10,000,000 SET TO LIVE TO 100

The following article concerns the UK but it should also have ramifications for the rest of the modern world. However, some of the conclusions rely a bit heavily on old tech and older paradigms for considering these issues. It probably is as a matter of consequence that they could not consider more progressive paradigms. I'll point a few of these issues out below where a newer higher technology considered paradigm changes certain premises considerably. However, I wish to point out that all issues aside I consider this to be enormously welcome good news!

10,000,000 SET TO LIVE TO 100

By Bob Roberts Deputy Political Editor

MORE than one million people now in their 30s could live to be 100, according to the latest official estimates.

The population of centenarians could soar from the current 10,000 to 1.2 million by 2074, the Government Actuary Department said.

People in their 30's could have a one in eight chance of living to be 100, while thousands could live to be 110 or more.

The figures, based on the most optimistic life expectancy trends, have dramatic implications for pensions.

Indeed but what is not considered as the reader will see is that they fail to consider that technology will make it so those aging pension aged individuals will not necessarily need to be decrepit. They might then choose to work beyond the age of retirement and this has bearing on pension expenditures.

Their longevity would have a big impact on the size of the population, with the number of people living in the country growing to 75 million by 2074.

It could soar further, to 90 million, if the highest projections for fertility rates and immigration are included.

This is true in one sense but again fails to take other possibilities into account. A key word here is immigration. If not for immigration the population growth rates for most modern industrialized countries would be negative. People tend to have fewer children as women get reproductive rights in their own hands and as a society becomes more affluant.

The best thing governments can do right now is put billions in funding toward anti aging and Life Extension science as these necessarily ameliorate the decrepitude of aging. Thus all the fears over bankrupt pension funds could be for not. How many people would trade getting feeble and old and waiting to die on a pension for being young for longer and taking no pension as they can still work? Or they could retire on personal funds allowed to accrue over longer periods with compound interest that soon overtake their expense needs. This way people that so choose could live enormusly long lives of leisure and travel or engage in perpetual altruistic pursuits at home or abroad.

Please view the rest of the article here.

New study on humans suggests eating less may delay aging

Well you sure don't need to tell our April Smith at Mprize this news. See her blog here: She's been following a youth extending caloric restriction diet for a while already. Many people have for years simply based on results for other mammals. The Mprize gave one of it's first prizes to a study on mice.

Look it's all good no matter what your goal. Less food means less bulk and more energy. This is because like a light weight race car you need less ummph to push it down the road. So less toxic exhaust in the air, equate that to less junk in your cells helping to age you. So go to it people, eat less, eat right to live better and longer!

Study: eating less may delay human aging

Jan. 15, 2006
Courtesy American College of Cardiology and World Science staff

A new study is the first to associate a low-calorie diet with delayed signs of aging in humans, its authors say.

The hearts of people who follow a low-calorie, yet nutritionally balanced, diet resemble those of younger people when examined by sophisticated ultrasound function tests, the study found. They also tend to have more desirable levels of some markers of inflammation and excessive fibrous tissue, it concluded.

The study appears in the Jan. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Eating less, if it is a high-quality diet, will improve your health, delay aging, and increase your chance of living a long, healthy and happy life,” said Luigi Fontana of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri and the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy.

“This is the first report ever to show that calorie restriction with optimal nutrition may delay primary aging in human beings.”

Please see the original article here.

Maybe The Most Exciting Breakthrough Yet! The Magic Mouse

This is so excitng I'm simply hopping! Here we go people! If this get's developed further and in human beings, well it's almost incalculable the number of good things it will do. Imagine losing a limb to an accident and rather than long and painful rehabilitation and then getting fit for a prosthetic device, even the really cool new bionic limbs in development, you instead have your limb regrown!

Oh don't stop there! Got a bad kidney, a liver rotted to the core, panacreas gave you diabetes? Grow new ones! I'll go so far as to hazard a guess that one could grow the new one along side the old -- how else would it work for certain organs after all that you can't live without-- and if so then maybe to catch up on health one could have two of something. That may be wild speculation but so was even considering this just a few years ago. It might be possible to target areas of an organ and therby rejuvenate the old ones like maybe the heart. Sound good? I can't wait for it myself.

The Sunday Times - Britain

August 28, 2005

'Miracle mouse' can grow back lost limbs

Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals.

The experimental animal is unique among mammals in its ability to regrow its heart, toes, joints and tail.

The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate.

The discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine.

Please visit here for the rest of this excellent article.

I happen to be a quadriplegic and I also just happen to suffer the world's worst case of a very rare bone disease. That disease has totally destroyed my pelvic area, hip joints and heads of my femurs. For that matter both my legs are pretty much shot from this disease. It is called Heterotrophic Ossification where bone material just goes nuts and deposits everywhere randomly but mostly in the joints locking them up solid. My right knee is shot too from it so basically. If there ever is a cure for spinal injury it won't likely immediately help me walk. In fact though I'd want to try it just to get my fingers and hands back and control of certain daily needs, it might actually make the chronic pain I already suffer much worse.

However, maybe one day there'll be a way to regrow all these areas so badly damaged and give me a shot at regaining the life I lost. I can't wait to run pell mell through a field as fast as I can and feel the wind rush past my face once again.

Exciting Yet Cautious Hope For Parkinson's Sufferers

We are beginning to see the very first attempts at gene manipulation therapies for curing dieases. It this therapy for Parkinson's a retro virus, sort of an intelligent nanoscopic pair of scissors, find's it's way into the exact correct spot to alter a gene. Let's hope it works. Parkinson's is an age related disease but can affect the young. Michael Jay Fox is widely known to suffer from the disease.

Gene-Therapy Tried for Parkinson's

BY LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer

4 hours ago

WASHINGTON - Mike Castle lay motionless as surgeons drilled two holes into his skull and injected a virus deep into his brain. The virus carries a gene and a tantalizing hope: that just maybe it could stall the Parkinson's disease slowly crippling him.

The Illinois man is among a few dozen patients enrolling in the first attempts at gene therapy for Parkinson's, a milestone in the quest to better treat the degenerative brain disease.

It's a time of mixed excitement and caution: These first three studies are to see if gene therapy is safe to try, not to prove whether it works. Yet studies in monkeys suggest at least one of the approaches has the potential to finally target the underlying disease, not merely tame its symptoms.

"It's this delicate balance between giving (patients) hope but making it clear to them, and to the world, that this is still highly experimental," says Dr. William J. Marks Jr. of the University of California, San Francisco, who is leading the most closely watched approach _ using a nerve growth factor to rescue dying brain cells.

"It's a gamble," agrees Dr. Leo Verhagen of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, a co-researcher in the project who treated Castle.

"This is the first trial that, if it works, could slow down the disease's progression," he explains.

Yet to stress the experiment's unknowns, he bluntly told Castle, "We are happy if we don't make you worse."

Parkinson's disease gradually destroys brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical crucial for the cellular communication that controls muscle movement. As dopamine levels drop, symptoms increase: tremors in the arms, legs and face; periodically stiff or frozen limbs; slow movement; impaired balance and coordination. It afflicts about 1.5 million Americans.

Please visit here for the rest of the original article.


Gene therapies remain controversial and may for quite some time. It's partly from misunderstanding the science and partly from personal differences held regarding what is ethical to do in changing genes that could possibly affect future generations. This is not that kind of therapy as I understand it. Hopefully people will reserve judgment until some positive results may be witnessed spread large and wide. Perhaps then people will calm down some and consider the fact that there but for the grace of chance or whatever, they too could need such a radical intervention. It's always easy to pontificate while one is young or healthy and the bad things only happen to others.

Old news is good news and come around again

I've reported in Rejuvenation Engineering News a couple of times before, once for heart attack victims and once for children, about the benefits of cold for preserving the brain and other tissues. It halts damage and increases the span of the "Golden Hour" spoken of for trauma victims that best recover if dealt with promptly within the first hour from injury.

Minn. Hospitals Chill Heart Attack Victims

Wed Jan 4, 10:14 AM ET

MINNEAPOLIS - A handful of Minnesota hospitals are now chilling some heart attack patients in an effort partly to protect their brains, a therapy that has produced results one doctor called "breathtaking."

Take the case of Robert Kempenich, 52, of Little Falls. On Dec. 5, he collapsed at a SuperAmerica store and was rushed to a St. Cloud hospital where he was hooked up to a machine that lowered his body temperature to 92 degrees.

Under normal circumstances, only about 5 percent of patients who collapse after a sudden heart attack survive. Even if emergency workers get the heart started again, the brain damage is often permanent.

Yet two days after Kempenich collapsed he awoke from a coma and gave the "thumbs up" sign. His wife, Mary, was there. The sign meant, "He knows," she said. "He knows what he's doing."

Less than a week later, Kempenich went home from the hospital. He was back at work at the SuperAmerica last week. His doctors say there are no signs of lasting brain damage. (cont.)

It is wonderful to see a good idea spreading across the country. Hopefully soon every hospital will get on the bandwagon and be better prepared for cool measures that save clever brains and their owners. See the rest of the article here.

Unlocked mysteries of premature-aging syndrome may provide clues to aging

Some exciting news for a few precious little tikes around the world that deserve it very much and so much more. It might also be exciting for the rest of us as well!

Mysteries of early-aging syndrome unlocked, researchers say

Dec. 13, 2005

Courtesy American Society for Cell Biology and World Science staff

Scientists say they are unraveling a longstanding mystery of how a rare syndrome causes its victims to die in their early teens, apparently of old age.

The answer could do more than help those children, researchers say. It could also lead to a better understanding of how normal aging happens, and what if anything one could do to stop it.

An estimated one in 8 million children are born with the condition, called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. They start life in apparent good health but by six to 18 months develop signs of premature aging, including hair loss, stiff joints, osteoporosis and atherosclerosis. Typically, they die by 13, finished by heart attacks or strokes.

No effective treatments are known, although scientists reported last September that a drug currently being tested against cancer might help the patients.

The cause of the condition, too, remains unknown. But researchers reported one breakthrough in 2003. They traced the condition to a spontaneous mutation in a gene encoding a component of the cell nucleus, the compartment of a cell that stores our genes.

Megan Nighbor, 5, a progeria patient. Her family, which has been appointed as the U.S. Progeria Research Foundation's Ambassador Family for progeria outreach, describes her as a bundle of energy who loves horses. (Photo courtesy of the Markesan Regional Reporter and the Progeria Research Foundation)

See the rest of the story continued here.

Progeria is a despicable disease. I would have to say that in fact it exceeds normal aging in loathsomeness. It robs beautiful children of their lives and time to enjoy life as much as they deserve. Their inner beauty always out-shining their outer, if you've ever had occasion to become familiar with them -- perhaps through a Discovery Channel documentary, they sparkle with joy and hope and love of life, what little of it this terrible disease affords them. We could all take lessons from them on how to appreciate the magical thing that mere existence is.

Let's hope this disease is soon to meet the dustbin of history and along with it that other thief of life that unfortunately plagues everyone plain-old every day aging itself. For even for these precious children, if they were to be cured of their premature aging, that old Dragon-Tyrant awaits them still.

This just in -- U.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High

In one respect this is very good news indeed, but stay tuned.

U.S. Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High

By MIKE STOBBE, Associated Press Writer

ATLANTA - U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high _ 77.6 years _ and deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, the government reported Thursday.

To put this in the shortest and sweetest terms, this is exactly the result of Rejuvenation Engineering. However, due to human nature there is a catch.

Still, the march of medical progress has taken a worrisome turn: Half of Americans in the 55-to-64 age group _ including the oldest of the baby boomers _ have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese. That means they are in worse shape in some respects than Americans born a decade earlier were when they were that age.

The health of this large group of the near-elderly is of major concern to American taxpayers, because they are now becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security.

"What happens to this group is very important because it's going to affect every other group," said Amy Bernstein of the National Center for Health Statistics, which put out the new report.

As I alluded to above human nature disrupts a very good thing. So the way I see it what must be done is to kick this horse in the flanks with sharper spurs than have been used in the past. By sharper spurs I mean of course a lot more money. All the effort to raise the life expectancy until now has been a happy accident. I mean it is the result of blind efforts to simply fight disease, repair injury and improve the human condition.

As many are catching onto it's time now to take the more direct approach and actively fund research efforts toward the ends of curing aging. Along the way many of these problems spoke of in this article will be addressed directly because different remedies for aging will cross apply. The problems caused by lazy human nature such as obesity and lack of care for optimum health are in part caused by apathy toward life that until now has been seen as short and aging inevitable. These will be addressed by a change in public attitude toward living longer, a change that will come when they realize the goal is possible when it is accomplished in a an animal model such as promoted by the Mprize. When this happens the general public will come onboard in droves.

Please read the original report available here. It goes on to talk about differences in generations ten years apart, those born in the 30's compared to those born in the 40's, the so called baby boomers. The inference in the entire report is that Social Security and Medicare will be strained by people living longer so efforts are being made to encourage better health to assuage the cost.

As those in the Life Extension movement know quite well, the best answer to fixing the woes of Social Security and Medicare are to cure aging, period. For one, people won't need to retire if they are youthful for longer or rejuvenated to restored youthful health. They will then have the time and mental maturity to better handle finances and place themselves in positions of safer long term compound interest investment that allow them to not need government or even industry retirement pension plans.

If you like these ideas and like the possibility to live to see many generations of grand children and the wonders that a vastly more technical and connected world may offer in the future, then please by all means possible step up and help us fund the effort to first garner wider public support for Life Extension via the animal model I spoke of above. Currently the Methuselah Mouse Prize is in my mind the best prospect for this. You may click the mouse logo in the upper right of my blog to go directly to the donation page. Do consider a long term commitment that cost merely the same as a cup of coffee a day, consider joining The Three Hundred a group of highly motivated forward thinking smart people pioneering a brighter path for us all.

The promise of Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine

I've talked about the wonders of Nanotechnology before both here and in the Rejuvenation Engineering News section of the Mprize website. A recent post here left you all with a promise to make more sense foor you what this Nanotech is all about. This is the fulfillment of that promise.

I've posted but a few articles in RE News that show only the tip of the iceberg of what we hope to see coming down the pike. The following article is not about nanomedicine per se but it can give us a glimpse of what is hoped for. See the picture of the little, I mean, tiny tiny little car they made with but a very few atoms! Well one day we hope that tiny robots somewhat bigger than the little car but still way smaller than human cells will be able to move around inside and outsdide of cells and work on them to keep them healthy. They will be directly applicable to Aubrey de Grey's SENS theory for curing aging. In fact not only that but they will, as theorized and dreamed, be capable of what in past times would be considered magic!

As Isaac Asimov once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Nanotechnology promises to give us the power over matter itself... such power as to bend matter to our will down to the single atom. Ability like that would surely seem as though magical if one could be witnessed by someone from a former era. Nanomaterials and Molecular Manufacturing hold great promise and fill the dreams of many an innovator and futurist. At some level or other all these concepts, Nanomaterials, Nanomedicine and Molecular Manufacturing are all currently in extremely rapid development.

When you can place individual atoms in precise location or martial tiny robots around within the body to affect repairs, or even changes, you then have the abilty to do some very interesting things indeed. Imagine being able to change your hair color by thinking about it. Imagine tiny scrubbers keeping toxic buildup flushed out and artificial immunity devices keeping harmful bacteria and viruses at bay. Or how about automatic nail clipping?

I know I've dreamt up some pretty silly applications and some perhaps a bit practical here but my purpose is to spur the imagination. If something so mundane as hair color and nail length can be done what else may be possible? Robert Freitas, who wrote the book on Nanomedicine, figuratively and literally has dreamed up quite a few not so mundane uses. One is called Respirocytes, bascally tiny canistors of oxygen acting as artificial blood cells. See the image here below right:

With these little gems running around in your blood stream you might be able to hold your breath longer than a whale. You could have a heart attack and have it completely stop and yet go have a sandwich before worrying too much about getting to the hospital. The Respirocytes would keep your brain going and all your tissues well oxygenated and alive for several hours.

Getting back to the little nanocar, what we believe possible and one should see as such from the little car is the ability to make tiny little robots to do all these things and so many many more that I have mentioned above. Read the article I've exerpted below and visit the links I have listed further below to get a good look at the current boon in Nanotechnology going on and that is only getting more exciting and faster in pace as every day passes.

"World's smallest car" built

Oct. 22, 2005

Courtesy Rice University and World Science Staff

Humvee, move over.

Scientists say they have made the world's smallest car--a single-molecule "nanocar" that has wheels, axles and a chassis. They describe the device in a paper due to appear in an upcoming issue of the research journal Nano Letters.

Building such machines is a step toward regularly manufacturing things of this size, which could be useful for many purposes, said James M. Tour of Rice University in Houston, Texas, one of the developers.

"We'd eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that. They're helping us learn the ground rules."

The nanocar has a pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles, the researchers said. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece.

"Nanoscale" objects like this reported car are objects whose sizes are measured in nanometers, or millionths of a millimeter.

The car is just 3 or 4 nanometers wide, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA, the researchers said. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers wide.

Other research groups have created nanoscale objects that are shaped like automobiles. But study co-author Kevin F. Kelly, also of Rice, claimed Rice's vehicle is the first that actually functions like a car, rolling on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles.[continued]

See the link embedded in the article title for the original and rest of the article. Below you will find more information to become more aquainted with the world of Nanotechnology.

The shear frantic pace of nanotechnology development: Viewing the shear volume of articles at the two following links will give the reader a good idea why those watching this speak in terms of exponential growth and development.

Nanotech News Net

SmallTimes

The concept for nanomedicine as seen by one of the primary designers and conceivers: Check out Robert Freitas' two books regarding proposed designs for nanotechnological medical devices.

Nanomedicine

Examples of the pace of nanomedical device development: Well over 1000 articles!

Nanotech Web

Businessweek

SmallTimes