Healthy Life Extension

The Movie that Could Turbocharge Your Extreme Longevity

posted on June 28, 2011

Dear Future Centenarian,

Make sure the next DVD you watch is Transcendent Man.

The film chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and author of The Singularity is Near. It features discussions with and commentary by over 15 prominent scientific, political, and celebrity figures including Ray Kurzweil, Colin Powell, William Shatner, and Stevie Wonder.

For me, this is the movie of the year. Ray and his ideas have been my inspiration and rationale for age reversal in our lifetime for many a long time. Our prospects are grim without his foundational ideas. This documentary has the potential to be so influential, that it could ultimately trigger massive funding for the technologies that will rejuvenate you.

Following are excerpts from reviews in Technology Review and ign.com:

On its surface, Transcendent Man explores the science behind Kurzweil's prediction of a Singularity event, as he authored in The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil has observed that new technologies—ranging from the printing press to Google—themselves enable us to develop newer technologies even faster. So the pace of innovation is always accelerating, yielding an exponential curve of discovery.

Kurzweil produces data that extends Moore's Law to bits shipped, social connections made, and many other metrics of information technology. Extrapolating from historical trends, we will within two decades manufacture the powerful computers we carry today in sizes no larger than a blood cell.

Furthermore, as genomic sequencing transforms biology into an information science, we should see the same exponential pace of invention. Inevitably our machines would be so effective at fixing and augmenting our frail, limited bodies that we will incorporate them ever deeper into our lives. Memory prosthetics will feed our brains data, and nanobots in our blood will download the latest anti-virus software for fighting REAL viruses!

Kurzweil's Singularity is a point in time three decades from now when we create machines so intelligent that human beings are no longer on the critical path to further innovation. Our inventions will themselves solve the intractable problems of aging and death.

The Singularity is obviously a provocative prediction, even more so than Kurzweil's highly accurate prediction in the 1970's that in 1998 a computer would become the world's best chess player, which seemed a lot crazier back then. But the Singularity violates no laws of physics, suggesting that it's more likely a question of "When", not "If". Kurzweil presents the data transparently, challenging critics to assess the analysis rather than respond intuitively to the surprising conclusion.

At the same time, Transcendent Man recounts the life of this extraordinary scientist who was brilliant and crazy enough to doggedly tackle seemingly intractable problems.

As a teenager in the 1960's he built a computer to analyze and compose classical music. At MIT he started and sold his first computer software company, and after school he generalized optical character recognition (OCR) as Kurzweil Computer (the predecessor of today's Nuance). More ventures followed: at Kurzweil Music Products, Ray invented the modern synthesizer by generating sound indistinguishable from a grand piano. At Kurzweil Artificial Intelligence, Ray developed and commercialized the first large-vocabulary speech recognition software. Kurzweil Educational Systems developed text-to-speech software for the blind. Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies operated a hedge fund using AI techniques. And there were others—too many to expound.

He's been referred to as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison" by Forbes, leading the charge over the past few decades in developing the flat-bed scanner and many other innovations. A TIME Magazine poll recently named him the 30th most influential person in the world. But the film is more concerned with his beliefs as an author and futurist, chief among them being his claim that within the next 20 years or so we could all be granted open-ended lifespans, thanks to microscopic robots that will live inside us.

When Ray was 35 he contracted diabetes, which had led to his own father's death. Rather than capitulate to the limited science of the day, Ray resolved to learn the chemistry behind his condition and fix it. He studied the mechanisms behind diabetes and formulated a regimen of medical supplements that has, he claims, reversed the condition. He has since written two books on his medical research into staving off the ravages of age.

So on its surface, the film foretells how Humanity will transcend our biological boundaries, breaking the boom-and-bust cycle that has characterized every other species of nature.

But it's also the story of how Kurzweil himself has transcended his modest means, his illness, and his critics—striving still to transcend his own mortality.

The thing is… and this is what mostly drives this doc once the thrill of the sci-fi-esque concepts wears off… Kurzweil is revealed to be a guy who very much needs his ideas to come to fruition. He doesn't want to die. In fact, he doesn't plan on dying.

I think you’ll agree, that’s a pretty big ambition. See for yourself why he thinks it is possible.

Long Life,
David Kekich
____________________________

LATEST HEADLINES FROM FIGHT AGING!

REVERSING TYPE 2 DIABETES Friday, June 24, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/reversing-type-2-diabetes.php
Type 2 diabetes is as close to a disease of choice as you're likely to find: provided that you adopt a sensible lifestyle of good diet and exercise then you are never going to suffer the condition, barring extremely bad luck in your genes. Similarly, if you are headed down the path towards diabetes, you can turn back by changing the way you live your life. Here's evidence that the turn can be made quite late if made aggressively enough: "An extreme eight-week diet of 600 calories a day can reverse Type 2 diabetes in people newly diagnosed with the disease. The low-calorie diet reduced fat levels in the pancreas and liver, which helped insulin production return to normal. Seven out of 11 people studied were free of diabetes three months later.

More research is needed to see whether the reversal is permanent, say experts. The 11 participants in the study were all diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes within the previous four years. They cut their food intake drastically for two months, eating only liquid diet drinks and non-starchy vegetables. After one week of the diet, researchers found that the pre-breakfast blood sugar levels of all participants had returned to normal. MRI scans of their pancreases also revealed that the fat levels in the organ had decreased from around 8% - an elevated level - to a more normal 6%. Three months after the end of the diet, when participants had returned to eating normally and received advice on healthy eating and portion size, most no longer suffered from the condition. This diet was only used to test the hypothesis that if people lose substantial weight they will lose their diabetes. Although this study involved people diagnosed with diabetes within the last four years, there is potential for people with longer-standing diabetes to turn things around too."

EAT LESS, LIVE LONGER? Thursday, June 23, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/eat-less-live-longer-1.php
A cautious popular science article on calorie restriction: "Caloric restriction as a research discipline has actually been around for ages. The first demonstration of extending lifespan and improving health in rats by cutting calories was back in 1934, and since then the finding has been repeated in numerous species up to and including non-human primates. Animals subjected to caloric restriction while maintaining adequate vitamin, mineral, and protein intakes not only live longer, healthier lives, they also maintain vitality to an older age and have fewer visible signs of aging - such as white fur - compared to better-fed siblings. It is worth noting that we are not just talking about shedding a few pounds here. Animal studies show that, almost up to the point of frank starvation, the more calorie restriction the better when it comes to extending lifespan and health.

Virtually every animal study ever done on caloric restriction has shown benefits for health and longevity, and now we have emerging studies showing that even intermittent caloric restriction may be beneficial, so it would be almost surprising if humans turned out to be the only species to have a negative response. Unlike research animals, however, humans don't live alone in pre-paid houses with the right kind of food carefully provided by scientists, so if caloric restriction is to be a feasible strategy for maintaining health as we age it has to be feasible to implement - in other words, doable and practical in real lives in the real world." People who write about calorie restriction without having made a serious attempt at trying it invariably exaggerate the difficulty. Practicing calorie restriction is both "doable and practical," and requires no more investment of time and willpower than any modestly challenging hobby.

NOTES ON THE 40TH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN AGING ASSOCIATION Thursday, June 23, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/notes-on-the-40th-annual-meeting-of-the-american-aging-association.php
From the IEET: "The focus of the 40th annual meeting of the American Aging Association, held a few weeks ago in North Carolina, was emerging concepts in the mechanisms of aging. Most of the usual topics in aging were covered, such as dietary restriction, inflammation, stress resistance, homeostasis and proteasome activity, sarcopenia, and neural degeneration. Newer methods like microRNAs and genome sequencing were employed to investigate gene expression variance with aging and genetic signatures of longevity. Aging as a field continues to mature including by using a systems approach to tracing conserved pathways across organisms, sharpening definitions of sarcopenia, frailty, and healthspan, and distinguishing interventions by age tier (early-onset versus late-onset). A pre-conference session on late-onset intervention concluded that there are numerous benefits to deriving such interventions."

MORE ON FINANCIAL PLANNING AND CRYONICS Wednesday, June 22, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/more-on-financial-planning-and-cryonics.php
It is good to see that cryonics is now sufficiently widely known that business magazines are willing to write articles on the financial engineering and legal explorations associated with establishing a successful cryopreservation: "Financial planning, like most disciplines, generally relies on the assumption that the dead will remain that way. Some people, however, are not as willing to accept this premise. Cryonicists believe science will eventually give us the ability to reanimate the dead. In preparation for this possibility, they elect to have their bodies, or sometimes merely their heads, stored in extreme low temperatures so that, when the time comes, they can be restored to life.

Some anticipate a future in which their bodies will be thawed and cured of their ailments, while others see the process as akin to data storage, preserving the organic record of their thoughts and memories until these can be downloaded onto some new medium. The legal and financial questions surrounding cryonics require serious believers to make plans in the present, before they start their hiatus. Since cryonics remains well outside the mainstream, most end-of-life matters have yet to be thought through as temporary-suspension-of-life concerns. Ordinarily, at death, social security numbers are cancelled and made public, and citizenship privileges such as voting are revoked (at least in most jurisdictions). What would the temporarily dead need to do to put their legal status on ice along with their bodies?" If you want a serious consideration of the details, you might look at some of Rudi Hoffman's articles on cryonics and financial planning.

A PROFILE OF LAURA DEMING, THIEL FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT Wednesday, June 22, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/a-profile-of-laura-deming-thiel-foundation-fellowship-recipient.php
At Forbes, a profile of one of the Thiel Fellowship recipients who focuses on longevity science: "Deming started working in a research lab when she was 12, enrolled at MIT at age 14 and last month, the now 17 year-old was awarded one of 24 $100,000 Thiel Foundation Fellowships for her work in the realm of anti-aging, specifically efforts to identify the genes that control aging and to use discoveries about age-defying therapies effective in worms to unlock the key to extending the human lifespan.

I had a fantastic childhood. Growing up, I had complete freedom to investigate whatever I was interested in, so I puzzled around with math and science, and got hooked on biology. When I was 12, Cynthia Kenyon, one of the coolest people I know, let me come to her lab. She works with a wonderful little worm called C. elegans, so I got to spend the next few years peering down a microscope at the fascinating critters. Then I went to MIT. I'm leaving as a physics major after a whirlwind couple of years spent exploring the magical properties of the quantum realm. 'I'd been mulling over what to do after college. The optimal scenario I came up with was exactly what the 20 Under 20 program offers; an opportunity to spend two years working to extend the human healthspan.' She will take up her award in the fall and will initially focus on identifying promising anti-aging research projects that are close to commercialization."

MORE ON LEUCINE INTAKE AND MUSCLE MASS Tuesday, June 21, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/more-on-leucine-intake-and-muscle-mass.php
You might recall that age-related issues with the body's processing of the dietary amino acid leucine were implicated as a possible contributing cause of sarcopenia, the progressive loss of muscle mass with age. More leucine in the diet seemed to be a possible treatment - here that is tried for cancer patients, with a generally positive outcome: "Maintenance of muscle mass is crucial to improving outcome and quality of life in cancer patients. Stimulating muscle protein synthesis is the metabolic basis for maintaining muscle mass, but in cancer patients normal dietary intake has minimal effects on muscle protein synthesis.

Adding leucine to high protein supplements stimulates muscle protein synthesis in healthy older subjects. The objective was to determine if a specially formulated medical food, high in leucine and protein, stimulates muscle protein synthesis acutely in individuals with cancer to a greater extent than a conventional medical food. Ingestion of the experimental medical food increased muscle protein [synthesis]. In contrast, ingestion of the control medical food did not. Conclusions: In cancer patients, conventional nutritional supplementation is ineffective in stimulating muscle protein synthesis. This anabolic resistance can be overcome with a specially formulated nutritional supplement."

IMMUNOTHERAPY CURES PROSTATE CANCER IN MICE Monday, June 20, 2011 http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/06/immunotherapy-cures-prostate-cancer-in-mice.php
A good demonstrations of the promise of immune therapies, training the immune system to destroy very specific types of cell: researchers "cured well-established prostate tumors in mice using a human vaccine with no apparent side effects. This novel cancer treatment approach encourages the immune system to rid itself of prostate tumors without assistance from toxic chemotherapies and radiation treatments. Such a treatment model could some day help people to live tumor free with fewer side effects than those experienced from current therapies. We are hopeful that this will overcome some of the major hurdles which we have seen with immunotherapy cancer research.

Among the team's findings: no trace of autoimmune diseases in the mice. The murine T-cells attacked only cancerous prostate cells, leaving the healthy tissue unharmed. To develop this new approach, geneticists assembled snippets of genetic code from healthy human prostate tissue into a complementary DNA (cDNA) library. These bits of cDNA were then inserted into a swarm of vesicular stomatitis viruses (VSV), which were cultured and reintroduced into the test mice as a vaccine during a series of intravenous injections. Development of comprehensive cDNA libraries from healthy human prostate tissue represents the key to successful immunotherapy. All infections, allergens and tissues, including tumors, have a unique fingerprint called an antigen - a molecular protein tag that triggers a response from the body's immune system. [Researchers] deployed the human vaccine prostate cancer antigens through the mutated VSV vector to raise a full-on assault from the mice's T-cells. After exposure to the mutated viruses, the animals' immune systems recognized the antigens expressed in the virus and produced a potent immune response to attack the prostate tumors."

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