Longevity News

The Post Office Clock

posted on June 22, 2010

A few weeks ago, I visited the local post office to get a passport. I’m not planning any trips. In fact, I find it very difficult to travel beyond short distances due to my injury. But for some reason, I decided I should have a passport. So I went to the post office.

Naturally, I had to wait in line. While waiting, I started thumbing through my notebook, reviewing some notes and planning my week. When I took a moment to glance at the clock on the wall, it mesmerized me.

It was one of those government office analog clocks with a sweeping second hand that pauses slightly every second. You know the kind, the ones the employees can’t keep their eyes off when it gets close to quitting time. I couldn’t either, but for a different reason. With every tick, I couldn’t help thinking how those precious seconds were disappearing forever, while I was killing an hour in a bureaucratic office, getting something I may never need.

When you are as sensitive as I am to the passing sands of time, it’s very painful to have some taken away from you by outside influences. It was doubly painful at the post office, since I put myself in that situation.

Once we have the aging puzzle solved, it will be easier to relax, and maybe even fun to vegetate form time-to-time. Now however, our time is finite. We only have so much of it to figure out how to get out of this black hole called a limited life span. We may not be able to add more hours to your day, be we will be able to add quality years to your life. All we have to do is use our resources, including time, effectively.

The more organized we can be and the more time you are willing to spend on pursuing age-reversal, the sooner we will have solutions. Spending time here may be as simple as learning all you can to extend your own life with today’s knowledge. Buying more time this way puts you in the position to improve your odds of being alive long enough to incorporate tomorrow’s radical life extending technologies.

Maybe spending some of your time on the life extension movement means being a little more proactive. That could mean volunteering your time or money to foundations such as Maximum Life Foundation, SENS Foundation, Methuselah Foundation or the Immortality Institute. If you’re a scientist, you may be able to provide research. If your children are planning an academic career, you might nudge them towards aging research if their interests lie in that area. Maybe you could write letters to the editor to make people in your community aware of some of the recent breakthroughs, who in turn, may enlist some of their friends in the movement. Or just educate your friends and family as to the possibilities of age-reversal in their lifetimes. Sometimes just getting that one special person involved could make a life or death difference.

Whatever you decide to do, remember, how you spend your time today could very well determine whether or not you and your loved ones will be here tomorrow.

Long Life,
David Kekich
____________________________

SUMMITS ON OPEN SCIENCE

The h+ Summit on citizen scientists took place this past weekend, and coming up next month is the Open Science Summit:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/the-tumbling-walls-of-formal-science.php

"But why should we folk interested in engineered longevity spend much - or any - time following or helping support the open biotechnology movement? I think that the most obvious reason stems from the analogy to the open source software development movement. If you look at the software infrastructure of the present day internet, vast swathes of it are open source, its breadth and quality only made possible by the gift economy that takes shape in unfettered collaborative marketplaces of this nature. A very large fraction of all new innovation on the web now builds on top of open source infrastructure, for example.

"Low cost, high quality tools are the necessary precursors for a large community of skilled amateurs to arise in any field. It happened for software development, and we all benefit greatly from the results of that process. I would like to see it happen in the life sciences as well, because the only thing better than thousands of people advocating for engineered longevity is thousands of advocates who can also step in, do the work, and help to get the job done. Not all biotechnology is rocket science: a great many useful and necessary tasks in any project can be accomplished by undergraduate students - or anyone who has put in a few months of evening reading and practice."

In short, open science and garage biotechnology will lead to faster progress in the areas we care about - and we all want to see that happen.

TOMORROW'S ARTIFICIAL IMMUNE SYSTEMS

In the future, our immune systems will be augmented by adaptive nanoscale machinery, rendering us largely immune to disease and cancer. This might seem far from the here and now, but in fact the first foundations of this technology are already emerging from the laboratory:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/06/building-the-foundation-of-tomorrows-immune-system.php

______________________________

LATEST HEALTHY LIFE EXTENSION HEADLINES

WHY AGING RESEARCH? (June 10 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4763
From In Search of Enlightenment: "A person’s interest in remaining healthy and alive does not evaporate as the number of birthday candles they accumulate increases. The aged, like the young, have an interest in remaining healthy and vigorous for as long as possible. When a person over age 65 is murdered or killed in a car accident we conceive of these events as constituting a serious harm. We believe that there is a moral duty to prevent these harms from being realized, if it is possible to do so. Whether these harms come from an external source that we can easily perceive (such as a criminal wielding a gun or a speeding car) or from complex biological processes that are internal to our biology is irrelevant to the stringency of the moral duty to prevent harm. The general affluence of a country, as well as its natural resources, profoundly influences the quality of sanitation it can offer its citizens. But in the case of developing an antiaging pill to protect against chronic disease, there is good reason to believe that many of these obstacles will be less of a challenge. Unlike sanitation, the main costs associated with the development of an antiaging pill will most likely be with research and development, rather than the manufacture and dispersion of such a pill. So I believe there is good reason to be optimistic that such an antiaging intervention could be enjoyed by most of the world’s population in a relatively short time from when it is first developed."

THE OTHER USE FOR STEM CELLS (June 10 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4762
A low-cost source of stem cells can generate diseased tissue for study in the laboratory, a use that is probably just as important at the present time as regenerative medicine: researchers "have for the first time differentiated human stem cells to become heart cells with cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscle cells are abnormal. The discovery will allow scientists to learn how those heart cells become diseased and from there, they can begin developing drug therapies to stop the disease from occurring or progressing. [Researchers] took patient skin cells and reprogrammed them to become pluripotent stem cells. Such cells can then develop into almost any type of cell in the human body. The researchers then created heart cells that had characteristics of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We knew there was potential in using pluripotent stem cells from people with genetic disorders to develop diseases in vitro, but our study is the first to successfully create abnormal heart cells. Now that we have developed these cells, we can study why they become enlarged and develop treatments to prevent them from overgrowing."

ON COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF AGING (June 09 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4761
Maria Konovalenko on the study of the often large life span differences between similar species - or rather the lack of such research work in comparison to other fields of life science: "Here's this quite simple idea:
to take two species similar in size and basic biology, but having a substantial difference in longevity, and figure out what's the reason for this difference. What are the distinctions in the mechanisms of aging and stress resistance? It's desirable to carry out this work in various species. However, not a lot of people are excited about this simple idea. Even the genome of the famous naked mole rat has not been sequenced yet, although many people believe it's got 'negligible' senescence. For now all that we have is negligible funding of evolutionary-comparative biology of aging. Moreover, previously obtained results are put into cold storage. And here comes the main question in biogerontology. Why is the research into the fundamental mechanisms of aging so scarcely funded?" Aging and longevity research in general receives very little funding and attention in comparison to its importance to the future of human health. This state of affairs is slowly changing, but not fast enough for my liking.

TOR AND CALORIE RESTRICTION (June 09 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4760

Via Newswise: "Why all the attention on TOR? TOR (target of rapamycin) is a key nutrient-sensing catalytic enzyme that evolution has conserved among every plant and animal species that has cells containing a nucleus. TOR mediates the connection between nutrients in the environment to the growth and metabolism of the organism. Studies in flies, worms, yeast and mice support the notion that the TOR signaling network also plays a pivotal role in regulating the aging process. When TOR signaling is reduced, either through genetic manipulation or via the use of drugs, the organism presumes there are reduced nutrients in its environment and goes into a 'survival' mode similar to that seen in dietary restriction, which has been shown to extend lifespan and slow the onset of certain age-related diseases. It remains to be seen which downstream effectors of TOR are key drivers of longevity and which ones elicit only minor effects. In addition to simply extending lifespan, research on the protective effects of TOR is likely to identify which age-related diseases can be slowed by inhibition of the TOR pathway."

ARTIFICIAL CORNEAS (June 08 2010) http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/vnl.cfm?id=4758

From Singularity Hub: "In order to work in the human body, an artificial cornea has to meet some rather stringent requirements. First, it has to bond to the human eye around its edge, but stay unclouded by cells in its center. To that end, [researchers] took a widely used opthalmological polymer (found often in intraocular lenses) and adapted it with other special polymers around the edges. Combined with the application of a growth factor protein, the modified edge promoted cell growth around the periphery of the implant and secured it in place using the body's own cells. The center of the artificial cornea, however, does not promote cell growth and remains clear so that it can be seen through. The artificial cornea also has to move freely with the eyelid and balance moisture on its faces. The polymer [researchers] chose is hydrophobic, allowing tears to lubricate the surface and provide the correct moisture on both of its sides. The artificial cornea has passed clinical trials and is ready to see expanded use in patients this year."

. Back to Top