Human Aging Starts Before Birth

See also:
-- 'Books Forum' blog
-- 'Health Studies' blog


Greetings,

Here is an interesting interview given by British scientist Dr. Aubrey de Grey to a Russian newspaper "Novaya Gazeta" [New Newspaper], which is related to his recent scientific visit to Russia.

The title of this new story is "Human Aging Starts Before Birth", and it is published in Russian language. Some excerpts from this publication are translated in English and attached below:

Question from Reporter (Elena Kokurina):

- Dr. de Grey, there are many debates among scientists regarding aging. The question is not even about the methods of fighting with it, but rather what is aging in the first place. For example, why is it manifesting itself precisely at the end of life?

Answer by Dr. Aubrey de Grey:

- I believe, because the normal process of metabolism, which keeps us alive, produces cumulated side effects. Such as the loss of cells or the formation of “indigestible” molecules. For some period of time this damage is rather limited and it cannot affect the organism as a whole, but in the long run the damage becomes so extensive that the physiological functions deteriorate sharply.

However, the very process of aging process starts well before our birth, as it is demonstrated by recent studies. The first signs of atherosclerosis can be found even in newborn. Recently Leonid and Natalia Gavrilovs, the Russian researchers working in the USA, proved that starting at birth we already accumulate many defects, which are the beginning of aging.

Also here is the original Russian text for these excerpts:

Елена Кокурина:

— Д-р Ди Грей, среди ученых много разногласий по поводу старения. Речь идет даже не столько о методах борьбы с ним, сколько о том, что это такое. Например, почему оно проявляется именно в конце жизни?

Обри Ди Грей:

— Я считаю, из-за того что нормальные процессы обмена веществ в организме, благодаря которым мы живем, дают накапливающиеся побочные эффекты. Такие как потеря клеток или образование «неперевариваемых» молекул. Длительное время эти повреждения носят частный характер и не способны воздействовать на организм в целом, но, в конце концов, их становится столько, что физиологические функции резко ухудшаются.

Однако сам процесс старения начинается, как показывают последние исследования, еще до нашего рождения. Первые признаки атеросклероза можно найти даже у новорожденного. Недавно Леонид и Наталья Гавриловы, российские исследователи, работающие в США, доказали, что уже с рождения мы аккумулируем множество дефектов, которые являются началом старения.

Automatic computer translation of the entire interview could be found through the Bable Fish translator and the Google translator as well.

To read comments on this story, and to post your own thoughts, click here

See also:

- Старение: как отменить приговор?

- Смерти можно дать пивком под зад

- Технологии, способные остановить старение, могут быть разработаны в ближайшем будущем

- Бессмертие человека не за горами
- Бессмертие человека не за горами,Interesting discussion


Pictures:
- Обри ди Грей,1
- Обри ди Грей,2
- Обри ди Грей,3
- Обри ди Грей,4

Key words:
SENS, Life-Extension, Aubrey de Grey, rejuvenation research, Leonid Gavrilov, Natalia Gavrilova, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, anti-ageing, anti-aging, ageing, aging, longevity, Novaya Gazeta, Elena Kokurina, Russia, Елена Кокурина,Обри Ди Грей


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Human Aging Starts Before Birth
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Upcoming Meeting on Life-Extension (SENS) in England, September 2009

See also:
-- 'Books Forum' blog
-- 'Health Studies' blog


Dear All:

Here is an interesting announcement I have got recently about the upcoming meeting on life-extension (SENS) in Cambridge, England, September 3-7, 2009:

My apologies if you receive this email more than once. Please forward it to any colleagues who you feel may be interested.

I am writing to notify you that registration and abstract submission are now open for the fourth Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, to be held at Queens' College, Cambridge, England on September 3rd-7th 2009. The early registration and abstract submission deadlines are both June 15th. All details, including forms for abstract submission and online registration, are at the conference website:

http://www.mfoundation.org/sens4

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.

Please note that registration fees are fully inclusive of accommodation and all meals. Those not requiring accommodation, and journalists wishing to obtain free press passes (not including accommodation) are asked to contact me by email (aubrey@sens.org).

I hope to welcome you to Cambridge in September!

Cheers, Aubrey

Aubrey de Grey
Organiser, SENS4
Chairman and Chief Science Officer, Methuselah Foundation
Editor-in-Chief, Rejuvenation Research

-------------END--------------------


Key words:
SENS, Life-Extension, Aubrey de Grey, rejuvenation research, Leonid Gavrilov, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, anti-ageing, anti-aging, ageing, aging, longevity


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New Attack on SENS Life-Extension Project and Aubrey de Grey

Greetings,

Here is a new turn in hot scientific debates over the SENS Life-Extension Project, and Dr. Aubrey de Grey activities in rejuvenation research:

Recently a new chapter came out in a book published by the Springer publisher:

Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics:
Biopsychosocial Approaches to Longevity
by Leonard W. Poon and Thomas T. Perls
http://tinyurl.com/2opjy6
(Hardcover - Dec 12, 2007)


Chapter 3 of this book entitled "The Promise of Human Life Span Extension" and written by Dr. Preston W. Estep III, contains the following section:

"SENS Brings Neo-Lysenkoism to Longevity Research"

Here are some excerpts:

"Agenda-driven pseudoscience like SENS has a clearly stated goal, but wishful thinking and extrascientific considerations, such as political or fundraising power, are placed ahead of and are often incompatible with scientific evidence.

There have been many examples of agenda-driven science, but SENS is strikingly similar to Lysenkoism, a name given to the pseudoscientific misdirection of Soviet Biology lead by Trofim Lysenko." [in Stalin period]

Stay tuned for the response from Aubrey de Grey !

Key words:
New books, SENS, Life-Extension, Aubrey de Grey, rejuvenation research, Springer, Trofim Lysenko, Preston Estep, Neo-Lysenkoism, Leonard Poon,Thomas Perls

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Post them below by clicking here !

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Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime

See also:
-- 'Books Forum' blog
-- 'Health Studies' blog


Greetings,

Here is a book for discussion:

Ending Aging:
The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
by Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae (Hardcover - Sep 4, 2007)

Book Description provided by the Publisher (St. Martin's Press):

MUST WE AGE? A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging. Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from 60 Minutes to The New York Times, Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely-technology that would not only slow but periodically reverse age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future-is now within reach. In Ending Aging, Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology.

They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine's fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.


From the Back Cover:

People alive today could live to be a thousand years old

“His clarion call to action is the message neither of a madman nor a bad man, but of a brilliant, beneficent man of goodwill, who wants only for civilization to fulfill the highest hopes he has for its future.”
­Dr. Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine and author of How We Die and The Art of Aging

“Seems to me this man could be put in jail with reasonable cause.”
­Dr. Martin Raff, emeritus professor of biology at University College London and coauthor of Molecular Biology of the Cell

A leading researcher sketches the real “fountain of youth”

- The most realistic way to combat aging is to rejuvenate the body at the molecular and cellular level, removing accumulated damage and restoring us to a biologically younger state.

- Comprehensive rejuvenation therapies can feasibly postpone age-related frailty and disease indefinitely, greatly extending our lives while eliminating, rather than lengthening, the period of late-life frailty and debilitation.

- A comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies could probably be validated in laboratory mice within a decade. We would then have a good chance of developing it for human use only a decade or two thereafter.

- Removing the causes of aging-related deaths will also eliminate all the suffering that aging inflicts on most people in the last years of their lives.

- Aging kills 100,000 people a day: old people, yes, but old people are people too. Social concerns about the effects of defeating aging are legitimate but don’t outweigh the merits of saving so many lives and alleviating so much suffering.

Key words:
New books, aging, ageing, longevity, gerontology, gerontological, geriatrics, geriatric, senescence, anti-aging, anti-ageing, rejuvenation, life-extension, immortality, Ending Aging, Rejuvenation Breakthroughs, Reverse Human Aging, Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae, St. Martin's Press

Do you have any comments on this new book?
Post them below by clicking here!

Home:
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Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime
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Peter Thiel profile and Anti-Aging Studies

Greetings,

Recently an interesting biographic profile of Peter Thiel was published in the article "Why you should beware of Facebook" by the Australian magazine "The Age" on January 20, 2008. This is interesting because Peter Thiel made a very generous donation for anti-aging studies, so it helps to know more about this wealthy philanthropist capable to transform the pace of anti-aging and longevity studies. The profile is written in a somewhat skeptical way, and perhaps maybe incomplete and even inaccurate in some parts -- you are most welcome to post your additions and corrections below by clicking here.

Here are some excerpts:

"Although the [Facebook] project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer, from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $US 500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of $US 15 billion ($A 16.65 billion), would be worth more than $US 1 billion. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to eBay for $US 1.5 billion, taking $US 55 million for himself. He also runs a £3 billion ($A 6.5 billion) hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $US 500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitiveness, saying: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a right-wing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review ­ motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".

TheVanguard is run by one Rod D. Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses."

This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn (the liberal website), Hillary and the left-wing media some lessons they never imagined."

SO, THIEL'S POLITICS ARE not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries ­ and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one Rene Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.

If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5 million to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies … heading in this direction … Artificial Intelligence … direct brain-computer interfaces … genetic engineering … different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

Source:
"Why you should beware of Facebook"
by the Australian magazine "The Age" on January 20, 2008.

Book written by Peter A. Thiel:
The Diversity Myth
by David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel
Foreword by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese



Any comments, additions, corrections?
You are most welcome to post your additions and corrections below by clicking here.

Home:
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and
Peter Thiel profile and Anti-Aging Studies
Shorter weblink:
http://tinyurl.com/329hd7

.

New Books!

See also:
New Books for August 2007
New Books for July 2007
New Books for June 2007
New Books for May 2007



Greetings,

I am pleased to share with you the list of new published books, organized in the following categories (just click on the titles below):

-- Aging

-- Alzheimer's

-- Anti-Aging

-- Aubrey de Grey Ideas

-- Biomedical Nanotechnology

-- Brain Aging

-- Caloric Restriction

-- Cancer

-- Cardiovascular Health

-- Cryonics

-- Dementia

-- Diabetes

-- Estrogen

-- Genetics of Aging and Health

-- Geriatrics

-- Growth Hormone

-- Hormones

-- Human Longevity

-- Immortality

-- Life Expectancy

-- Life Extension

-- Menopause

-- Mortality

-- Nursing

-- Population Aging

-- Regenerative Medicine

-- Rejuvenation

-- Resveratrol

-- SENS: Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence

-- Soft Drinks

-- Stem Cell Therapy

-- Supplements

-- Testosterone

-- Vitamins

Hope this helps!