Fight Aging!

We should all thank Jeriaska of Future Current for providing such a fine service in writing up and publishing presentations, interviews, and lectures from conferences of interest to the transhumanist and healthy life extension communities. Two of the latest are from the Understanding Aging conference hosted earlier this year by the Methuselah Foundation:

Natural Cancer Resistance in Mice and in Humans

The main concept for this project is very simple. This idea, that we may have natural resistance to cancer present in our body at all times, is not a new idea. It has been proposed for over a hundred years. In other words, the reason that we are sitting here cancer-free is not because we’re lucky, it is because we may have an innate system in our body to protect us - in other words, to get rid of cancer cells. As we get older, this protection may get weaker. That balance between the generation of cancer cells on a continuous basis can overtake the ability of your body to get rid of them

If you are already familiar with Zheng Cui's work, this presentation provides some very interesting additional data. If not, you might want to read the excellent introduction posted at the Methuselah Foundation blog.

Unfocused Pulsed Lasers Selectively Destroy Lipofuscin

The idea is lipofuscin is this aggregate of oxidized lipids and proteins that accumulates in autophagosomes or lysosomes. Lipofuscin itself we think is the problem. We think lipofuscin is sufficient to knock down autophagy as it accumulates. Eventually you get cells that are loaded with lipofuscin and the lysosomes cannot do their job of rejuvenating the cell. We think many aspects of aging are the result. If that is true, this is where the whole idea of "removing the garbage" comes in. We think the garbage itself is the problem, and if you can get rid of it we can make some serious inroads into conquering aging.

If you found these items interesting, then I recommend you look over the online videos from the Understanding Aging conference.