We Created the Longevity Party

We made the first step towards the creation of the Longevity Party. On July, 19 the initiative group of 10 people gathered together in Moscow to establish the first political party aimed at extending human lifespan using technological advances. Among these 10 people were Mikhail Batin, Alexey Turchin, Leonid Kaganov and Elena Milova. This is the very first step in the long and hard process of legally registering a political party. I believe this is one of the most important things that happened in the past few years in fighting aging. Nowhere in the world never before people expressed their desire to life longer in a form of a political movement.

The main goal of the Longevity Party is to increase human lifespan so that people could live for as long as they would like to and remain young and healthy. We would like to achieve this goal by promoting scientific research and technological advances in regenerative medicine, genetics of aging and longevity, neuroscience, computer modeling of biological processes and other areas of life extension. Longevity Party is 100% transhumanist party.

There are so many things that we need to do in order to legally register the Party, and we have already started doing them. I will be posting the updates as frequently as possible. Next big thing we need to finalize is the Program of the Party. Then we have to have at least 2 people in 42 regions of Russia as representatives of the Party and have the founding meeting after which the Party can be registered and eventually appear in the voting ballots.

Our goal is to influence the authorities to support life extension technologies and increase funding for research aimed at improving people’s health and extending longevity.

Join us. Together we will win. Longevity Party must be a global initiative.

Melanie Swan: A summary of important themes in aging research

Melanie Swan, MBA, is an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET – The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Ms. Swan is a science generalist, hedge fund manager, and founder of citizen science organization DIYgenomics. She serves as a researcher and advisor to foundations, government agencies, corporations, and startups, and is active in the community promoting science and technology. Her life mission is to impact millions of people by facilitating the widespread deployment of beneficial high-impact science and technology.

Melanie recently summarized some important themes in aging research that were discussed at the second Bay Area Aging Meeting:

Processes work in younger organisms but not in older organisms

A common theme in aging is that processes function well in the first half of an organism’s life, then break-down in the second half, particularly the last 20% of the lifespan. In one example, visualizations and animations were created from the 3D tissue-sectioning of the intestine of young (4 days old) and old (20 days old) C. elegans. In the younger worms, nuclei and cells were homogenous and regularly spaced over the course of the intestine running down the length of the worm. In older worms, nuclei disappeared (an initial 30 sometimes ultimately dropped to 10), and the intestine became twisted and alternately shrunken and convoluted due to DNA accumulation and bacterial build-up.

The main question in Biogerontology

There’s this quite simple idea: to take two species similar in size and basic biology, but having a substantial difference in longevity, and figure out what’s the reason for this difference. What are the distinctions in the mechnisms of aging and stress resistance? It’s desirable to carry out this work in various species. However, not a lot of people are excited about this simple idea. Even the genome of the famous naked mole rat has not been sequenced yet, although many people believe it’s got “negligible” senescence.

For now all that we have is negligible funding of evolutionary-comparative biology of aging. Moreover, previously obtained results are put into cold storage.

In 1962 George Sacher began laboratory breeding of wild-caught house mice (Mus musculus) and white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus) trapped near the Argonne Laboratory site in northeast Illinois. The maximal lifespan of the white-footed mouse turned out to be more than 8 years, contrary to 3,5 years in either wild-caught or laboratory house mice. Sacher’s laboratory publiched about a dozen papers comparing house and white-footed mice, as did Ron Hart’s laboratory in the National Center for Toxicological Research.

There’s no need to say that George Sacher was given grants mostly for works in the area of radiological protection, and aging research was mostly funded by means of the lab’s own resources.

Since the beginning of the 1980s research was just middling, but still something was found out.

Below are some data from the works of Ungvary et al. and Labinskyy et al. Basicly this table shows the major known differences between the species. The autors claim that these data correspond with the oxidative stress theory of aging.

Still a lot of questions can be addressed to the white-footed mouse. For example, what is the destinction in the stress resistance mechanisms? What’s with its regeneration capacity? What if we compare it with the naked mole rat? And here comes the main question in Biogerontology. Why is the research into the fundamental mechanisms of aging so scarcely funded?