From mice to men, research in the next few decades may lead to
therapies that will dramatically extend our lifespans. 
Biologist Aubrey de Grey is developing therapies designed to
postpone aging. His test subjects may still be mice, but he argues
“there are no absolutely fundamental breakthroughs that we still
need” in order to make the jump to humans.
So how long can you and I expect to live?
“At this point I think it’s fair to say there’s a good chance
that people who are alive today, and are still young, children
today, there’s a good chance that they have no upper limit on their
lifespan,” asserts de Grey in a recent MemeBox interview
His roadmap to longevity starts in the mind:
“I think in the next 5 years we have a very good chance of
seeing a complete phase change in people’s attitude to what aging
is. In other words, to the distinction, or lack of it, between
aging and age-related diseases.”
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By Jack Uldrich
Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve.com
The signs are all around us and yet, rather surprisingly, there
is very little public discussion of an issue that is going to have
profound moral, ethical, and political ramifications for all of
society. 
The issue of which I speak is the possibility of immortality. In
just the past few days, however, the New York Times has run an
informative article on how advances
in genomics are improving the treatment of disease; the
Economist has discussed the impressive progress
being made in the field of gene therapy, and Technology Review
covered the extraordinary advances that researchers at the
University of Minnesota are making in growing a human heart.
Last week, I discussed why the future is accelerating
and before that, I encouraged readers when thinking about the
future to “think 10X, not 10%”; and the more I
think about health care and human longeveity, the more I think both
of these lines of thought apply to this field in particular.
(cont.)
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This interview was conducted by Venessa Posavec on Dec. 14,
2007
V: What do you do and how is that related to the future?
A: I’m a biologist, mainly, and I’m focused on the development
of future therapies that will be able to postpone human aging a
very great deal. By postpone, what I really mean is, repair the
accumulating molecular and cellular damage that causes aging, and
really is aging. The various things that happen, the side effects
of our normal metabolic operations, so to speak, throughout our
lives that will eventually cause things to go wrong with us.
V: And what is the Methuselah Foundation?
A: The Methuselah Foundation is the main vehicle through which I
pursue these goals. It’s a 501©(3) nonprofit registered in Virginia
and it was founded by me and a businessman called Dave Gobel who
has a very distinguished career in a variety of different high tech
industries over the years, so it’s very complimentary so to speak
since I’m on the science side. We have been able to build up the
foundation into a very prominent organization that both promotes
the general merits of seriously combating aging, and also directly
fund research in universities around the world to actually make
that happen. We obtain the money for that research from the general
public, and from wealthy individuals.
V: Where do you see the foundation heading in the future?
A: The main thing that it really has to do is to grow. At the
moment we’re not nearly big enough. There’s masses of research that
needs to be done, that isn’t being funded by anybody else, because
people think it’s too ambitious or they don’t understand the goals
or whatever, and it’s not being funded by us because we don’t have
the money yet. My my main purpose, my main focus at the moment is
to expand the foundation, to get more money in so that we can put
more money out.
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(Cross-posted from
Ouroboros: Research in the biology of aging.)
A transgenic mouse that lives twice as long as controls is also
stronger and faster, arguing against the idea of inherent negative
tradeoffs associated with lifespan extension. 
Increased expression of a metabolic enzyme, phosphoenolpyruvate
carboxykinase (PEPCK, an enzyme that most of us learned about in
freshman biology and then promptly forgot, reasoning that the
descriptive name and the ability to look it up if necessary would
suffice if it ever came up again) results in mice that are
muscular, have lower body fat than a runway model, and able to run
25 times farther than a wildtype control.
Even more interesting, according to proud parents Hanson and Hakimi, the females of the PEPCK-Cmus strain mate and have
normal-sized litters at 35 months, an age when the blood of
wildtype mice has cooled substantially (and, indeed, the mice
themselves are starting to check out). The implication is that
aging is slowed, and longevity extended, as a result of the
transgene.
It’s become reflexive to ask whether a long-lived mutant is
living longer because it’s calorie-restricted for some reason,
incidental to the main phenotype conferred by the mutation, but
this is not the case here: In order to preserve their enviable
bods, PEPCK-Cmus mice eat 60%
more than controls — so they’re not extending their lifespan
by dieting. If anything, they’re anti-dieting: their increased
metabolic efficiency means they’re harvesting more calories per
gram of carb or fat than normal animals. No word yet on what
happens if you do try to calorie-restrict them; I can imagine it
going either way but am holding out hope for tiny
explosions. (cont.)
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Crossposted on Super Concepts
Any race that cures death will end up with a very old, wise and experienced society. Who knows what sort of implications this could have on their world.
The implications of more time alone would dramatically enhance one’s ability to contribute. For example, time to specialise in many fields would bring about more knowledgeable scientists, more skillful musicians and sports people, and more flexible artists. Centuries of honing and refinement would give birth to unseen talent. Throw wisdom into the mix too and you have yourself an extremely enlightened society, making today’s most gifted look like incapable children.
Imagine an artist who masters psychology, quantum physics and child care, and is able to integrate it into their art in a way never before achieved, using skills refined over millennia. The boundaries of magnificence would continue to be pushed to extraordinary levels. This is a world of wonder the likes of which we have never seen.
With vast and varied knowledge, many would be able to integrate obscure connections in their knowledge, much like I was talking about in my blog Time to Improve on Accidental Science. New discoveries and solutions would be found at an ever increasing rate as more and more people learnt to see relationships between seemingly unrelated concepts.
High efficiency achieved by centuries of practice and trial and error would lead to yet another boom, in productivity. Prices would drop and profits would soar, further speeding up the eradication of poverty.
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(cross-posted from
Ouroboros: Research in the biology of aging)
Our understanding of aging in animals owes a great debt to a
large body of careful work in a single-celled organism, the
brewer’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Indeed, as I’ve
argued
before, yeast is one of the two organisms with the strongest
credible claim to have started modern biogerontology. An unusually
large crop of yeast aging papers have appeared over the last few
months, and I thought it would be appropriate to spend a few
paragraphs describing them — in honor of this humble organism that
rises our bread, ferments our beer, and has done so much to open
our eyes to the fundamental mechanisms of aging.
For those unfamiliar with the yeast field or simply wishing a
clearly written and nearly comprehensive summary, Steinkraus et al. provide the historical
perspective. The piece thoroughly reviews the development of yeast
as a model system in aging, as well as the arguments in favor of a
connection between results in yeast and well-established (but
sometimes hard-to-test) hypotheses in animals.
Based on the influence that yeast has already had on
biogerontology as a whole, it seems fair to claim that it will
continue to reveal fundamentals of aging that are conserved across
evolution. (cont.)
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By Jack Uldrich
Cross-posted from www.jumpthecurve
I ask this question from neither a deep-seated fear of dying nor an egotistical desire to live forever. I simply ask it from the perspective of someone who is deeply interested in the accelerating pace of change and is concerned we are heading into a future for which few of us are really prepared.
Let me begin by sharing a couple of recent news items which speak to the astounding progress being made in the field of health care.
To begin, if I am in need of surgery sometime within the next few years, it is likely that that surgery will be conducted with the assistance of a robot. Given that these robots are already better than many human surgeons, this suggest I will not only get out of the hospital faster but that I will be in better condition when I do so. Continued advances in robotics will only improve surgical outcomes over the coming years.
Next, say, I am in an accident. There is now a very good chance – due to advances in the Nationwide Health Information Network, personal electronic records and the ever-improving capability of the Internet – that my providers will be able to rapidly access a growing wealth of medical knowledge in order to keep me alive.
Much of this knowledge will likely be genetic in nature and it is not unreasonable to believe – given the extraordinary advances in genomics as well as the possibility that I will within a few years be able to sequence my own genome for less than $1000 dollars - that I will soon be able to avail myself to a growing category of drugs individually tailored to treat me for everything from heart disease and diabetes to a wide variety of cancers.
Assuming then that I dodge some of these pesky middle-age risks, there is a very real chance, according to this article, that I’ll soon be able to “grow replacement body parts.” We can already replace our aging hips and knees, but what happens when I can replace my lungs and, eventually, my heart?
The question is a serious one because society is closer to this future than most people realize.
Alas, these advances – which I remind you are only from the past few days – are just the beginning. I am now 44 years and it is not unreasonable to think, given recent medical progress, that I will live to 100.
But even this is the wrong way to think about this issue. The question I – and all of us, really – need to ask is what further advances will be made in the next 56 years of my life and how might they extend my life past 100 years of age?
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