SATURDAY June 28, 2003
3:15-4:45pm
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 62
High St., New Haven CT
"The Technologies of Life Extension"
Aubrey de Grey Ph.D.
Dept of Genetics, University of Cambridge
"Foreseeable, radical life extension: the biology to inform the
philosophy"
[LISTEN HERE]
Anti-aging biotechnology is far closer than most
biologists realise: in ten years we should be able to treble the remaining
healthy life expectancy of a late-middle-aged mouse that has received no
treatment before that age. I will discuss the biology underlying this
claim and its present-day sociological and ethical implications.
Aubrey de Grey is a biogerontologist at the University
of Cambridge, UK. He designs interventions to reverse (not just retard)
the cellular and molecular changes that accumulate with age and reduce
remaining life expectancy (i.e., cause aging). He has coined the term
"strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS) to describe these
interventions, which he has argued are the only feasible way to extend
human lifespan by more than a decade. He has published widely on such
technology (see http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGpubs.htm). He is holding
a major conference on such technologies in Cambridge, UK on September
19-23, 2003 (see
http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/iabg10/).
Rafal
Smigrodski M.D., Ph.D.
Department of Neurology University of Virginia
"Emerging Life Extension Therapies"
[LISTEN HERE]
I will present an overview of life extension, with
practical advice for today, subjects to follow in the near future, and
some dreams worth paying attention to. Life extension, one patient at a
time, has been the goal of medicine since its very beginning but for the
most part, only persons with identifiable pathological conditions could
hope to benefit from therapy. In the last few decades, however, a small
mumber of pharmacological treatments has been developed, which appear to
prolong survival of healthy humans by preventing many of the deadly
conditions associated with aging, such as stroke, or myocardial
infarction. These drugs include statins, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, as well
as possibly some other compounds, and are available today. For the near
future, the progress in elucidating the cause of aging gives us for the
first time in history some hope of directly influencing the rate of aging,
perhaps by mitofection, caloric restriction, and stem cell therapy. And,
last but not least, there are even more daring approaches on the far
horizon, such as cryonics, and uploading, offering the distant but so
tempting vision of freedom from aging, the fulfilment an age-old dream.
Dr. Smigrodski was born in 1965 in Poland. MD-PhD in
human molecular genetics at Heidelberg University, involved in the
identification of genetic causes of epilepsy. Postdoctoral work at
University of Pittsburgh on brain cortex development. Neurology residency
at University of Pittburgh. Presently a movement disorders fellow at the
University of Virginia, working on mitochondrial dysfunction in
Parkinson's disease.
