A. de Grey wants you to live a Really..Long Time.

Link: http://www.fortune.c...43799-2,00.html

What can you say about someone who stands up day after day and says that Life is good and Death is bad in the face of so many insane suggestions to the contrary?

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THE END OF AGING
Aubrey de Grey Would Have You Live a Really, Really, Really, Really Long Time.
If a mouse can survive the equivalent of 180 years, why not us? Or our kids? Scientific provocateur Aubrey de Grey has a plan.
By David Stipp

Absent-mindedly stroking his Rip van Winkle beard, Aubrey de Grey recalls when he first realized how humans might halt the process of growing old. His "Eureka!" came at a research meeting in California four years ago. Jet-lagged and wide awake at 4 a.m., the British scientist posed himself a simple question: "What would it take to bioengineer a nonaging human?" The light dawned as he scribbled a list—it seemed that only seven things had to be prevented, mainly toxic byproducts of metabolism that accumulate in the body over time. "I realized that we could bloody well fix them all," he says. "We could go in and periodically clean up the seven deadly things before they cause problems."

Good to see more articles cropping up

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

What a great place for the article!!!!!!!!! Fortune magazine (at least the online version). Go where the money is!!!!! Maybe he can pick up a couple big donors just from this article.

Wow, it's great to see Aubrey getting such amazing press. Now may be an odd time to ask this question, but which technology do you guys predict will conquer aging first, SENS or nanomedicine? Is SENS a more encouraging approach because many of the engineering building blocks are already available?

I'm not positive but I think this article is destined for the print edition Mind..



Mike,

IMO.. neutralizing rid of the 'seven deadly sins" of aging proposed by Aubrey will be accomplished hand in hand with advances in nanomedicene, although it depends on what you think nanomedicene is. If it's nanobots and synthetic immune systems... I think we're a long ways away from that.. but if its synthetically engineered proteins using already existing biological templates as a foundation to build from.. I'm hopeful that we are looking at pretty near term applications.

I agree with you Kevin. It will probably be a combination of many different technologies. The most important aspect I think, is the collection of knowledge on how the biology of our body works. That process of knowledge gathering will go hand in hand with the currently fast moving development of various nano-probing technologies. Advanced probing of both body and cells is going to reveal the inner workings of the biochemical molecular machinery which drives these fantastic processes.

I'm not positive but I think this article is destined for the print edition Mind

The net article says:

From the Jun. 14, 2004 Issue

I disagree that nano-immune systems are a long way off, the engineering problem of creating a mechanical nanobot that navigates through the blood and disassembles foreign objects without harming the body is a substantial one, but probably not as difficult as, say, designing nanobots that work in concert to build a skyscraper in an open-air environment. Robert Frietas's recent textbook Nanomedicine IIA proposes many intriguing designs.

However, I do think it is possible that synthetically engineered proteins may provide the critical "stepping stones" necessary to save the lives of millions of elderly people before nanomedicine becomes available. Plus, as lightowl points out, the important thing is a collection of knowledge about how our body works. It would be a lot easier to design a synthetic immune system if you knew what all the cells were doing.

Heh, one of my favorite parts of the article is this:

""Suppose you're a scientist 200 years ago who has figured out how to drastically lower infant mortality with better hygiene," he says. "You give a talk on this, and someone stands up in back and says, 'Hang on, if we do that we're going to have a population explosion!' If you reply, 'No, everything will be fine because we'll all wear these absurd rubber things when we have sex,' nobody would have taken you seriously. Yet that's just what happened—barrier contraception was widely adopted" about the time that infant mortality began dropping."

Slashdot accepted my submission for this one. Yay!

http://www.imminst.o...1&t=3752&hl=&s=

Moral: to get our stuff on Slashdot, mention engineering.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longeitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

That was profound, Reason.

De Grey also wants anti-aging therapists of the future to correct a cellular design flaw that abets damage from highly reactive molecules called free radicals. (Free radicals are the baddies that supposedly can be neutralized with "antioxidants" such as vitamins E and C.) That vulnerability stems from the way our DNA is positioned in our cells. Most of our DNA nestles safely within the cell nucleus. But a small fraction of it (13 genes, to be exact) is found outside the nucleus in cellular structures called mitochondria, which serve as our bodies' energy generators. Trouble is, mitochondria churn out free radicals that can clobber their small parcels of DNA. Over time, such damage may dim our cells' power supplies. To prevent it, de Grey proposes putting functioning copies of the damage-prone mitochondrial DNA into the protective confines of the cell nucleus. Studies dating from the mid-1980s have already shown that this is perfectly feasible, he adds. The method of choice, once again, would be gene therapy.

This is theoretically feasible, but there are problems: there are can be as many as 1000 mitochondria per cell requiring an enormous amount of transcription to be occurring in the nucleus meaning that this region of DNA will be exposed for unusually long periods, thereby diminishing protection afforded by histones; the issue of mutant mitochondria that are dysfunctional yet have a selective advantage over normal mitochondria also cannot be addressed by this method.

Rather more effective and simple a solution is to introduce additional DNA repair and protection enzymes into mitochondria. There are also organisms out there with far more effective DNA repair and protection enzymes than ours, whose genes we could also therapeutically introduce.

Using this method the probability of DNA damage in mitochondria would be dramatically reduced with a concomitant reduction in cell death due to apoptosis.

Here's a quote from a Aubrey article
"That’s right. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely."

http://www.livescien..._interview.html

I agree with alot of what Aubrey says, but I remember reading years ago that the age at which human physiological potential is highest is between 10-11 years old. I think in the future scientists will choose this age range to halt aging at as it would be easier to maintain, long term.