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Anti-Aging Studies gets Funded; is Qigong Next?From: Michael Winn
Subject: General
Date/Time 2008-06-27 15:24:42
Remote IP: 66.32.1.43
Messagenote: This shift to accepting that life spam is elastic is the first step in the West to exploring whether spiritual sciences such as qigong can impact the aging process, as the Chinese have long accepted.
- I have been away in China and then getting heavenly mountain retreats going. I have a lot of backup stuff to post, will get to it eventually!
Michael
THE FIGHT TO END AGING GAINS LEGITIMACY, FUNDING
By Alexis Madrigal
Wired
June 26, 2008
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2008/06/methuselah?currentPage=all
Gandhi once said, describing his critics, "First they ignore you, then they
laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
After declaring, essentially out of nowhere, that he had a program to end
the disease of aging, renegade biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey knows how the
first three steps of Gandhi's progression feel. Now he's focused on the
fourth.
"I've been at Gandhi stage three for maybe a couple of years," de Grey said.
"If you're trying to make waves, certainly in science, there's a lot of
people who are going to have insufficient vision to bother to understand
what you're trying to say."
This weekend, his organization, The Methuselah Foundation
, is sponsoring its first U.S.
conference on the emerging interdisciplinary field that de Grey has helped
kick start. (Its first day, Friday, will be free and open to the public.)
The conference, Aging: The Disease -- The Cure -- The Implications
, held at UCLA, is an indication of
how far de Grey has come in mainstreaming his ideas.
Less than a decade ago, de Grey was a relatively unknown computer scientist
doing his own research into aging. As recently as three years ago a cadre of
scientists wrote in the Nature-sponsored journal EMBO Reports, that his
research program, known as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence,
was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the
informed scientific community." Also in 2005, MIT-sponsored magazine
Technology Review went so far as to offer a $20,000 prize to anyone who
could prove that de Grey's program was "so wrong that it was unworthy of
learned debate." (No one won.)
Now, though, some scientists are beginning to view his approach -- looking
at aging as a disease and bringing in more disciplines into gerontology --
as worthwhile, even if they still look askance at his claims of permanent
reversible aging within a lifespan. The Methuselah Foundation now has an
annual research funding budget of several million dollars, de Grey says, and
it's beginning to show lab results that he thinks will turn scientists'
heads.
What's more, other researchers have also found some success pursuing
similarly structured research programs. For example, late last year, the
Buck Institute for Age Research received $25
million from the National Institutes of Health to establish a home for the
"new scientific discipline of geroscience." The new field, and its research
institute, are dedicated to proactively fighting aging with researchers from
a dizzying array of fields.
"There are vast areas of what we're calling geroscience, which is the
interface between aging and disease," said Gordon Lithgow, a Buck researcher
who is managing interdisciplinary geroscience research for the institute.
And de Grey seems to have earned Lithgow's respect not necessarily by the
power of his ideas, but rather his powers of persuasion in getting money for
researchers to put his ideas into practice.
"We're all out here doing the best damn experiments we can think of Š So the
response to Aubrey was, go off and get a grant to do [experiments]," Lithgow
said. "And to be fair, that's what he's done. He's gone out and raised money
in an unconventional way and funded his research."
In research that will first be presented on Friday at the conference,
Methuselah-funded scientists will demonstrate a proof-of-concept experiment
for using bacterial enzymes to fight atherosclerosis, or the hardening of
the arteries. That's an idea that de Grey has been pushing for years.
"Back in 2002, I published an inconspicuous review paper that suggested we
might be able to use this approach," he said.
But de Grey isn't quite an establishment figure yet. Instead, he seems to
have made the move from outsider crackpot to, well, insider crackpot.
Lithgow maintains that de Grey still makes predictions far beyond what the
messy lab work of biology can support.
"Aubrey extrapolates from current hard science into, 'If we can do something
about this process and that and seven or eight other ands, then there's this
great opportunity for great human life extension,'" Lithgow said. "And it's
at that point that a lot of scientists are dropping off."
For now, de Grey and his foundation keep trucking along trying to pick off
each of those processes one by one.
"In perhaps seven or eight years, we'll be able to take mice already in
middle age and treble their lifespan just by giving them a whole bunch of
therapies that rejuvenate them," de Grey said. "Gerontologists all over,
even my most strident critics, will say yes, Aubrey de Grey is right."
Even as he imagines completing Gandhi's fourth step, de Grey always keeps
his eye on the ultimate prize -- the day when the aging-as-disease meme
reaches the tipping point necessary to funnel really big money into the
field.
"The following day, Oprah Winfrey will be saying, aging is a disease and
let's fix it right now," de Grey said.
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- Anti-Aging Studies gets Funded; is Qigong Next?: (447) Michael Winn (1192) - - 2008-06-27 3:24 pm
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