We Have to Have More Courage to Insist Aging is Accepted as a Disease

The recent Nature journal special edition is dedicated completely to the problem of aging. Among various articles covering topics from demographics to comparative biology and robots, there’s one about the interventions in the aging processes. It is a nice overview about the current successes in slowing down aging in mammals, however I found the last paragraph rather disappointing. It says:

Ageing isn’t a disease, and lifespan extension will be almost impossible to prove in humans.

These are the words of the NIA officials and some of the scientists. Aging is not considered to be a disease at the moment. There is no such indication as aging, therefore one can’t register a geroprotector drug, the one that slows down aging. This is one of the major hurdles in aging research. Even though there are some substances that are proven to slow down aging and protect from diseases, researchers can’t make drugs from these substances. This has to be changed if we want to live longer and healthier. I think it’s horrible that the NIA people are propagating this idea that aging is not a disease. They are rejecting the opportunity with their own hands. If they fought for persuading the healthcare officials to accept aging as a disease, a lot of problems would be gone instantly.

Firstly, it would be much easier to get grants for aging research. Now everyone has to come up with the potential impact on treating the pathologies like cancer and diabetes, but once aging is recognized to be a disease, it would be much easier to apply to funding.

Secondly, research would be more effective, all the scientists now working on separate age-related diseases wouldn’t need to shift their attention from the actual cause, they would be able to focus on the aging processes with no harm to the future funding opportunities.

Lastly, there will be aging doctors in the clinic. Right now one can’t come to the hospital and  say, “doctor, I’ve got a problem, I am aging.” People would laugh at such a patient, however this is the best kind of patient, the smartest one, one who cares about his future and wants to prevent the upcoming illnesses and frailty. Most importantly, there is a way to help patients like that. the article says “lifespan extension will be almost impossible to prove in humans.” I believe this is wrong. The right panel of aging biomarkers will do the trick. Yes, the panel will be huge, we would need to monitor a lot of parameters (proteomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic data, etc.), watch the dynamics, but after some time of monitoring, we’ll be able to prevent diseases and make truthful predictions regarding the rate of aging of a particular person. It has already been shown. Read the story of Michael Snyder from Stanford University who was able to track the onset of his type 2 diabetes and treat it, way before the traditional diagnostics could detect the illness.

Glass, Sierra and others hope that research on ageing interventions will change the way we think about disease and drug development, and lead to treatments that tackle multiple age-related diseases at once. Major causes of death worldwide, including cancer and cardiovascular disease, share a common risk factor: age. Tackling one disease at a time isn’t working, says the NIA’s de Cabo. “Ageing is the leading risk factor for all chronic diseases,” he says. “Postpone ageing, and you postpone these diseases.”

Dr. de Cabo is right, however it is absolutely not clear to me how these researchers are going to change the existing attitude without making aging recognized as a disease. I believe it’s NIA that has to be the leader in persuading the government to change the nomenclature and include aging in the list of diseases. Instead, they are hiding their heads in the sand. And in the meantime we are not getting any younger.

European Union Deserved the Nobel Peace Prize

Today all over the world we hear the voices of indignation and irritation about the European Union’s Nobel Peace Prize. These voices belong to ingramuses.

European Union is the greatest political achievement of people of the Earth. For thousands of years the European nations were ruthlessly exterminating each other. Just 70 years ago dozens of millions of people were dying at war, the factories were burning people alive non-stop, day and night. People hated outlanders. Today were are witnessing a completely different situation: the boundaries are erazed, we feel absolutely safe in another country, we can get a job, there is one save currency in the European Union, which is very convenient.

The Eropean Union is an example for other countries in the policy of benevolence, humanitarism, protection of civil rights and providing opportunities. Of course, not everything goes smoothly and thing are quite complicated now. And it’s not only about the economical crisis, but about the general setback of panhuman, liberal, democratic values all over the world. Namely the EU is the island of liberty, ideals of good and justice, that stands against the waves of religious fundamentalists and autocratic regimes, that are willing to submerge the whole world into the sea of blood, pain and suffering.

The European Union deserved the Nobel Prize, because it’s heard work of many people in favor of peace and friendship among the nations. From my part, I wish human life becamee more  and more valuable and the efforts of the European governments were dedicated to radical life extension. To do that more attention to studying the fundamental mechanisms of aging, development of regenerative medicine and allying Artificial Intelligence to biological tasks are needed.

Transhumanism Presentation in Tallinn at the NMR meeting

It was an honor for me to get invited to talk at the Nuclear Magnet Resonance conference in the framework of the Estonian Magnet Week in Tallinn on September, 30. I am very thankful to Ago Samoson who provided me with the opportunity to share our ideas about transhumanism as the ideology that can be used as the basis for uniting researchers and increasing the amount of funding. Researchers all over the world are struggling with the lack of money for experiments. Regardless of the way this money is distributed among the labs within a given field, it is still not enough. And it won’t be  enough unless there’s a social mandate formed in the society and the politicians react to it appropriately. Landing on the Moon was only possible because there was a strong idea behind it and a lot of people were backing up this idea. Transhumanism can offer the powerful ideology of defending life, increasing the human abilities with the help of technologies. It can serve as a point of crystallization. The government interest in scientific research, relies upon the interest of the general public. It’s the goal of the scientists to unite, to abandon their fears and explicitly state their goals – longevity and good health for everyone. This way we have a chance to be alive at the time when the life extension therapies are created and people no longer have to suffer from diseases and die.

A picture from Estonian coast and a video of the first half of my talk shot with the iPhone in a dark room)

 

Second Transhumanist Political Meeting Took Place in Moscow

The Second Transhumanist Political Meeting took place on Saturday, September 22, 2012 in the very center of Moscow in Revolution Square right opposite the famous Bolshoi Theater. For the secont time Russian transhumanists went to the streets and declaired their demands, which are – life and youth for everyone, development of new biomedical technologies and development of life extension therapies. The meeting was organized by the Russian Transhumanist Movement. I loved the atmosphere. It’s such a pleasure to be surrounded by like-minded people, who understand the importance of common actions aimed like this one. The meeting was aimed at publicly stating that we need our lives to be protected and extended. We demanded more money to be dedicated to research aimed at eliminating aging and life extension. In this picture Mikhail Batin is saying a couple of words about his new transhumanist book Futurology that he co-authored with Alexei Turchin.

The poster says: “250 years of life for everyone”

“We are against death!”

Posters from left to right: “Eternal youth to the masses”, “People must live” and “For cryonics”.

Alexei Turchin, expert in global risks, is showing Anna Arlanova, actress, the book Futurology, which can be thought of as a transhumanist text book.

Dr. Yury Pichugin is advocating that cryonics must be recognized as a credible scientific field, that holds a lot of potential for the humanity and that more money has to be spent on research in the area of cryobiology.

Daria Khalturina, lobbying expert, is signing the petition to increase funding for research aimed at life extension addressed to the Russian authorities.

“The right to live is the main human right”

“Overpopulation is a myth”, “Protect our right for life!”

“I want to become a Genetically Modified Organism”

“We are for regenerative medicine” and “The retired must live”.

“I want to extend youth to 150 years”

 

I am an Aging Fighter Because Life is the Main Human Right, Demand and Desire

Here’s my essay on the Longevity Party published on the IEET website with the help of Hank Pellisier. I am coping the text below with tiny edits. Enjoy!

My name is Maria Konovalenko and I am an aging fighter. I work for the Science for Life Extension Foundation in Moscow, Russia. It is a small private non-profit headed by Mikhail Batin.  Our goal is to attract funding for research aimed at studying the fundamental mechanisms of aging and finding the ways of life extension. We are attracting around 5 million dollars a year on average, both from the government and the private sector.

I am a transhumanist. I would very much like to live forever, but most importantly I would like all the people in the world to have this opportunity. Therefore, I am spending 100% of my time on life extension projects. I graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is the best Physics school in Russia. My major is Molecular Biological Physics. During my 5th year at school I had a course in Gerontology and this is how I became involved with the radical life extension initiative. I have spent 9 years in the music school and I’ve been swimming competitively for about 11 years in Murmansk, my home town, which is located in the very north-west part of Russia. It is a place where we have 9 months of winter, and I really wish I were joking.

Right now I am entirely focused on transhumanism, because I believe life extension is the top priority goal.

Why did we start the Longevity Party? Because life is the main human right, demand and desire. Trying to increase lifespan means wanting to live and be constantly healthy. In the modern developed society life expectancy depends on the state of biomedical technologies. And the state of health care is the issue of government policy. I am talking not only about the availability of modern technologies, but also about whether they are actually developed or not. This means that your life depends entirely on the budgets allocated for fighting aging and life extension. It is crucial that people in different countries demand funding the fight against aging, because the main interest of the voters is staying alive. So, the question whether you are alive or not is a political one. A party is a political tool, therefore it is essential the majority of countries have parties that place life extension on the top place in their agenda.

The idea of the Longevity Party is acting rationally in our own interest. I believe if there were 20 people in the US, who had the necessary level of intellectual resources, they could change the situation, possibly with the help of the Longevity Party. Unfortunately, there is no large-scale scientific project in the area of life extension. The task of the Longevity Party is to elucidate the super-importance of such a project to the people.

At this moment the will to live looks like a struggle of common sense against superstition and unbelievable stupidity. Idiocy is an incredibly strong enemy. You cannot just go ahead and tell people that living is good and dying is bad, because you will immediately hear in response that many “would be bored to hell to live that long” and they “don’t want to argue with nature.”

Arguments are not enough to persuade the public, we need a powerful propaganda machine. How this machine is organized is perhaps the task of the Longevity Party, or perhaps the task of an incredible genius who will become the most significant person in the history of the civilization. I don’t know such a person yet. The goals of the party include finding this leader or leaders. Defeating aging is defeating narrow-mindedness, lack of education and inertia; it requires total intellectual superiority.

I envision a global Longevity Party. A national initiative [in numerous nations] to fight for radical life extension would be enough. The US, UK, Germany, Turkey and Russia all possess the budgets for radical life extension. However, the influence of transhumanists on national governments is zero. Probably the first goal of the international alliance for significant life extension is to impact the situation in a single small country, like Denmark or Israel.  We could play on the will of small countries to be noticed. People don’t listen to logical arguments, so maybe art can help us, like Pussy Riot or Femen.

The international Longevity Party is the alliance of people with firm character. If you have decided to be involved in transhumanism professionally – welcome. Our first step? Maybe we should let 400 coffins float down the Hudson River, that’s the number of people that die each day in NYC. I know only one thing – we need to be courageous. Forums, where mostly freaks hang out, are useless. Conversations among ourselves have given us exactly nothing. The Party is a tool of self-identification. We need to give people the opportunity to make a rational and moral choice, that is to join the Party.

So far, the response I have gotten from people about the Longevity Party is… okay. People are active and willing. There are no strong leaders, though. They are especially needed in the United States. Maybe a critical mass is lacking.

In Russia registering a political party is a rather bureaucratic procedure and is frowned upon by the government. We have submitted the application and we need to organize the founding meeting within half a year with representatives from 42 regions of the country. This is quite a significant amount of money for us. Nonetheless, we are going to give away membership cards. We will think of the hierarchy so that a person could grow within the Party and gain new knowledge.

My prediction for the future?  Will immortality be achieved? If humanity doesn’t perish, then immortality is inevitable. The only question is whether you, specifically, are going to make it. The most irrational human generation is ruling the planet now. It is missing the unique opportunity to radically extend their own lives. Undone is even a simple experiment of testing the longevity effects of pharmacological compounds in humans. This should have been done already, in the 1970s!

If this generation dies, it dies only because of its own stupidity. Because it doesn’t care about scientific research in the area of life extension. There is some research going on, but it’s pace and the amount of funding is ridiculous compared to the importance of the goal.

I believe that real technologies of rejuvenation could be created in 20 years provided there is a scientifiс megaproject on life extension. It is going to be expensive at first – several billion dollars, but after a while the price will fall down the same way it did with genome sequencing, which costs a couple thousand dollars today and will be less than a hundred dollars tomorrow. If you are less than 65 years old, then you can buy immortality with about 30 billion dollars. But you also need intelligence and will. Intelligence you need for not giving your money to frauds, and will – to not to stop half-way to eternal life.

If you are 20, you have pretty good chances to live up to 1000 years, if there’s no global catastrophe. There’s only one serious problem threatening immortality – Unfriendly Artificial Intelligence. Aside from that – people have got the whole universe ahead of them.

If you are older than 60 – you should do diagnostics of aging using numerous biomarkers, fight cancer, and be involved in cryonics.

If you are 50-60 years old – you should be involved in regenerative medicine and gene therapy, in particular, creating the “longevity viruses.”

If you are 40-50 – you should focus on therapeutic cloning, brain transplantation artificial organs, neuro-modeling.

If you are 30-40 – you should work on development of friendly Artificial Intelligence and nanotechnologies.

If you are 20-30 – do all of the above.

If you are less than 20, aging will be defeated without you. Your major risk is a global catastrophe. Work on creating the friendly AI and it’s going to solve all the problems and you will become a superhuman with capabilities that the Olympic Gods wouldn’t even dream of.

But of course, improve yourselves, study and look after your health at any age.

What do I see as the best path to Radical Life Extension?  Technology is convergent and genome manipulations are now absolute nanotechnologies. Most effective is stimulating our own reparative, regenerative mechanisms. We need to urgently bring the diagnostics of age-related changes, i.e. aging, to the clinic. We need to learn how to restore functioning of the damaged spine using stem cells and transplant brains in primates. We need to learn how to clone a human. We need to carry out the Human Epigenome Project.

I mentioned cloning, hence a few words about bioethics.

We need to make it clear to everyone that life extension and defeat of death is absolutely moral and righteous for humanity. Miscreants, religious zealots and unbelievable illiterates are using their rhetoric to slow down scientific progress. Progress, by definition, is the movement from bad to good. Today, we transhumanists must promote the ideals of goodness, to combat people in pulpits and media who harangue against life extension, mortifying millions of people in the name of “bioethics.” It is, quite obviously, quintessentially Ethical to save the lives of millions of people. The servants of Satan stand against us, when they try to inculcate their credulous parishes that they act out of love for them.

The incontestable leader in biotechnology is the United States. Maybe China will come up with something significant. Europe has kind of mentally surrendered in the technological race. Governments in Europe act mostly to please the middlebrows with their not-so-sophisticated values: how to eat tasty food and watch football. Europeans are forced to transform into social animals that live in autopilot mode. On the other hand, Life Extension is a creative goal. People in society have to come out their psychological comfort zone.

When we understand that aging isn’t absolutely required, Death becomes horrifying. The nation where a critical mass of people think like that, will be the nation that solves the problem of life extension.

What do I need to help me with my endeavor? Money. As a biophysicist, I can tell you that money is the source of life. Unfortunately, our supporters have very little money. There are almost no people in the world working on advancing transhumanism who are not thinking about where to get food, clothing and housing.

If you haven’t got many resources, spend them on self-education in the area of molecular biology, artificial Intelligence or similar things. Even if you have tons of money, you should do the same thing. Studying stimulates neurogenesis and helps you make the right decisions.

The Longevity Party needs design, movies, art, scientific research, organizational work, lobbying, advertising, websites, remote education. Even making an interactive multimedia textbook on aging costs several millions of dollars. Nonetheless, we have to act even in these hostile circumstances. Supporters of radical life extension should meet together often, so that new projects can originate from discussions. We have to persuade the people around us. We have to spoil each and every party with conversations about immortality and emerging technologies.

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.

The Horror of Being in a Sect

This story touched me deeply. What a brave girl Astra Woodcraft is to escape the Sea Org, a very strict sect within the sect of Scientology. I believe this is one of the worst things that can happen to a person – being deceited into believing some meaningless stories that lead one to separation from one’s family and friends. There is no education within a sect and the lack of education, actually leads people into sects in the first place. The sect and religion in general give a person a false feeing of comfort and sense, but in fact they only feed on the people’s income, energy and other resources.

Several friends of my parents are in various sects right now and it’s so hard to be aquainted to such people, because you see how wrong they are, but often you don’t have enough influence and strength to drag them out of this abyss. However, you can fight sects and examples like Astra Woodcraft prove that to us.

People Who Justify Aging are Profoundly Wrong – Aging is Abhorrent

I have read this recent opinion in the New York Times “Age and Its Discontents” by author Louis Begley and it resonated so much with my personal feelings about the topic. The author vividly describes the last years of his mother’s life, who had been a widow for the previous 40 years before her death. Begley lets us feel the pain in her joints and in her heart. He obviously sees aging as nothing but misery and loneliness. But I think he misses the point – he believes his mother’s solitude is the reason of her woes, but it actually is aging, her declined health, pain and suffering – these are the real reasons of her tragedy. If she had been young she would have had no diseases, but only good looks and the opportunity to start over, but alas! she rot alive. Louis Begley caught the very overwhelming in its inevitability, horrifying feeling that it’s all over, no need to buy new costumes. They will not be worn for a long time and they’re not worth spending time and money.

Mr. Begley was widely criticized – and by whom? Who do you think justified aging?  Executive director and chief scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation wrote:

Mr. Begley’s bitter portrayal of aging is neither universal nor inevitable.

This is unbelievable. So wrong. In reality it’s exactly the opposite – aging is universally debilitating and inevitable. While this type of words are coming out of the mouths of people who are the advocates for aging research, nothing good will happen. There will be no money for research to live longer in a younger body. And the reason is the faulty idea that aging can be healthy, productive, or enjoyable. It can’t by definition. Aging is the worst thing and it’s happening to everyone of us every second of our lives, sucking up our strength, youth and beauty. I want to fight this widely spread idea of how old age is full of pleasure, when your grandchildren sit on your lap. Sure, that’s nice, but it’s not even remotely enough. For example, it would be much better to have the possibility to go to a night club after your grandchildren’s visit and be able dance all night long. But this can never happen while we have leaders of Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundations saying that aging is ok. Opinion leaders have to understand how harmful justifying aging is – this position is killing us.

And I want to live. I want all the people on Earth to live. In order to achieve this everybody who is involved in the field of aging has to be more courageous. They have to speak up for themselves and for their work. They have to say that they want to fight aging, that they want life extension. Cancer researchers say that cancer is their greatest enemy, that cancer has to be illuminated and viola – the amount of money that went to cancer research from the National Cancer Institute in 2010 was almost 5.1 billion dollars – that’s like 5 times more than on aging. And cancer is just an individual case of an aging-related pathology. We have to learn from oncologists, cancer researchers and advocates. We are fighting aging and we have to speak about it freely and explicitly. Make no mistake – our goal is to defeat aging completely.

Australian doctors raise against quackery courses in medical universities

Good job Australia! According to The Telegraph:

The group, Friends of Science in Medicine, says universities have been trashing their reputations by teaching “quackery” and pseudoscience. Almost half of Australian universities offer courses in alternative medicine, including Chinese herbal remedies, chiropractics, homoeopathy, naturopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy.

The Australian group has written to university vice-chancellors, saying they should back evidence-based science rather than give “undeserved credibility to what in many cases would be better described as quackery”.

I believe this would be terrific. This is so much attention to these nonsense “disciplines” in the public, but people are fooled by the snake oil sellers, who offer youth, health and what not. There’s a huge cult of “grandma’s potions” in Russia. A lot of people rely on herbs and neglect going to the real doctor and then die, because the herbs don’t work. I believe this situation has to be changed and Australian scientific community sets a decent example for scientific communities all over the world.

Open Science is Key in the Opinion of Paul Allen

Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, established the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2003. By integrating genomic and anatomic information, as well as sophisticated data search and viewing tools, the unique resources of the Institute offer researchers unprecedented access to details and patterns of gene activity throughout the brain. The information is stored in Atlases:

1. ALLEN Mouse Brain Atlas – an interactive, genome-wide, three-dimensional map of gene expression throughout the adult mouse brain
2. ALLEN Spinal Cord Atlas – an interactive, genome-wide map of gene expression across the adult and juvenile mouse spinal cords
3. ALLEN Developing Mouse Brain Atlas – a detailed three-dimensional map revealing how genes change during the development of the brain
4. ALLEN Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas – three-dimensional, high-resolution map of neural connections throughout the mouse brain
5. ALLEN Human Brain Atlas – a one-of-a-kind resource for understanding genes at work in the human brain

Most importantly, all the data is in open access. Allen says:

… we generate data for the purpose of sharing it. Since opening shop in 2003, we’ve had 23 public releases, or about three per year. We don’t wait to analyze our raw data and publish in the literature. We pour it onto the public website as soon as it passes our quality control checks. Our goal is to speed others’ discoveries as much as to springboard our own future research.

I think we’d get more bang for our buck by making more data more useful to more scientists—and, by extension, to the world community that will benefit from their work

Paul Allen is definitely brilliant. I believe, researchers in the whole world can benefit a lot by having open access to any scientific publication, clinical trial data or pharmacological company data sets they want. This could accelerate progress a great deal and make radical life extension much closer to reality.