The Campaign for Aging Research

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

Let me direct your attention to the Campaign for Aging Research, a recently formed non-profit group that focuses on advocacy and research fundraising for engineered longevity. Their organizational viewpoint on the science is informed by the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), and the Campaign volunteers have a very post-blog, social network look to their online outreach efforts.

The Campaign for Aging Research is about "More time." More time to live, more time to understand the world and more time to discover. C.A.R offers a different perspective on life and the future. The same way we get contact lenses instead of accepting bad eye sight or take aspirin to overcome a strong migraine, aging is natural like the bad eye sight and the migraine, yet it is a handicap that can be overcome, and at the very least must be faced and dealt with like we would with a nasty virus or pandemic. Research always takes time - how much resources are invested affect the time that it takes to obtain results.

I don't know any of the folk involved, and I view this is a welcome sign. Progress in growing the advocacy community is measured, from any one personal perspective, by the number of people who come seemingly out of the blue to get things done. I'm all for more of that. The CAR message could use a little polish, but you can't fault the volunteers' earnest intent, which comes shining through. All in all, more fundraising for SENS research is a very good thing, and the more people working on it the better the long-term outlook.

A little digging - very little, Google makes everything easy - turns up this exchange on the Methuselah Foundation forums from a couple of months ago:

[Florin Capa] I have a few observations and some questions about The Campaign for Aging Research (C.A.R) ... Does anyone else know more about them
[Aubrey de Grey]: I do. Their founder, Charlie Warren, is based in the S Bay area and I have had extensive interaction with him. CAR does not at this point have any formal links with [SENS Foundation], but I can vouch for Charlie's commitment to allocate any funds he may attract in accordance with our recommendations. CAR obtained charitable (501c3) status just a few weeks ago.

So drop by their website, welcome CAR to the community if you haven't already, and offer them a helping hand if you like what they're doing.