Is Curing Aging Just a Scientific Challenge? The Answer Below May Surprise You.

Dear Future Centenarian,

I wish you could have been with me last week. Please let me explain…

I attended a week-long conference for two reasons. First, my assistant went on his honeymoon then, and it was convenient for me to hole up and rest in a hotel for 5 days. Second, it gave me a good chance to spend some time with some friends who I hadn’t seen for a while. Oh and there was a third reason too… I figured I couldn’t help but pick up a nugget or two of valuable information.

Well, here’s what happened:

I didn’t get much rest. The conference started at 9 am each day and ran until almost 8 pm. And it was so captivating that I didn’t want to miss a word.
I hardly got to spend any time with my friends (See #1).
I picked up my nugget or two in the first 10 minutes. Five days and a whole tablet full of notes later, I looked back on the most insightful and valuable conference I ever attended.

Without going into detail, it was advertised as a business building and development conference. The organizer, Eben Pagan, walked nearly 200 attendees through the trials and tribulations he endured in building his business (and his incredible life) and how to shortcut them. Eben disclosed, step-by-step, how he built a business that triples every year. It already earns well over $2 million a month – and is still exploding. But there was more. Much more.

Why do I mention this in a life extension newsletter? Because solving the aging puzzle and delivering extreme life extension to you is as much a business and marketing challenge as a scientific one. Last week’s education is fast tracking that challenge for me. It could do the same for you, your project or your business.

If you’d like details, go to http://getaltitude.com.

Network Your Way to Immortality

Dear Future Centenarian,

Saturday evening, I enjoyed life extension and stem cell technology conversation and dinner at an incredible couple’s home. Their guests were incredible as well. Not only were they bright, well informed and enthusiastic about extreme life extension, but they were a mix of savvy and successful scientists and business people. The latter will have as much to do with your longevity as the former. Maybe more. You’ll see what I mean when you read the attached PowerPoint.

Since 2000, Maximum Life Foundation designed a scientific and financial roadmap to reverse the human aging process. The attachment illustrates an aggressive approach to solving aging in your lifetime. You’ll notice what a surprisingly small investment we think it will take. But we can back up our scientific and financial assumptions. Now it’s time to implement the plan.

Reverse Aging by 2029 – Finally Becoming Believable?

Dear Future Centenarian,

Last Friday energized me for almost three days… and counting.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey was in Los Angeles, and we cosponsored a Longevity Workshop. Of course Aubrey spoke brilliantly about the Methuselah Foundation and SENS and how it will reverse aging. www.sens.org

Dr. Stephen Coles opened the workshop with a Gerontology Research Group presentation. See www.grg.org for some fascinating life extension info.

The eminent evolutionary biologist Dr. Michael Rose followed Aubrey with a broad overview of how his 30 years of research is finally paying off in diagnostic tools and nutraceuticals that promise to have a huge impact on aging in the very near future. www.biology.ucr.edu/irpee/index

Then I chipped in by describing Maximum Life Foundation’s strategy to reverse aging in 21 years.

Finally, we had a lively panel discussion which included Peter Voss. Peter founded and manages Adaptive AI. See www.adaptiveai.com. Adaptive AI is aggressively pursuing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Once developed. Imagine the positive impact AGI, or machines with human level thinking abilities would have on life extension research!

So why am I so pumped up over info that you would think is old hat to me? Simply because just being around committed positive life extensionists supercharges me. And I don’t just mean the presenters. I mean people like Bruce Klein, founder of the Immortality Institute www.imminst.org and his wife Susan who spent so much time organizing this event. Bruce now works with Ben Goertzel in another AGI company called Novamente www.novamente.net. And I especially mean the enthusiastic audience, nearly 100% devoted to the prospect of indefinite youthful lifespans.

Afterwards, the speakers and organizers met for a dinner/social function hosted by super nice guy Elon Musk. Elon co-founded PayPal. His former partner, Peter Thiel, donated $500,000 to the Methuselah Foundation and ledged $3 million.

Actually, I’ve been energized for over two weeks. You almost always get positive feedback when you preach to the choir. No endless questions regarding what we’re going to do with all the people or how unnatural this is, etc. But a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to about 700 small business owners at a marketing conference. My topic was supposed to be the philosophy of certain success principals, but I spent about as much time on extreme life extension. Five years ago, an uninitiated audience like this would have thought I was a fruitcake. But of the 150 or so people who approached me afterwards, over half were as interested in the prospect of open ended lifespans as they were about marketing and business success.

Exhilarating!

There’s more good stuff, but I’ll save it for later.

Another Life Extension Report from Longevity Meme

Dear Future Centenarian,

See http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/.

We’re seeing some serious progress in life extension research. Here are two projects that were announced at Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Conference last week:

http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2007/09/sens3_report_towards_mitochond_1.html

"Unlike most other parts of the cell, mitochondria house many of the genes encoding their essential proteins within themselves. These genes are vulnerable to the constant assault of free radicals produced by the mitochondria as a side-effect of their role as cellular power plants. When mitochondrial DNA is damaged, it cannot make the proteins needed to carry on the essential business of generating energy for the cell; the ensuing metabolic damage is the driver of age-related rise in oxidative stress. This oxidative stress fuels free radical damage and interferes with essential signaling pathways in cells far from the original site of the damage.

"PhD candidate Mark Hamalainen of Cambridge University presented the initial success in his Methuselah Foundation-funded work on allotopic expression, showing evidence that his allotopically-expressed genes could encode the relevant proteins and that these were taken up into the mitochondria. In this case, the genes encode healthy and defective versions of the protein that is miscoded in Neuropathy, Ataxia and Retinitis Pigmentosa (NARP), a hereditary mitochondrial disease characterized by blindness and weak and uncoordinated muscles. Well done! It is good to see Foundation-funded research make such solid progress; many thanks go to the generous donors who have made this possible."

http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2007/09/sens3_report_the_gift_versus_c_1.html

"In 2003, Dr. Zheng Cui and his colleagues at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University reported the discovery of mice with immune cells that rendered them invulnerable to cancer. Last year, Dr. Cui electrified the world when he showed that the new strain's cancer-fighting abilities were caused by a particular subset of their immune cells -- members of a class of white blood cell known as neutrophil granulocytes. These cells are from the innate immune system, meaning that they don't have to 'learn' to identify a narrowly-defined enemy, but are constantly on the lookout for broadly-defined 'foreign' cells.

"At SENS3, Dr. Cui presented the next logical step in his research: work demonstrating the existence of, and characterizing, high-potency cancer-killing granulocytes in humans."

The Inevitability of Open-Ended Lifespans

Dear Future Centenarian,

Here’s an excellent commentary from Reason at LongevityMeme.org:

“The choice of living a healthy, youthful life of centuries and more is inevitable. That much is obvious, written in the present breadth of human civilization, knowledge of what is possible under the laws of physics, and pace of progress in biotechnology. The burning question in this case is whether or not it will happen soon enough to benefit you reading this today:

Replacement biological organs are a decade away, and commercial efforts to develop sophisticated repairs to age-damaged cells and vital biomechanisms will be rife in the 2020s. Computational power will be so great and so cheap that tens of thousands and then millions of research programs will be accomplished in simulation for a tiny fraction of their cost today; the priesthood of bioscience will dissolve and progress will be as diverse, energetic and imaginative as it is for open source software at present. Redesigning human biochemistry and greatly augmenting our biology with nanomachinery will be hot areas for venture funding.

I see development of the baseline technologies required for greatly extending the healthy human life span as a given for the next few decades. The biotechnology revolution is roaring ahead, and there's no halting the relentless advance of computational power. But just because we can doesn't mean we will - there is still the need to take that baseline technology and turn it to a desired use.

Given that there is no massive, serious life extension research and development community in existence today - and here, I'm thinking of a community to match the cancer research establishment in breadth and support - the future we'd like to see is still in doubt. If we want the awe-inspiring biotechnologies of the 2020s promptly put to use in repairing the damage of aging, right out of the starting gate, then we'd better get working on that now.”

AGE Breakers

Dear Future Centenarian,

Advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) are a range of metabolic byproducts that gum up the works in your biochemistry, such as by sticking vital chemical compounds together so that they can't perform their role. The more AGEs in your system, the worse the damage they cause, directly contributing to age-related degeneration and disease:

A number of groups are at the stage of animal or early human trials with designed or discovered compounds, many focused on diabetes due to the increased level of AGEs associated with that condition, and the fact that regulatory agencies do not recognize aging as a disease - and thus will not approve a therapy designed to repair a cause of aging. For example, the AGE-breaker compound C36 has been evaluated on diabetic rats:

"Unfortunately, past evidence suggests that excitement over work in rodents should be muted at best - the history of ALT-711 or alagebrium demonstrates that different types of AGEs are important in shorter-lived mammals versus humans. So far, promising work in mice and rats has translated poorly into human therapies - in most cases, through trying to address the wrong AGEs."

Another Life Extension Report from Longevity Meme

Dear Future Centenarian,

See http://www.longevitymeme.org/newsletter/.

We’re seeing some serious progress in life extension research. Here are two projects that were announced at Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Conference last week:

http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2007/09/sens3_report_towards_mitochond_1.html

"Unlike most other parts of the cell, mitochondria house many of the genes encoding their essential proteins within themselves. These genes are vulnerable to the constant assault of free radicals produced by the mitochondria as a side-effect of their role as cellular power plants. When mitochondrial DNA is damaged, it cannot make the proteins needed to carry on the essential business of generating energy for the cell; the ensuing metabolic damage is the driver of age-related rise in oxidative stress. This oxidative stress fuels free radical damage and interferes with essential signaling pathways in cells far from the original site of the damage.

"PhD candidate Mark Hamalainen of Cambridge University presented the initial success in his Methuselah Foundation-funded work on allotopic expression, showing evidence that his allotopically-expressed genes could encode the relevant proteins and that these were taken up into the mitochondria. In this case, the genes encode healthy and defective versions of the protein that is miscoded in Neuropathy, Ataxia and Retinitis Pigmentosa (NARP), a hereditary mitochondrial disease characterized by blindness and weak and uncoordinated muscles. Well done! It is good to see Foundation-funded research make such solid progress; many thanks go to the generous donors who have made this possible."

http://blog.methuselahfoundation.org/2007/09/sens3_report_the_gift_versus_c_1.html

"In 2003, Dr. Zheng Cui and his colleagues at the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University reported the discovery of mice with immune cells that rendered them invulnerable to cancer. Last year, Dr. Cui electrified the world when he showed that the new strain's cancer-fighting abilities were caused by a particular subset of their immune cells -- members of a class of white blood cell known as neutrophil granulocytes. These cells are from the innate immune system, meaning that they don't have to 'learn' to identify a narrowly-defined enemy, but are constantly on the lookout for broadly-defined 'foreign' cells.

"At SENS3, Dr. Cui presented the next logical step in his research: work demonstrating the existence of, and characterizing, high-potency cancer-killing granulocytes in humans."

Life is Everything. Death is Nothing

Dear Future Centenarian,

To seek to provide the choice of healthy longevity for all who want it is an aspect of the better side of human nature:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001254.php

"Helping to make life longer and better, one action at a time, is a core human ideal. There are no special cases, no magical transition point at which it's fine and dandy to write people off or justify their deaths.

Healthy life extension flows quite naturally from the same mindset that helps neighbors and appreciates modern medicine. We all recognize that which is unpleasant in commonplace life, and it's only natural to work to remove that unpleasantness. Seeking equality of opportunity by helping people to overcome the limitations of their own personal human condition is a worthy goal today, and will be just as much so in a future of far greater opportunity. The foundation of opportunity is life - is being alive, and possessed of the vigor to take advantage of that fact. Without that, there is nothing. So I think we really have to start there, with aging, a great injustice blindly inflicted upon humanity by chance, physics and evolution.

To not seek the cure for aging would be just as strange as to fail to seek a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's - it would be inhuman and unnatural for the species that helps its neighbors and appreciates the good things in life."

What is Your Life Worth… Really?

Dear Future Centenarian,

If you knew technologies over the next few decades could deliver to you a chance for an open-ended youthful lifespan, how much would you donate to the research?

Say you want to live a much longer, healthier life. Would you help to achieve that goal by donating 90% of your net worth in support of research? If so, when? When you are terminally ill when it would probably be too late? Years or decades down the road? How about now? If not, how much?

There are no right answers in consideration of personal economic choices, but these are question you might ask yourself. Wealth at any level is worthless to the dead, and being alive and healthy allows you to generate more wealth. Logically we should all be willing to devote most of our net worth to longevity research at the most effective time. If we can buy time with money - and we can begin to now in earnest, for the first time in history, by supporting the research that will lead to the first healthy life extension medicine - then we should all be in that market.

MaxLife believes the tiniest fraction of most wealthy individuals’ net worth or annual income could reverse aging in less than 30 years. It also believes most of the money could be invested… not donated… in for-profit enterprises. More on this topic in a week or two.

Who Doesn’t Want to Live Longer?

Dear Future Centenarian,

Casual deathists are everywhere. I'm sure you all know someone who responds to the concept of healthy life extension with "I can't see why anyone would want to live past 100." This is what they have been taught throughout their lives, implicit in the way their peers and parents plan, act and talk. Perhaps "learned deathism" is a better term. A longevity revolution is right around the corner, yet we structure our lives in the same way our grandparents did:

There's nothing wrong with choosing not to strive for more healthy life, but I believe it's our responsibility to at least point out the lazy assumptions and false information that forms the basis of most casual deathism. Kevin Perrott, organizer of the Edmonton Aging Symposium, recently did a sterling job of this in a letter to the Globe and Mail, reproduced in this Fight Aging! post:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001332.php

For Reversing Aging, SENS Makes Sense

Dear Future Centenarian,

Where has summer gone? For that matter, where have the past few years gone? Days, weeks, months and years fly by too quickly now. What did you do this past year to help insure your longevity? You most likely belong to the last generation to die “on time”, or you will be part of the first generation to escape death for aging. It’s partly your choice.

A few days ago, I started reading Aubrey de Grey’s new book, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. If you want an education on what causes aging damage and how to fix it, I suggest you get a copy. It is fascinating, and it could help you help yourself to extreme life extension.

Go to http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066.

With Friends Like This…

Dear Future Centenarian,

Admittedly, I’m a wild eyed optimist, especially regarding the prospects of indefinite youthful lifespans for you and me. But since I KNOW I’m an optimist, I try to take special efforts to see and understand pessimists’ points of view. Ten I try to balance the input and come to my own conclusions. In other words, I try to be objective about what our chances really are. I sent you my timeline and budgetary estimates several issues ago and stand by them.

So here’s an opinion from one who may be the most pessimistic of all well known gerontologists, followed by Reason’s commentary:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001354.php

"'We're all going to croak,' says Richard Sprott, the Ellison Medical Foundation's director, who expects that humans may eventually live as much as 30 years longer, but only in the distant future."

Read the full post; I find it incredible that anyone with Sprott's background can stand in the midst of the present outright revolution, of wild, foaming progress in bioscience, and say that things just aren't going to change all that much. It's an outlandish position - and an outlandish position held by someone who directs a fair amount of funding for aging research:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/001331.php

It's a sad state of affairs we're in, wherein so much of the research establishment has declared defeat and stasis before even setting goals for aging science. How is it that we have an establishment community disbursing so much in the way of funds to exactly the people who are not going to make significant progress - those who say that progress is impossible or far distant in advance of any initiative?

The advance of science and technology is change itself, is the growth of opportunity and choice, and is the opening of new doors in the halls of the human condition. The hidebound and defeatist are not really contributing - if you want things done, if you want bold new progress, fund the people willing to set goals and shake trees.


NOTE: Sprott’s stance makes we want to toss my cookies. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. In his case though, I believe it will cost lives. Lots of lives. I say that not only because he may control more of the scarce “life extension” funding than almost all the administrators and researchers in the free market combined… but also because he is influential. With 100,000 people dying every day from aging, the last thing we need is anyone standing in the way of those who refuse to “go silently into the night”.

If someone were drowning and a lifeguard stood in the way of a would-be rescuer, what would you call the lifeguard? Multiply that by millions.