From the invitation email:Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), Fourth Conference
You are cordially invited to participate in the fourth Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, which will be held from 3-7 September 2009 at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Queens' College, Cambridge, England
3-7 September 2009
The meeting will comprise invited talks, short oral presentations of submitted abstracts, and poster sessions. There will be no concurrent sessions. Talks will take place in the Fitzpatrick Lecture Hall. Poster sessions will take place each evening in the conservatory adjacent to the bar, with the customary free alcohol.
The preliminary program already has 35 confirmed speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous SENS conferences, the emphasis of this meeting is on "applied gerontology" - the design and implementation of biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans) to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:
Making metabolism less harmful:
Vladimir Skulachev, Holly Brown-Borg, Stephen Spindler, Stephen Vatner
Spontaneous regeneration:
Brandon Reines, Jonathan Tilly, Alexandra Stolzing
Eliminating recalcitrant intracellular molecules:
William Sly, Ana Maria Cuervo, John Schloendorn, Claude Wischik, Martin Hetzer
Rejuvenating extracellular material:
Nik Nikitin, Mark Pepys, Sudhir Paul, Mark Noble, Kendall Houk
Novel anti-cancer approaches:
Paul Hallenbeck, Adela Ben-Yakar, Vera Gorbunova, Maria Blasco, David Keefe
Rejuvenating the immune system:
Janko Nikolich-Zugich, Anne de Groot
ES-like cells and cell therapy:
Justin Ichida, Ilham Abuljadayel, Thomas Zwaka, Daniel Kraft, John Sladek, Dan Gazit
Tissue engineering:
Augustinus Bader, Gabor Forgacs
The defeat of aging and its consequences:
Philip Moriarty, Tanya Jones, Leonid Gavrilov
In addition, there will be at least a dozen short talks selected from submitted abstracts, as well as poster sessions each evening. Authors of short talks and posters will, like the invited speakers, be invited to submit a paper summarising their presentation for the proceedings volume, which will be published in the high-impact journal Rejuvenation Research early in 2010.
More details are on the Methuselah Foundation's SENS4 page. If you're a life extensionist and can possibly make it, you owe it to yourself to attend. In addition to the great value it'd be for you yourself to see the science close up, it's very important to have good turnout from the radical life extension community. Crazy as it sounds, not only the general public, but even many of the scientists doing key research (and especially biogerontology!) who really don't think about the implications of their work, either for aging, or even for biomedicine: do their work because they wanted to do something challenging, but only drifted into aging research (or SENS-relevant biomedicine more broadly) because that's where their opportunities came up, through the vagaries of their academic career.
Contact with you will help to awaken these people to the enormous moral responsibility that they unwittingly hold in their hands, as well as rousing the members the general public who are interested, but still somewhat in the grips of the "pro-aging trance," and whose mobilization will be key to getting more public and private investments into the core biotechnologies that we will need to finally end the blight of biological aging.
I've been to all of the SENS conferences, plus UABBA, and they have consistently been amazing, exciting, inspiring (and exhausting!) events that left me full of optimism for further progress and the sense of being right on the pulse of progress. You get to interact directly with researchers doing cutting-edge work, hear the presentation of unpublished work, and watch as scientists from different SENS-relevant fields, who often have no idea what's going on in other fields in the SENS platform, realize that they've been unwittingly participating in a revolution.
Whether or not you can go, please do your part to spread the word! You can do this on personal blogs, by email, in organizations where you work, play, or volunteer, or by whatever creative means you can come up with.
Hope to see you all there!
-Michael
Edited by caliban, 03 July 2009 - 08:20 PM.
