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Understanding Aging or Making Death Optional?
Southern California reasonoids might want to drop by the free conference, Aging - The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, over at UCLA late this afternoon. The session is the kick-off for the Understanding Aging conference also being held this weekend at UCLA. That conference will feature top flight anti-aging researchers from around the world.
Wired has a nice profile of conference organizer and anti-aging crusader Aubrey de Grey:
Gandhi once said, describing his critics, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the first three steps of Gandhi's progression feel. Now he's focused on the fourth.
"I've been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years," de Grey said. "If you're trying to make waves, certainly in science, there's a lot of people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand what you're trying to say."
This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation, is sponsoring its first U.S. conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.) The conference, Aging: The Disease - The Cure - The Implications, held at UCLA, is an indication of how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.
Less than a decade ago, de Grey was a relatively unknown computer scientist doing his own research into aging. As recently as three years ago a cadre of scientists wrote in the Nature-sponsored journal EMBO Reports, that his research program, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community." Also in 2005, MIT-sponsored magazine Technology Review went so far as to offer a $20,000 prize to anyone who could prove that de Grey's program was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." (No one won.)
Now, though, some scientists are beginning to view his approach -- looking at aging as a disease and bringing in more disciplines into gerontology -- as worthwhile, even if they still look askance at his claims of permanent reversible aging within a lifespan. The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it's beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists' heads.
In December, de Grey and I participated in a Cato Unbound debate on "Do We Need Death?" The pro-death side was argued by President Council on Bioethics member Diana Schaub and Harvard University bioethicist Daniel Callahan. You can find that whole discussion here. The Wired profile is here.
Hat tip to the folks at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
|6.27.08 @ 1:45PM|#
I am so sick of that Gahndi quote.
Most people who made a revolutionary change on society were once
laughed at. You know what that DOESN'T mean?
J|6.27.08 @ 1:47PM|#
Nice Art.
I love the anti-aging group. Sadly, even if they can fix it, I
doubt they'll do it in time for me. Oh well, still cool.
Episiarch|6.27.08 @ 1:48PM|#
Does anyone else think he looks like Manson in that picture? Imagine a little carved-in swastika on his forehead if that helps.
|6.27.08 @ 1:50PM|#
You know what that DOESN'T mean?
That stand-up comedy is the first step to changing the world?
|6.27.08 @ 1:52PM|#
Does anyone else think he looks like Manson in that picture?
Naw. Next to Marshall Applewhite, Charlie Manson has the craziest eyes I've ever seen. I mean, damn.
Lemmy|6.27.08 @ 1:56PM|#
You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools. But that's
the way I like it, baby. I don't wanna live forever.
Don't forget the joker!
Naga Sadow|6.27.08 @ 1:57PM|#
Art-P.O.G.,
Ahem, I think you meant to say "good i'd be". Any mention of Yoda
must be followed by Yoda speech.
Josh|6.27.08 @ 1:58PM|#
The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding
budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it's beginning
to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists'
heads.
Have they discovered any way to increase lifespan without
resorting to starvation?
|6.27.08 @ 2:01PM|#
Any mention of Yoda must be followed by Yoda speech.
Oh, man what a faux pas. It's getting to the point where I'm not even cool enough to be an internet nerd.
Naga Sadow|6.27.08 @ 2:03PM|#
I'm against increasing lifespans due to the fact that the people who would mostly like avail themselves of this technology would be statists. That is all.
Naga Sadow|6.27.08 @ 2:05PM|#
Look Art-P.O.G. I don't make up the rules. I just follow them for fear of being shunned. I would suggest you do the same.
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 2:08PM|#
Perhaps we can ask if Justice Breyer believes "persuit of
happieness" restricts this science to only law enforcement?
I don't have time to hang around the SCOTUS cafeteria to bump ino
him and ask.
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 2:16PM|#
Bright side: if we stop aging then ancient old protestors will not look so creepy when they are chanting young people stuff.
|6.27.08 @ 2:32PM|#
The Methuselah Foundation now has an annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and it's beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists' heads.
Have they discovered any way to increase lifespan without resorting to starvation?
Birth conttrol. Duh!
Taktix®|6.27.08 @ 2:55PM|#
That stand-up comedy is the first step to changing the
world?
It could be true. Every time I see Lisa Lampanelli I want to fight
someone...
Smartaleck Pedant|6.27.08 @ 3:02PM|#
Wired has a nice profile of conference organizer and
anti-aging crusader Aubrey de Grey:
Shouldn't you only see one eye in a profile?
e|6.27.08 @ 3:02PM|#
"The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that
all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they
laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they
also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
-Carl Sagan
Marcvs|6.27.08 @ 3:04PM|#
I still think that the longer we are able to live, the more we'll become a bunch of pussies as a species. Think about it: you can live for 1000 years, assuming that you don't do something stupid, like walk in front of a truck. I think Tolkien said something similar (and better worded) in the Silmarillian regarding the elves (who also could live effectively forever).
e|6.27.08 @ 3:04PM|#
(although, I read the MIT Tech Review interview with AdG, and he seemed more of a Wright Brother than a Bozo).
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 3:07PM|#
Bozo the Clown, discoverer of the ozone hole, global climate change and the population bomb will never be thought of as a great thinker?
e|6.27.08 @ 3:24PM|#
Guy Montag, quite true, and as we all know, Carl Sagan was a dope smoking leftist LOON! Even worse, he believed in Global Warming and Evolution!
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 3:27PM|#
e,
He did come up with some crazy crap, like nuclear winter, vitamin c
cures cancer, ozone hole will only cause cancer in Whites, etc.
Yes, I saw him on C-SPAN talking about the last two to a large
audience someplace.
Josh|6.27.08 @ 3:37PM|#
J Sub D,
I was refering to the calorie restrictive diet being tested on lab
mice.
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 4:05PM|#
Josh,
One of the guys who was in "Biosphere 2", I think, was
experimenting with that approach years ago. Forgot his name, but he
had one of those long Foo-Man-Choo mustaches and a shaved head.
|6.27.08 @ 4:08PM|#
I've been waiting for a semi-appropriate time to post this link.
Click here and
then click next use the force until you get to picture
number four.
Guy Montag|6.27.08 @ 4:15PM|#
Shawn,
You are evil.
But I will defend your evilness to the last drop of blood in the
bodies of those to my left and right.
|6.27.08 @ 4:19PM|#
I love that it's called the Methuselah Foundation. All comp sci nerds are Heinlein fans.
TallDave|6.27.08 @ 4:46PM|#
"Do We Need Death?"
I support the right of anyone who needs it to have access to
it.
Me, I wanna stay young and pretty forever.
|6.27.08 @ 5:02PM|#
I love that it's called the Methuselah Foundation. All comp
sci nerds are Heinlein fans.
Methinks the coinage predates Robert Heinlein.
Me·thu·se·lah (mə-thū'zə-lə)
A biblical patriarch said to have lived 969 years.
lost in america|6.27.08 @ 5:05PM|#
One of the guys who was in "Biosphere 2", I think, was
experimenting with that approach years ago. Forgot his name, but he
had one of those long Foo-Man-Choo mustaches and a shaved
head.
That would be Dr. Roy Walford, who died in 2004. visit:
www.walford.com
|6.27.08 @ 5:10PM|#
What is a bioethicist for?
Mostly, for telling people that an early, miserable death is Right
Thing.
e|6.27.08 @ 5:37PM|#
[Sagan] did come up with some crazy crap, like nuclear
winter,
I'm not going to worry about the other stuff, but why is nuclear
winter crap?
TallDave|6.27.08 @ 6:14PM|#
I'm not going to worry about the other stuff, but why is
nuclear winter crap?
I think the consenus is for nuclear warming now.
Colin Clout|6.27.08 @ 6:18PM|#
TallDave,
If a significant exchange of nuclear weapons creates enough smoke,
dust, etc. and that stuff works in the atmosphere like debris
clouds from large comet, etc. strikes work then a significant
period of cooling (with the reduction in sunlight that entails)
seems like at the very least a plausible hypothesis.
tarran|6.28.08 @ 8:51PM|#
If they were truly Heinlein fans, they would have called it the Howard foundation.
First Little Pig|6.29.08 @ 12:53PM|#
Personally I still consider a "Logan's Run" dystopia preferable
to a "utopia" where no one dies.
I would set the limit to 70 and see how fast the runners can
run.
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