Healthy Life Extension

Turning Controls Over to You

posted on February 15, 2011

Here’s an example of what one of my subscribers is doing to help ensure you, he and I see no end to our personal growth. He is fighting to “make 100 the new 50” as an intermediate goal and to ultimately see us rejuvenated to youthfulness. There is no upper limit for Fivos Olympios. He broke out of the pack to help do the “impossible.”

Here is what he wrote to me recently:

“No doubt Aubrey de Gray and all the other gerontological geniuses out there will be thrilled that slowly but perceptibly we are [winning] and will win this war on aging. 

Reminds me of a program I saw on Discovery Channel about the US Marine Corps fighting their way against the Japanese on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima during World war II. The Japanese were tough, fought ferociously and severely mauled the US Marines. But in the end, America won the day. One marine interviewed described this as the toughest fight the US army ever had to face, on some days perhaps edging forward only a few feet against the Japanese.

It’s the same with aging - a very tough slog, but we will get there. I ascribe to the philosophy it is better to die trying than die doing nothing. Hence I am contacting hospitals all over the UK. So far, I am meeting resistance but doggedly keep moving forward. I have recommended to scores of people, including doctors, oncologists and other specialists to look at your website with an open mind rather than making value judgments based on prejudiced corporate media propaganda.”

This is the kind of commitment and determination it takes to win this war. Fivos is an early leader in our ever-growing army of aging people determined to be part of the first generation to embrace open-ended youthfulness. Fivos, like you, does not want to be part of the last generation of victims who will fall to aging.

So what can you do? Well, what is it worth to you? It doesn’t take much if enough chip in just a little here and there.

Maximum Life Foundation just made another donation to the Immortality Institute. They are sponsoring a series of small research projects which they find worthy. This is the current one:

"Cognitive functions of the brain decline with age. One of the protective cell types in the brain are called microglia cells. However, these microglia cells lose function with age. Our aim is to replace non-functional microglia with new and young microglia cells derived from adult stem cells. We will inject these young cells into 'Alzheimer’s mice', a model for Alzheimer’s disease. After giving the cells some time to work, we will measure microglia activity, neurogenesis, proliferation of neuroprogenitors and plaque density in the brain. A reduction in plaque density of Alzheimer’s mice would be a first proof that the transplanted microglia are performing their expected function."

The link below is to a fund raising effort for this research project. Their advisor, Aubrey de Grey, and other advisors feel this has a lot of potential and is worthy of our efforts to fund. But we need help and have approved a matching grant, dollar for dollar. Anything you donate (even if only $10) will be doubled (tax deductible in the US):

http://www.longecity.org/forum/index.php?app=donate

They have approved a matching grant of $8000, so a total of $16,000 can be raised for this project. Any surplus will go into the next scientific research initiative that is already in the pipeline. Please help them reach their goal, and at the least, come learn more about how this research can further our knowledge of ways to combat aging. Here is some detailed information:

http://www.imminst.org/Research2010B

Long Life,
David Kekich
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LATEST HEADLINES FROM FIGHT AGING!

A GOOD OP-ED ON AGING AND LONGEVITY Friday, February 11, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/a-good-op-ed-on-aging-and-longevity.php
I'm always pleased to see more good writing on the topic of longevity science: "To extend our longevity, we'll have to advance in stages... With a healthy lifestyle and some luck (absence of accidents and natural disasters) we not only can increase our lifespan, we can increase the health in that lifespan and postpone debilitating illness to the very end of our life. To go beyond this achievable life extension, we need more advances in the basic sciences. Considering aging as a disease is new concept. It will take time before we accept this not just as wishful thinking but as a real possibility in our lifetime. The end of aging does not mean that we will never die; we will still die of other diseases, accidents, or natural disasters but no longer of aging itself. Aging is not yet recognized as a disease. Some among us would like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to recognize it as a disease so that we could get funding for basic, translational, and clinical research on aging. These changes will be implemented incrementally. The unprecedented biological and technological evolution we face today will be the driving force for social, economic, and even political changes. Working conditions will change significantly: retirement will be changed, people will no longer retire after a certain age, they will take time off from work every few years and then return to it afterwards. Our goal is not to reach immortality but to postpone and eventually prevent aging. For now and the immediate future we can change our lifestyle toward healthier living. This will buy us time so that we can survive long enough for the advances in basic sciences, which will be made in the next 15 to 20 years, helping us move to the next stage where aging will no longer be the biggest killer of our species."

APOLOGISM FOR AGING IS ALIVE AND WELL Friday, February 11, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/apologism-for-aging-is-alive-and-well.php
There is no shortage of people trying to convince us that degenerating into frailty, suffering, and death is a wonderful thing: "Mr Agronin is an optimist. He does not deny - how could he? - the sufferings and indignities of old age. Scanning slices of old brain, 'stained and prepped for the microscope', his eye is unsparing: 'the aged folds' like 'the withered meat of a walnut', the blood vessels like 'hardened tendrils', the 'small plaques of toxic amyloid protein surrounded by a debris field of dead neurons'. But alongside the science, he sees something else: the people themselves. Old age, he says, has become our blind spot, neglected by the medical profession, lumped together with dementia and disease, something to be endured, dreaded, mercifully pre-empted, or even - as one researcher in the field, Aubrey de Grey, argues - reversed. Mr Agronin, by contrast, embraces it. He sees it as intrinsic to life, with its own 'ways and meanings', its particular wisdom. Even at its most tenuous and hollowed out, he finds some shape, a sense of cyclic pattern. In an almost mystical passage, inspired by his professor, Erik Erikson, a psychologist, Mr Agronin likens life to a stream which eventually seeps down unseen into the bedrock, and opens 'like a flower into the aquifer below'." From where I stand, there needs to be more of a healthy dread of aging - perhaps that would motivate more people to help develop the rejuvenation biotechnologies that can do something about it. To try to pretend that aging to death, suffering terribly along the way, is just peachy keen has an air of desperate madness to it.

IN 2045, THE END OF AGING? Thursday, February 10, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/in-2045-the-end-of-aging.php
Time here looks at Ray Kurzweil's timeline for the development of biotechnologies that can defeat aging: repair the old, remove biological damage, and eliminate frailty and age-related death. "The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians. .At the 2010 summit, which took place in August in San Francisco, there were not just computer scientists but also psychologists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, molecular biologists, a specialist in wearable computers, a professor of emergency medicine, an expert on cognition in gray parrots and the professional magician and debunker James 'the Amazing' Randi. After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. Like a lot of Singularitarian ideas, it sounds funny at first, but the closer you get to it, the less funny it seems. It's not just wishful thinking; there's actual science going on here.

People have begun to realize that the view of aging being something immutable - rather like the heat death of the universe - is simply ridiculous. It's just childish. The human body is a machine that has a bunch of functions, and it accumulates various types of damage as a side effect of the normal function of the machine. Therefore in principal that damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. It's really just a matter of paying attention. The whole of medicine consists of messing about with what looks pretty inevitable until you figure out how to make it not inevitable." I don't see it as plausible that we'll have everything in hand by 2045, but if we make a good start now, then we could have enough to put us into actuarial escape velocity - gaining life expectancy faster than we age, and thus able to wait for far better technologies that arrive later.

TOXIC PROTEIN ACCUMULATION AND DRY MACULAR DEGENERATION Wednesday, February  9, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/toxic-protein-accumulation-and-dry-macular-degeneration.php
A fair chunk of degenerative aging is caused by the accumulation of various kinds of damaging biochemicals, and here dry macular degeneration is added to that list: "A team of researchers, led by University of Kentucky ophthalmologist Dr. Jayakrishna Ambati, has discovered a molecular mechanism implicated in geographic atrophy, the major cause of untreatable blindness in the industrialized world. Concurrent with this discovery, Ambati's laboratory developed two promising therapies for the prevention of the condition. Geographic atrophy, a condition causing the death of cells in the retina, occurs in the later stages of the 'dry type' of macular degeneration, a disease affecting some 10 million older Americans and causing blindness in over 1 million.

There is currently no effective treatment for geographic atrophy, as its cause is unknown. Ambati's team discovered that an accumulation of a toxic type of RNA, called Alu RNA, causes retinal cells to die in patients with geographic atrophy. In a healthy eye, a 'Dicer' enzyme degrades the Alu RNA particles. We discovered that in patients with geographic atrophy, there is a dramatic reduction of the Dicer enzyme in the retina. When the levels of Dicer decline, the control system is short-circuited and too much Alu RNA accumulates. This leads to death of the retina. Alu elements make up a surprisingly large portion - about 11 percent by weight - of the human genome, comprising more than 1 million sequences. However, their function has been unknown, so they have been called 'junk' DNA or part of the 'dark' genome. The discovery of Alu's toxicity and its control by Dicer should prove of great interest to other researchers in the biological sciences. Ambati's team developed two potential therapies aimed at preventing geographic atrophy and demonstrated the efficacy of both approaches using laboratory models. The first involves increasing Dicer levels in the retina by 'over-expressing' the enzyme. The second involves blocking Alu RNA using an 'anti-sense' drug that binds and degrades this toxic substance. Ambati's group is preparing to start clinical trials by the end of this year."

A LOOK AT THE INSTITUTE FOR BIONANOTECHNOLOGY IN MEDICINE Tuesday, February  8, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/a-look-at-the-institute-for-bionanotechnology-in-medicine.php
From Fast Company: "The mice in the video flickering on his colleague's computer screen were moving their legs. Their back feet trailed behind them from time to time, but the fact that they were walking at all was astounding. Only a few weeks earlier, they'd been paralyzed from the waist down. Then Stupp's team at Northwestern University injected them with made-to-order molecules. Now the mice were trying to run around their cage. Those mice were the first living glimpse of the future that Stupp is hoping to accelerate in his role as the director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine at Northwestern. It's a future in which molecular self-assembly - where researchers direct molecules to spontaneously combine into ordered structures - will help the body heal itself.

It wasn't until 1995 that one of his nanotechnology experiments steered him onto an entirely new scientific course. He was trying to make molecules called rodcoils line up side by side to create a large polymer sheet with one side shiny and the other sticky, properties that might make the sheet useful for industrial applications. But something unexpected happened. Instead of forming a single thin membrane, the rodcoils coalesced into trillions of tiny individual structures that looked like mushrooms. Stupp initially wrote off the result as a failure, but he quickly realized that the mushroom-shaped nanoparticles might have a host of advantages. What if he could inject the nanomolecules into the bloodstream so they could serve as microscopic vehicles to deliver therapeutic compounds? Even better, what if he could modify the nanomolecules so that they would attract the body's own healing compounds to an injured area, kick-starting the repair process without introducing any foreign cells at all? The 'mushroom' paper Stupp published in 1997 attracted lots of attention, and Northwestern lured the rising star to its materials-science program in 1999. The very next year, Stupp founded IBNAM, the lab he hoped would bring his interdisciplinary ideas to fruition."

LIFESTYLE MORE IMPORTANT THAN GENES TO NATURAL LONGEVITY Tuesday, February  8, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/lifestyle-more-important-than-genes-to-natural-longevity.php
Another confirmation that your natural longevity is more a matter of your choices than the luck of the draw: "It is often assumed that people with parents who lived to be very old are more likely to live to a grand old age themselves. 'But that's just not true - our study shows that hereditary factors don't play a major role and that lifestyle has the biggest impact,' says professor emeritus Lars Wilhelmsen, referring to the 1913 Men study that formed the basis of the current research. Those who did not smoke, consumed moderate amounts of coffee and had a good socio-economic status at the age of 50 (measured in terms of housing costs), as well as good physical working capacity at the age of 54 and low cholesterol at 50 had the greatest chance of celebrating their 90th birthday. We're breaking new ground here. Many of these factors have previously been identified as playing a role in cardiovascular disease, but here we are showing for the first time that they are important for survival in general.

The study clearly shows that we can influence several of the factors that decide how old we get. The 1913 Men epidemiological study started up in 1963. A third of all male 50-year-olds in Gothenburg were called for a check-up that focused on cardiovascular health. Every ten years since, a new group of 50-year-olds has been called in and those who were already taking part in the study have been given another check-up. This has enabled researchers to follow the development of illnesses in a specific age group, and to compare the health of 50-year-olds in 2003 with that of 50-year-olds in 1963, for example." The choices you make become even more important when we consider the prospects for future medical technology: are you helping to bring about the rejuvenation biotechnology that will extend all healthy human lives, or are you merely sitting on the sidelines and hoping?

STEM CELLS FORM NEW SKIN RAPIDLY WHEN SPRAYED ON Monday, February  7, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/02/stem-cells-form-new-skin-rapidly-when-sprayed-on.php

Here is an example of the way in which advances in delivery methodology can greatly improve an existing therapy: "Doctors have invented a revolutionary skin spray-gun that heals severe burns within days. The spray-gun which fires stem cells on to the damaged skin has already been used successfully on a dozen patients. Rather than sheets of skin being laboriously grown over a period of a month and applied to the patient, stem cells are harvested from a small patch of healthy skin, put into a solution and sprayed back on to the affected area. The process takes only 90 minutes [and] burns can heal in as little as four days. It eliminates a major flaw of existing burns treatment, the time taken to grow new layers of skin in the lab, during which time patients can die from infection. The process involved isolating stem cells from a healthy patch of the patient's skin, putting those cells in a water solution, and then spraying the mixture back on. After being sprayed, the patient's wound is covered with a special dressing that provides glucose, sugar, amino acids, antibiotics and electroytes to the treated area, to provide nutrition and clean the wound until the stem cells get established. For Matthew Uram, a police officer from Pennsylvania, the radical technical has already saved his skin. Last July he received severe burns to his face, neck, shoulder, arm and hand after someone threw a cup of petrol on to a bonfire at a party. His hand looked like a 'charred piece of meat', he said. Quickly taken to hospital, he was offered the chance to be one of the first patients to benefit from the skin gun. They did it on a Friday, and my follow up was that Monday and the burns unit said it was completely healed."

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