What will be the next steps in medicine lenghtening your life?

(apologies for not posting... real life took it's toll. Oh and i'll be a way a few weeks on vacation so not mucho posts to come soon either).

Work is in progress on various fronts related to life extension and some work looks rather promising. What would be the first to come to clinical use and what will be the impact?

Certainly there is a big push and rapid development in the field of regenerative medicine. Already beating heart tissue has been grown in the lab and using a heart as scaffold a full heart has been grown. Vascularisation is in my view the leading problem in this area but clearly progress is well afoot. Say 15 more years and many applications should be at least very close to market in my educated guess.

Also using patient derived stem cells either by apharesis, skin stem cells or possibly soon enough by dedifferentiating cells from a biopsy plenty of clinical applications become possible resulting in vast improvements in cardiovascular disease, dystrophie or ataxia to name but a few. First commercializations are in progress and applications are close to market.

So life extension without touching the underlying processes of aging in a systemic and systematic way is plausible. Many will interject that these steps that at are in progress of being made available regardless of what biogerontology brings to the table will maybe up the life expectancy by another decade but then everyone will develop Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other failure modes of the brain. Well, fortunately we seems to make a lot of progress in these domains too so maybe the most apparent ways in which the brain goes will be treatable in the same time frame? Certainly there is reason for hope.

Living Forever: The Longevity Revolution

Consider that in labs we can get yeast to live 10x as long. Next we will be able to make mice live longer and then people will realize aging is malleable and will demand tackling this next level in medicine.

Matching challange at the Methuselah Foundation

If you have been considering donating for research in the Methuselah Foundation's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) research program then now is an excellent opportunity. Ryan Scott has set up a $100,000 matching fund for all research donations made in 2008, together with Peter Thiel's $3 million matching fund this means means that all your SENS research donations will be tripled - a $100 donation becomes $300 for new research into longevity medicine.

Add to that the free book everyone who donates more then 100$ receives. The book by itself is a recommended read if you are interested in why we age and what might be done to avoid it or rather what can and in my view should be done to enable us to repair the damage that accumulates in our bodies.

So go ahead, donate and help making this world a better place. I have.

So i'm a slightly left leaning libertarian

Well at least according to this online test. somehow doesn't surprise me. I guess i'm on a long term trend toward more libertarian and approaching more the middle ground between left and right but time will tell...

why don't you take the test yourself and see if you agree with the results?

Dependency on hydrocarbon fuels

People fear peak oil and certainly whether or or not a nation has oil affects foreign policy towards that country. However more recently the public at large is concerned about hydrocarbons because of suspected influences on the climate and the impact of price on the economy. Even though the influence of the oil price on the economy at least of Europe and the US has sunken it still is a major factor. So clearly if we want to limit our negative influence on the ecology of our planet and reduce the unhealthy influence on politics and thus ultimately the wellbeing of a large number of people we need to reduce our dependency on hydrocarbon fuels.

Fortunately progress in science offers tantalizing hope for amelioration and indeed there are many developments that combined will help overcome this addiction.

Breakthroughs on the horizon like room temperature superconductors allow transporting electricity over large distances without the loss of todays technology. Also with the advent of less then 1$ per watt and better photovoltaics energy production is less expensive then coal.
Combined with 10 times better energy storage in batteries used for instance in plugin hybrid cars or buffering stations enabling local distribution of electric power in microgrids make vast loses of power in maintaining the local power grid stability a thing of the past and thus allow to reduce standby power from coal power plants or make then altogether unnecessary.
Power sources like wind power for instance in the form of the maglev turbine can be combined with all these advances.

What about other uses for oil etc in producing fertilizer and plastic? Well, for fertilizing soil there exist even better techniques we still need to figure out but at least we think there are a lot better ways just look at terra preta soil and if all fails why not take co2 and turn it into fuel?

This is just a cursory look at a few developments shaping our future. Let us strive to reduce our footprint and stop the destruction of our ecology with futile and counterproductive activities like bio-fuel.

Science's 'Breakthrough of the Year': Human genetic variation

Further steps towards personalized treatment and incidentally also unblocking the stall in new drug development will in my view be facilitated and mediated largely by the rapidly advancing possibilities in personal genomics. Science recognizes the importance of us not all being alike and indeed significant hurdles hinder the market entry of promising drugs, simply because they only work in some and not all but such is the fate of many advanced treatments since they now grow vastly more targeted and thus have a not only a higher potential for positive patient outcomes but also for negative outcomes and without personal genomics it simply will be next to impossible to bring the next (well maybe a few steps more removed) generations of drugs to market. Fortunately where there is a market there is someone willing to sell. Among others 23andme offering basic scans for 1000$. Of course there are different offerings and competition and quality will grow at the same time that prices will erode. Ten years hence this will be far from uncommon i suppose, at least among people committed to their health.

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture 2007 - Craig Venter on BCC

Craig Venter talks on how he sees genomics will shape the next century. He truly is one of the pioneers and more power to him and others working on improving the human condition.