Building Momentum for Human Rejuvenation
From the SENS Foundation: "The fifth biannual Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence biomedical conference is just days away. Getting ready for the trip has cast my mind back not only to previous meetings of this exciting interdisciplinary series, and also to the recent 40th meeting of the American Aging Association (AGE). Along with its international sister organization, the International Association for Biomedical Gerontology (IABG), AGE was the first, and remains the premier, professional scientific organization focused specifically on biomedical research in aging. That is, much of biogerontology research is dedicated to pursuing an ever-more-granular understanding the metabolic processes that contribute to, or fail as a result of, the degenerative aging process. But the scientists at AGE (and IABG) focus their work not on understanding age-related decay, but on its biomedical amelioration. ... While the rest of the conference included a wide diversity of biogerontology research, there was still a noticeably higher content of experimental interventions in the aging process and aspects of age-related degeneration than in previous years. ... Organized by Dr. de Grey, the preconference 'Late-onset intervention against aging: Tools, approaches, impact' brought the focus squarely back on AGE's interventive raison d'être -- and shed its most intense light on progress toward interventions that could meaningfully bend the degenerative aging curve when administered to persons who are already in the last decades of a current life expectancy. It is these people - individuals past the age of ~60 - for whom the medial need for intervention is most pressing, and whose generational demographic trajectory under 'aging as usual' poses the most dire social challenges. Therefore, therapies that will slow, arrest, or reverse age-related ill-health and frailty stand to provide the most good - to each aging person, and to societies as a whole."