Allow me to point you to an attractively blunt assessment of the human condition from the Russian end of the rejuvenation research advocacy community, tidied up a little after the automated translation made a hash of it:

Needless to say, a catastrophe - something unpleasant. Global catastrophe - unpleasant globally. And what is the most global of global catastrophes? Probably the one that leads to widespread death. And here we must note that if nothing is done, then all living people will die with 100% probability. Of aging. Therefore, it is aging that is the global catastrophe that is unfolding silently throughout the course of human history.

"Unfolding silently" because nearly everyone in the world studiously refuses to characterize the consequences of aging for what they in fact are. Everyone will die of aging - everyone! - and that is somehow removed from the normal fervor and unified efforts that greet any other form of mass death. Take the tsunamis of recent years, for example, one of which managed to kill about as many people as die of aging in any given day. There was a global outpouring of funds, support, and activity following that tsunami. Yet every day, without cease, that many people again are killed by the effects of aging - and next to no-one cares enough to do something in response to this horrible ongoing loss of life.

This is an age of biotechnology, in which we have a good grasp on the causes of degenerative aging and how to approach treating them. The goal of producing medical technologies that can rejuvenate the old and grant additional decades of life might be accomplished within a few decades, given billions of dollars in funding and and tens of thousands of researchers and supporting workers. But that support doesn't exist today. The peoples of the world think about aging little differently than they did a thousand years ago - they haven't yet woken up to see what could be accomplished through medical science within their lifetimes. As a consequence of this lack of support, many, many more people will age, suffer, and die than might have been the case - ourselves included, unless we get our act together.

From Cryonics Magazine: "As a neuroscientist whose day job is to map neural circuits, I know exactly what type of evidence is needed to convince the scientific community that cryonics preserves the neural circuits encoding our unique memories and personality. What is required is a systematic whole-brain survey with an electron microscope. Recently I, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jacob DiMare, formed the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) to promote new scientific research in the field of whole brain preservation for long-term static storage. The BPF has announced the Brain Preservation Technology Prize (purse currently at $106,000) for the first team to demonstrate that an entire large mammalian brain can be preserved for long-term storage such that the connectivity between neurons remains intact and traceable using today's electron microscopic imaging techniques. A complete set of rules for the prize can be found on our BPF website. ... This prize is being presented as a challenge to cryonics providers like Alcor and their research partners: 'Demonstrate the quality of your product in a rigorous, independent, and open way to the scientific community and to your customers.' The BPF is hard at work raising funds to promote this prize and to help perform the electron microscopic evaluation required, and we are recruiting a board of scientific advisors and judges that will give the prize credibility."

Link: http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2011/06/07/the-brain-preservation-technology-prize/

Researchers are making the first inroads into implanted machinery that can adjust the workings of memory, potentially leading in the years ahead to ways to restore memory function in the old: "Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off - literally with the flip of a switch. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. ... Using embedded electrical probes, [scientists] recorded changes in the rat's brain activity between the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known as subregions CA3 and CA1. During the learning process, [CA3 and CA1] interact to create long-term memory ... experimenters blocked the normal neural interactions between the two areas using pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then no longer displayed the long-term learned behavior. ... the teams then went further and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions. Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. In addition, the researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats."

Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/uosc-rmr061211.php

Today I noticed a fairly long interview with David Gobel of the Methuselah Foundation - a lot of interesting detail in there as to the Foundation's goals and arrangements. For example:

Q: What collaborations, partnerships, or other types of relationships does Methuselah Foundation have with other longevity funding organizations, if any. One example would be the Ellison Foundation.

A: Ellison has been a donor to the Methuselah Foundation. We've had many organizations that have been supporters such as the Thiel Foundation, the Ellison Foundation, The Paul Glenn Foundation.

Q: Are there any other collaborations with any funding or research-focused organizations?

A: We are, I suppose closest to SENS foundation, we do many things together. We also co-founded the Super Centenarian Foundation which did the world's first autopsies on super centenarians to figure out not how they lived so long, but what exactly they died from, which is a question I posed during the discussion about founding that organizations so they did the autopsies and there's a paper talking about what came up and what can be done about it.

Q: What is your relation with SENS in particular?

A: We are their fiscal sponsor. They recently received their 501c3 tax-deductible exemption from the IRS but from the 2 or 3 years where they did not have that, we were their fiscal sponsor. We also continue to provide them donations from donors and they recently donated funds to help fund the NewOrgan Prize that we're producing.

Q: How far into the future do you think you and your team plan the strategy and goals of the organization?

A: We are looking at what we can accomplish and deliver to end users within 18 months and 5 years and SENS is focused on 10-15 years.

That last point is an important one, and keeping it in mind will illuminate a great deal of the thinking behind the activities of the two organizations. The Methuselah Foundation invests in technologies likely to emerge within the next few years, for example, like organ printing development by startup Organovo. The SENS Foundation, on the other hand, spends a fair amount of effort on building the foundation for the next generation of the research community - outreach amongst people who are in college now, studying life science, but who may have their own laboratories and companies in the biotech space ten years from now.

Researchers are very interested in establishing biomarkers of aging and longevity, as at present the only truly reliable way to distinguish between long-lived and not so long-lived individuals is to wait and see what happens - which isn't an efficient way to run studies of potential therapies for aging. Here's an example of one line of investigation: "Wound healing (WH) is a fundamental biological process. Is it associated with a longevity or aging phenotype? In an attempt to answer this question, we compared the established mouse models with genetically modified life span and also an altered rate of WH in the skin. Our analysis showed that the rate of skin WH in advanced ages (but not in the young animals) may be used as a marker for biological age, i.e., to be indicative of the longevity or aging phenotype. The ability to preserve the rate of skin WH up to an old age appears to be associated with a longevity phenotype, whereas a decline in WH with an aging phenotype. In the young, this relationship is more complex and might even be inversed. While the aging process is likely to cause wounds to heal slowly, an altered WH rate in younger animals could indicate a different cellular proliferation and/or migration capacity, which is likely to affect other major processes such as the onset and progression of cancer. As a point for future studies on WH and longevity, using only young animals might yield confusing or misleading results, and therefore including older animals in the analysis is encouraged."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21667230

An interview from the Scientist: "Cartilage is a firm, yet elastic, connective tissue that cushions joints and minimizes friction between bones. It is made up mostly of a matrix of collagen and proteoglycans and lacks nerve cells or blood vessels. In fact, cartilage contains only one cell type, the chondrocyte. A joint injury is often followed by progressive degeneration of cartilage, but there is hope that stem cells injected into damaged cartilage can help repair it. University Hospital Basel tissue engineer Ivan Martin discusses a recent study that sheds light on the mysterious process of cartilage regeneration by tracking labeled, implanted cells using a conventional MRI scanner ... [For treating cartilage injury] there is a very promising, relatively new technique - the use of autologous cartilage cells, or chondrocytes, which are expanded ex vivo and injected into the defective area. Even more recently, people have considered using mesenchymal stem cells, which are the progenitors of chondrocytes. ... We cannot just continue injecting cells and looking two years down the road to see if there is a change or not in the clinical results. We need to have control over the treatment we apply in order to understand the mechanisms of action and to be able to predict with better reproducibility the clinical outcome. This [MRI-based] technique would possibly contribute or provide the technical means to address this important scientific question."

Link: http://the-scientist.com/2011/05/30/cellular-salve/

Confusion is an important barrier to overcome when advocating engineered human longevity. For those folk who are not paying much attention to the topic - which is, sadly, 99.9% of the present roster of the human race - there's little apparent difference between advocacy for real, plausible scientific development and the nonsense of the "anti-aging" marketplace. It's pretty much all the same to them, and that's a big problem.

One of the long term projects for the advocacy community is to raise the general level of education and awareness, such that a far greater number of people do know that they should support SENS research and not the ramblings of the pill and potion vendors if they do have an interest in living longer. Not a small project, but we can all help.

Things become somewhat worse when we pull in religions and spirituality, however. To go along with the confusion created by the prodigious and often duplicitous output of "anti-aging" salespeople, there are entire armies of people who place immortality in the spiritual sense into the same bucket as life extension through science. They are even more confused - and you can find a good example in a recent article that shifts seamlessly between radical life extension through technology, the longevity of being famous, and Buddhist spirituality. All in the same category for that author.

Religious believes are, unfortunately, delusions. It's just the same as any dream of lazy immortality - such as the possibility that you are software in a simulation, a brain in a jar, or one of infinitely many copies in a universe of many parallel worlds. You shouldn't live your life banking on being a brain in a jar, and you shouldn't live your life banking on a supernatural continuation of your existence post-mortem. All that these comfortable beliefs give you is the chance to feel good while failing to achieve the material, real-world goals that will give you a greater chance at a far longer life. It's grand failure, while pretending to succeed.

While it's tempting to let the religious have their cozy refuge, that's no way to run a campaign of advocacy for scientific development, as noted at length by other authors:

As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, [the Dirac] equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. ... If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn't exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren't any soul at all, and then what's the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking - what form does that interaction take?

...

Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It's not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.

We don't choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed - indeed, required - to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. ... There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.

The same goes for engineering longer lives for ourselves and our descendants. That worthy goal is fundamentally undermined by the widespread acceptance of supernatural immortality. The religious nature of your average human and human society is yet another hurdle to overcome - it won't be going away any time soon, given its origin in evolved human nature, but we have to find good ways to work around its effects.