Aubrey de Grey on TEDTalks

This'll be the last "life extension" themed post this month, I promise.

Aubrey de Grey is an interesting guy whose theories and work has attracted a lot of controversy over the last few years. de Grey is the founder of SENS - Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - which, according to the site attempts to develop a "practical approach to developing real anti-aging medicine".

Despite his appearance, de Gray isn't all types of crazy, having worked in the Department of Genetics at Cambridge University and currently involved with the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ageing.

I can't pretend to have more than a basic understanding of de Gray's arguments, and it's fair to say that not everyone agrees with him (see the Wikipedia article on the MIT Technology Review controversy for more details on that). Still, I find his ideas interesting and plausible to a layman such as myself.

As an introduction of sorts, below is a speech he gave at a TED conference in 2005. Run time is a touch over 20 mins.

Yes SIR: SIR2 and the genetics of youth

My recent post on living longer reminded me of one of the podcasts from the excellent Futures in Biotech (part of the twit.tv family). I The subject interviewed in episode 2 was Dr Leonard Guarente, a biology researcher at MIT. Part of Dr Guarente's body of work has included the identification of a gene known as SIR2 that appears to be responsible for the extension of the lifespan in a range of different lifeforms from yeast to roundworms to fruit flies to humans. I first listened to this podcast back in July but was prompted to listen to it again this week.

A number of interesting ideas were raised in the podcast including:

• aging may well be post-reproductive, in that the body's ability to grow in a healthy manner is greatly reduced once the peak reproductive period has passed
• caloric restriction (CR) may be linked to this concept and could also be a survival mechanism. A CR diet reduced the ability for lab mice to reproduce. When calorie intake was increased, the ability to reproduce returned. So, not only did CR increase the lifespan of lab mice, it also altered reproductivity in accordance with availability of food.
• CR is not so much anti-aging as prolonging youth and extending the period of time before the reproductivity window ends and aging kicks in.
• CR diets appear to "activate" the SIR2 gene
  

Dr Guarente referred to rodent models where disease was slowed or even stopped by a CR diet. Therefore, there would be great value in the development of medication that mimicked a CR diet and the activation of SIR2 as a way of improving quality of life for older people. For example, such medication could slow or stop the development and impact of degenerative diseases. Therefore, life might not be greatly extended for these people but their quality of life would be vastly improved in later years. I found this particularly interesting as I tend to think of "life extension" treatments as something to extend my own life. It's a side of the process I had never thought of before.

Dr Guarente and I have something in common as well - we both think that a drug that mimicked the effect of SIR2 and a CR diet would be much better than actually undertaking a CR diet because, well, eating food is fun.

One other tip I picked up from this podcast was that, according to the good Doctor, there are already many things we know today that can help greatly extend our life span. These are the basic things like a good diet, exercise, not smoking etc. If we want to live longer, we need to be doing these things now and not wait for some big pharmaceutical company to produce a miracle drug 20 years down the track.

Apparently Dr Guarente's book "Ageless Quest: One scientists search for genes that prolong youth " is a good read too (note: that's not an Amazon affiliate link).

Interesting links:
Guarente Lab
Futures in Biotech

Live longer. Apparently.

The more I spend time on the internet, the more I realise that I know very little about what goes on around me.


Aging is, apparently, the enemy. There are entire movements out there dedicated to anti-aging and "life extension". To my surprise (although perhaps I should know better), these are two completely separate things.

Life extension is all about extending life spans, obviously, and trying to live longer. Advocates encourage the adoption of lifestyles such as calorie restriction diets. Research into mice and monkeys seems to indicate that a drastically reduced calorie intake correlates with an extended lifespan.

Anti-aging advocates research that will prevent aging (rather than slow aging, which is what a calorie restriction diet appears to do) and even reverse its effects. A lot of life extension things are more or less free (calorie restriction, healthy diet etc) and therefore research dollars need to be channeled into areas which actually prevent aging.

At least, that's what it looks like to me. It seems to jump around a fair bit and it's hard to follow. Bizarre and interesting, but hard to follow.

The Longevity Meme and Fight Aging!
Partial Immortalization
Senescence and the Biology of Human Aging

(Note: I am in no way capable of making a balanced argument either way on this subject, and the links are are certainly only one side of the issue. Just read the links for what they are - connections to something interesting you may not have considered before)