Upcoming Meeting on Life-Extension (SENS) in England, September 2009

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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

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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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SENS 3

Scientific Program of the upcoming third conference "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" (SENS), Cambridge, England, September, 2007.


Greetings,

I am pleased to get an e-mail message from the organizer of the third Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, which in fact represents a public announcement to share:

I am writing to notify you that registration and abstract submission are now open for the third Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence(SENS) conference, to be held at Queens' College, Cambridge, England on September 6th-10th 2007. 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.sens.org/sens3/

The preliminary program already has 48 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:

New pharmaceutical interventions in aging: Patrizia D'Alessio, Laura Dugan, Randy Strong

Immunotherapy against cancer: Zheng Cui, Robert Hawkins, Claudia Gravekamp

Persistent viruses in aging: Ruth Itzhaki, Ed Mocarski, Rita Effros, Arne Akbar

Protecting the brain (genes and delivery): Elizabeth Corder, Pedro Alvarez

Damage to long-lived intracellular molecules: Sataro Goto, Kim Janda, Paola Scaffidi

Non-insertional gene therapy: Nicola Philpott, Michele Calos, Fyodor Urnov

Rescue of mitochondrial mutations: Ian Holt, Marisol Corral-Debrinski, Volkmar Weissig, Samit Adhya

Telomeres and cell senescence: Mary Perry, Gillian Butler-Browne, Lenhard Rudolph, Walter Berger

Non-specific nuclear DNA damage in aging: Jan Vijg, Michael Siciliano, Aubrey de Grey

Deriving autologous embryonic stem cells: Chang-Kyu Lee, Wolfgang Engel, Miodrag Stojkovic

Regeneration of complex structures: Stephen Minger, Chris Mason, David Gardiner

Eliminating beta-amyloid: Ashley Bush, Beka Solomon, Yoh Matsumoto, David Morgan

Repair and turnover of extracellular material: Robin Franklin, Dwight Towler, Cato Laurencin

Long-term goals of biomedical gerontology: Chris Phoenix, Ben Best, Ray Kurzweil

Outreach to key communities: Linda Powers, Michael Rose, Huber Warner, Bernard Siegel

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 nigh-impact journal Rejuvenation Research early in 2008.

Please note that registration fees are fully inclusive of accommodation and all meals.

I hope to welcome you to Cambridge in September!

Cheers, Aubrey

Aubrey de Grey
Organiser, SENS 3
Chairman and Chief Science
Officer, Methuselah Foundation
Editor-in-Chief, Rejuvenation Research
(impact factor 8.571)

SENS

SENS stands for
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence
scientific initiative

See also:
What is Aging? Anti-Aging Is Immortality Possible?

To Read comments on this topic and post your own thoughts, click here


Greetings,

Recently Steve Connor, the science editor of 'The Independent' has published an interesting review of a new popular book "How to Live Forever or Die Trying", by Bryan Appleyard.

The review is critical, which is understandable for evaluations of a popular book, but I am struck by the following comment about the life-extension researcher, Dr. Aubrey de Grey:

"... de Grey's belief in immortality - or "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" - are something of a laughing-stock among mainstream gerontologists"

Well, all you need to do is just to take a look at this scientific book below, which contains research publications by over a hundred of mainstream gerontologists, with Dr. Aubrey de Grey being a Scientific Editor (!):

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence:
Why Genuine Control of Aging May Be Foreseeable
(Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences)



Obviously, the "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) are not a laughing-stock any longer among mainstream gerontologists, and many of them do participate in this scientific initiative.

Also read the relevant consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" signed by seven experts and published in Science, which acknowledges the legitimacy of anti-aging studies and cites the list of these anti-aging scientific publications. Please note that the first author of this published consensus letter is Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
This Science letter was later cited in a prestigious 2003 Macmillan Encyclopedia of Population, USA with a comment: "...the possibility should not be excluded that current intensive biomedical anti-aging studies may help to extend the healthy and productive period of human life in the future (de Grey et al., 2002)."

My personal attitude to the SENS scientific initiative could be best characterized with a quote by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950):

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;

the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

"Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

See also: New Books Discussing SENS

Disclaimer for a potential conflict of interest

We have published three articles in this SENS book, so we do know what we are talking about:

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. Early-Life Programming of Aging and Longevity: The Idea of High Initial Damage Load (the HIDL Hypothesis). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 496-501.

Gavrilova NS, Gavrilov LA, Semyonova VG, Evdokushkina GN. Does Exceptional Human Longevity Come With High Cost of Infertility? Testing the Evolutionary Theories of Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004, 1019: 513-517.

Gavrilov LA, Gavrilova NS. The Reliability-Engineering Approach to the Problem of Biological Aging. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2004,
1019: 509-512.

Also I have to admit that I am one of seven coauthors of the above mentioned consensus letter "Antiaging Technology and Pseudoscience" published in Science.

See also:
What is Aging? Theories of Aging Anti-Aging Population Aging

Read further comments, and post your own thoughts here