Fight Aging!

As you might recall, Attila Csordás of Partial Immortalization put out a set of questions on healthy life extension - primarily aimed at bloggers - and set out to get folk to answer them.

1. What is the story of your life extension commitment?

2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?

3. What is your favourite argument supporting human life extension?

4. What is the most probable technological draft of human life extension, which technology or discipline has the biggest chance to reach it earliest? (regenerative medicine, nanotechnology, gene therapy, caloric restriction, bionics, hormones, antioxidants, …)

5. When?

6. What can blogs do for LE?

Here is a selection of responses to date:

Chris Patil of Ouroboros (and part 2 and part 3)

I want to encourage the readership of aging-related blogs to take advantage of the interactivity of the web, and to get involved with their favorite sites, as commenters and missionaries and contributors. Building an online community devoted to the biology of aging can only help the cause of lifespan extension.

Jim Craig

I think all of the present “big potentials” like stem cells, gene therapy, etc will contribute to modest extensions to average and maximum life expectancy but I believe that the most significant gains will fall out of accurate and large scale computer models that can simulate the emergent properties of protein-protein and protein-enzyme interactions. These will be the tools of the multi-disciplined systems biologists of the future. I see advancements in life extension tightly bound in a triple helix with proteomic knowledge and computing power.

Phil Bowermaster of the Speculist

Those who claim to have no fear of death, whether they be an Objectivist or the Dalai Lama or some Palestinian strapping dynamite to his chest, have lost touch with a primary truth of human existence: a truth which has lead us both to science and to faith. Those who seek to prolong human life - whether via antioxidants or cryonics or standard medical procedures - have tapped into that same fundamental truth: Death sucks.

Aubrey de Grey

I can’t trace when I realised that aging was a bad thing - I must have been so young that I can’t remember. But I was nearly 30 before I found out that most other people don’t think the same, or at least don’t think that it’s important enough to work on. I was in a very lucky situation to be able to make a contribution - I had training in research in a very different field, and I also had quite broad knowledge of biology - so I decide to have a go. My first publication was very well-received, so I kept going!

I encourage the rest of you to jump on in; let's see what people think.

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