Lifeboat Foundation

Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation took a few hours from his packed schedule yesterday to answer questions from the community at /r/futurology. It is a pity that we can’t get a full day of his time at some point — clearly there are way too many interested folk with questions and not enough hours to answer more than half of them. It is a sign of progress, I hope, that ever more people recognize that the SENS approach to the development of rejuvenation therapies is promising, and understand enough of the science to ask intelligent questions about the details.

SENS is simple enough to explain at the high level: identify the cell and tissue damage that (a) appears in old tissues but not in young tissues, and (b) is caused by the normal operation of metabolism, not by some other form of damage. The resulting short list includes the causes of aging. It may include some other things as well, that in the end turn out not to need fixing, but why take the chance? In modern biotechnology and life science research, it is faster and cheaper to develop a repair therapy and see what happens than it is to painstakingly figure out how everything fits together.

When de Grey first evaluated the field of aging research, back before the turn of the century, he found that the causes of aging by the above definition were largely known, with a good deal of evidence in support of each one. Yet next to no-one was working on fixing them. Since then, he has campaigned tirelessly to build organisations, assemble allies, raise funding, and persuade researchers, and all of that to ensure that the scientific and biotechnology communities do in fact move ahead with a repair-based approach to building functional rejuvenation therapies. It has been surprisingly hard work, given a research community that was hostile towards the idea of treating aging as a medical condition versus merely observing it, and a public at large who seem disinterested in living longer in good health.

Advances in regenerative medicine, particularly stem cells and 3D-bioprinted organs, could soon make heart transplantation an obsolete medical procedure.

What is a body other than the vessel for your consciousness? Does the one you’re using right now really matter all that much? Why not, when your current body gets all old and run down, don’t you just get a new, young, beautiful, and healthy one? That’s the pitch in the first trailer for Netflix’s new dystopian sci-fi series Altered Carbon, which takes the form of an advertisement for Psychasec.

“Centuries ago, mankind discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new body making death a mere inconvenience,” says the commercial. “Since then we’ve been providing an unparalleled pedigree of human sleeves to only the most discerning clientele. Psychasec: Live forever in the body you deserve.”

Continue reading “Netflix’s Beautiful New Sci-Fi Series Will Make You Rethink Death” »

Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Continue reading “SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases” »

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer, founder of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) and one of the original proponents of a damage repair-based approach to aging and age-related diseases. His work has inspired many others to think about aging differently and entertain the idea that, perhaps, we do not have to accept the suffering that age-related diseases cause.

Recently, Dr. de Grey published an article in MIT Technology Review; here, we explain why this is a real milestone of progress.

Aubrey de Grey has set himself a simple task. The 54-year-old cofounder of the SENS Research Foundation wants to end biological aging for good. So sure is he of his mission, he proclaims the first human being to live to the age of 1,000 has already been born. De Grey believes that, within the next 20 years or so, scientists will finally solve one of humanity’s greatest problems.

“The fact is, aging kills 110,000 people worldwide every fucking day,” de Grey said at a Virtual Futures event attended by Inverse in London on Wednesday, in a conversation with group director Luke Robert Mason. “It doesn’t just kill them. You have to take into account all the suffering that comes before.”

Through his foundation, de Grey is working to solve seven types of aging damage that he believes are the key to a breakthrough. These are tissue atrophy, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death -resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates. It may sound like a complex salad of jargon, but de Grey claims that because science has an understanding of how to fix all these damages, aging can end for good.

Continue reading “Why This Aging Expert Thinks First 1,000-Year-Old Person is Already Alive” »

I think the talk was well received, and I appreciate them hearing me out.

Summary: Microbiome study of centenarians shows that ‘ridiculously healthy’ elderly have the same gut bacteria composition as healthy 30 year-olds. Can a more robust microbiome lead to the longer healthier life enjoyed by centenarians, or is it the other way around? [This article first appeared on LongevityFacts, follow us on Google+ | Facebook | Reddit. Author: Brady Hartman. This article was updated Dec. 2, 2017]

A recent study found that centenarians have the same microbiome as 30-year-olds.

In one of the most extensive studies of the human microbiome to date, an international group of researchers linked a healthy gut with “ridiculously healthy” elderly known as centenarians. This important study was conducted by the China-Canada Institute (CCI), a collaboration of geroscientists from the Lawson Health Research Institute, Western University, and Tianyi Health Science Institute in China. The researchers published their study titled “The Gut Microbiota of Healthy Aged Chinese Is Similar to That of the Healthy Young,” in the journal mSphere.

Continue reading “Researchers Link Human Microbiome With ‘Ridiculously Healthy’ Aging in Centenarians” »