Healthy Life Extension

Relationships

posted on April 06, 2010

Saturday was a very sad day for me. But it also opened a new chapter in my life.

Over the past six years, I formed an almost unbreakable bond with my assistant. He was more like a brother. I depended on him for almost everything, and he ALWAYS came through in the clutch.

How often do you find total loyalty, competency, reliability and enthusiasm all wrapped up in one package? Did I mention he was fun to hang out with?

But nothing lasts forever, and some circumstances beyond our control led to his departure. We’ll be friends for life, and I really miss Richard.

Enter Kristy.

I don’t know her very well yet, but she moved in Saturday evening and has tremendous potential. In fact, she brings some talents that Richard lacked. She’ll never replace him in my heart, but she doesn’t have to. There’s plenty of room there for new relationships.

When I talk about how desirable extreme life extension will be, some people immediately throw up barriers.  One goes something like this: “I’d never want to live forever. I’d miss all my friends (family, etc).”

Now isn’t that ridiculous? Richard and I will miss our relationship, but we have formed new ones. His wife is expecting their first baby soon, and that will open up a whole new world to him.

Couples fall madly in love, get married and can’t imagine lives without each other. Years later, 60% of them have new partners.

Parents become attached to their children and vice versa. But children grow up, move out, often to the far ends of the earth, and the parents eventually die. The surviving parent often remarries or otherwise adjusts. The children adjust as well, have children of their own, and life is good.

I grew up in a small western Pennsylvania town. People form strong bonds with their friends an neighbors there. But it’s cold in the winter, and many move to more comfortable climates and make new “best” friends.

The points are when age reversal becomes available, your friends will have the same opportunity as you to take advantage of it. If they decline, would any sane person choose to perish because their friends opt out? And you can always make new friends.

I will argue that new relationships are amazingly easy to form. And strong relationships are easier to form as our personalities, philosophies and interests develop over time. Aren’t you more attracted to those who share your interests? Didn’t you ever grow out of a relationship because you grew in different directions, or because one grew and the other didn’t?

Sure, cherish and nourish the relationships you have. In my opinion, they are what makes life worthwhile. But they can be stifling too if you don’t recognize it’s a big interesting world with valuable relationship possibilities waiting for you around every corner.

Be discriminating with whom you associate, and let them help you grow rather than restricting you.

With the possibility of more youthful years ahead of you than behind you, relish the anticipation of an exciting future with the relationships you have as well as the new fulfilling ones you will surely develop.

So now I have two, Richard and Kristy.

Long Life,
David Kekich

P.S. I want you to be the first to know about the NewOrgan Prize and NewOrgan Network.  They will not be announced to the public until this week. Methuselah Foundation’s new longevity prize specifically focuses on speeding up the development of replacement tissues and organs for humans.  The goal is to accelerate advances in regenerative medicine that will become the standard of care for replacing all tissue and organ systems in the body within 20 years, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

The first research team to construct a whole new complex organ (heart, kidney, liver, lung, pancreas) from a person’s own cells and successfully transplant it will be awarded the NewOrgan Prize.  The goal is to achieve this medical breakthrough within the next 10 years! 
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LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

THE LONG ROAD TOWARDS PROSTHETIC NERVES (April 02 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4664
One day, it will be possible to replace nerves with entirely artificial conduits. This is a branch of medical technology that will compete with regenerative medicine, and ultimately lead to more effective and resilient body parts. But today, the foundations are still being designed. A long road lies ahead. Here, the New Scientist looks at early work: "Schiefer is describing an experiment in which pulses of electricity are used to control the muscles of an unconscious patient, as if they were a marionette. It represents the beginnings of a new generation of devices that he hopes will allow people with paralyzed legs to regain control of their muscles and so be able to stand, or even walk again. His is one of a raft of gadgets being developed that plug into the network of nerves that normally relay commands from the spinal cord to the muscles, but fall silent when a spinal injury breaks the chain. New ways to connect wires to nerves [allow] artificial messages to be injected to selectively control muscles just as if the signal had originated in the brain. Limbs that might otherwise never again be controlled by their owners can be brought back to life. Nerves contain tens of thousands of axons, each capable of being controlled by the ultimate puppeteer: the brain. Learning to pull even a few of those strings, though, could restore partial function to a person's limb, restoring some control to an arm or leg that was previously paralyzed."

A REMINDER THAT OVERPOPULATION WILL NEVER BE AN ISSUE (April 01 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4663
At the Maximum Life Foundation blog: "Since the Industrial Revolution, alarmists screamed doom and gloom about overcrowding and limited resources (backed by their "statistics"). However, the opposite has happened. The population increased by 740% since then, and standards of living have soared. It's not so much a question of resources as it is one of education, individual productivity and distribution—social problems, not life-extension problems. As long as people produce more than they consume, it's impossible to run out of resources. Common sense and intuition say there should be a demographic catastrophe, if people were actually immortal and continued to reproduce. But what would the science (mathematics) say? Recently, Drs. Leonid and Natalia Gavrilov answered that question with a study sponsored by the SENS/Methuselah Foundation. They proved it is possible to have sustainable population dynamics in a future hypothetical non-aging society. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly small and slow in their response to dramatic life extension. Even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of overpopulation, but rather on such potential obstacles to a successful biomedical war on aging, such as scientific, organizational and financial limitations."

NANOPARTICLE GENE THERAPY DEMONSTRATED (April 01 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4662
From ScienceDaily: researchers "used a non-viral, synthetic nanoparticle carrier to improve and save the sight of mice with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease characterized by progressive vision loss and eventual blindness. [Researchers]  used groups of mice with the retinal degeneration slow (Rds) gene, which causes retinitis pigmentosa. The mice received one of three types of 'treatments:' nanoparticles containing the normal copy of the Rds gene, the normal gene alone, or saline solution. After these treatments were delivered to the mice, the structure and function of the retina were analyzed by comparing them to untreated mice with retinitis pigmentosa and healthy mice with the normal Rds gene. Researchers also measured the level and pattern of Rds gene expression, as well as functional, structural and biochemical improvements in disease symptoms. They discovered that mice receiving the nanoparticle gene therapy show significant signs of healing. These mice had structural improvement in their retinas, as well as functional vision improvements, which lasted throughout the duration of the study. The mice that received the gene alone or saline continued to lose their vision. The nanoparticles were safe and well-tolerated with no adverse effects."

TELOMERE ENGINEERING AND CELL THERAPIES (March 31 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4660
From the Wall Street Journal: "a growing number of researchers have been seeking to understand how telomeres work. One feat researchers have accomplished in the lab is using telomerase to 'immortalize' human cells. Scientists [have] shown they can keep certain types of cells living forever, including those from the breast, skin, retina and, recently, the colon, by adding telomerase to keep telomeres intact or repair those that became too short. Now researchers are studying how telomerase-based therapies could help repair damaged cells and play an major role in cancer research. What our goal should be isn't increasing life span, but healthy life span. Is there some way we can intervene and slow down some of the problems? If a telomerase-based therapy could be given to specific cells temporarily, say for a week or two, it could be a therapeutic 'home run,' repairing telomeres and allowing cells to keep dividing. Such a therapy - which would actually occur on a patients' own cells grown in a lab dish - could help people with conditions where cells have been injured and have used up their allotment of telomeres, such as anemia or skin sores or conditions involving inflammation. Many cancer researchers are trying to figure out how to turn off telomerase and potentially treat cancer. In experiments with lung cells, [scientists] are exploring how telomerase could be an alternative - and potentially easier - way of using stem cells to grow healthy tissue, without turning them all the way back to their embryonic state."

LONG INTERSPERSED NUCLEAR ELEMENTS AND AGING (March 30 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4659
Here is an interesting theory on the contribution of nuclear DNA damage to aging, and double strand breaks in particular: "Advancing age remains the largest risk factor for devastating diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The mechanisms by which advancing age predisposes to disease are now beginning to unfold, due in part, to genetic and environmental manipulations of longevity in lower organisms. Converging lines of evidence suggest that DNA damage may be a final common pathway linking several proposed mechanisms of aging. The present review forwards a theory for an additional aging pathway that involves modes of inherent genetic instability. Long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs) [such as L1 are] retrotransposons that compose about 20% of the human genome. While principally active only during embryogenesis, L1 transcripts are detected in adult somatic cells under certain conditions. The present hypothesis proposes that L1s act as an 'endogenous clock', slowly eroding genomic integrity by competing with the organism's double-strand break repair mechanism. Thus, while L1s are an accepted mechanism of genetic variation fueling evolution, it is proposed that longevity is negatively impacted by somatic L1 activity. The theory predicts testable hypotheses about the relationship between L1 activity, DNA repair, healthy aging, and longevity."

H+ MAGAZINE ON ORGANOVO (March 29 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4657
Here, h+ Magazine looks at Methuselah Foundation supported tissue printing company Organovo: "The December 2009 press release created quite a stir: Organovo, a San Diego-based company that specializes in regenerative medicine announced a new $200,000 bioprinter that prints artificial organs using inkjet technology. Partner engineering firm Invetech in Melbourne, Australia designed and developed what may well turn out to be the world's first production model 3D bioprinter. Since the 2009 press release, Invetech has cemented its plans to ship a number of 3D bioprinters to Organovo during 2010 and 2011. Organovo will then distribute them globally to researchers at world-class medical research centers. These initial units will be capable of printing only very basic tissues like blood vessels, not full-blown organs. Nevertheless, this technology has attracted the attention of longevity pioneer Aubrey de Grey and his Methuselah Foundation. What better way to counteract a damaged or aging heart, kidney, or liver than to replace it with a new one? Rather than wait for a donor organ, simply print one. That might just add a few years to your life. You give us your cells: we grow them, we print them, the structure forms and we are ready to go. I am pretty sure that full organs will be on the market [one day]."

AN ALLOTOPIC EXPRESSION UPDATE (March 29 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4656

From the SENS Foundation, an update on allotopic expression of mitochondrial DNA - the SENS approach to eliminating the contribution of mitochondrial DNA damage to aging. Vulnerable but essential mitochondrial genes are copied into the protected cell nucleus, and one of a variety of strategies are then used to ensure the encoded proteins get back to the mitochondria where they are needed: "To date, three of the thirteen OXPHOS genes still encoded in the mitochondria have been allotopically expressed (AE) in human cells. In work funded by SENS Foundation, Corral-Debrinski's group have used their improved AE technique of relocalizing translation of AE genes to the mitochondrial surface [to] reverse blindess in rats caused by exposure to mutations in this gene. Now we have the first report of a new gene, COX2, being allotopically expressed in yeast, by mutating the gene to overcome the hydrophobicity of the mitochondrial membrane. This is an exciting advance [and] the first allotopic expression of this respiratory chain component in a species in which evolution has never accomplished the feat for itself. The next step, of course, is to do it in mammalian cells - preferably, of our own species. And the same broad strategy likely applies to many of the other remaining [thirteen genes of interest]; indeed, during his work sponsored by SENS Foundation, Mark Hamalainen developed software that models hydrophobicity of proteins, and it predicts that a relatively small number of relatively minor amino acid changes would lower the hydrophobicity [sufficiently] to make them importable when the native gene likely is not."

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