immortality - given enough resources and time. The big question is whether the first stages on the road to the repair of aging and greatly increased healthy life spans happen rapidly enough to benefit you and I, or whether cryosuspension will be our only opportunity.

The choice is ours; how much do we want healthy longevity and how much are we prepared to work towards that goal?

« Previous Entries