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/

Most of us take for granted that the water flowing from our tap is clean and pure. We compare our tap water with the standards of much of the world and we reassure ourselves that the water in our drinking glass is safe. But we should be asking an important question: “safe” and “pure” compared to what?

The practice of purifying our drinking water with chlorine was pioneered by the military a century ago. It began to be commonplace in the U.S. in the 1930’s and was widespread by World War II. Chlorination has been a major boon to human health: the spread of water-borne diseases that still claims millions of lives around the world soon became a thing of the past in the developed world. That, as they say, is the good news.

But remember Dr. Mixon’s first rule:  “Anything strong enough to help is strong enough to hurt!” That applies to chlorination of water in a surprising way. Chlorination very effectively kills bacteria, parasites, and viruses. But as they are destroyed, these organisms and their component parts do not simply vanish. The chlorine rips them apart and transforms the basic molecules of their bodies into a series of compounds referred to as “halomethanes,” or chlorination sterilization byproducts (sometimes referred to as “disinfection byproducts”).

Here is the scary part. Virtually all of the dozen or so recognized chlorination sterilization byproducts are known to be carcinogens – that is, they can cause cancer. The over-consumption of some of these byproducts has been linked to rectal, bowel, and bladder cancer, and these byproducts also appear to be linked to an increase in some forms of leukemia.

Although everyone in the water treatment industry knows about the problem, only a few of these potentially dangerous chemicals are monitored by city water departments, while others are not. For many people the risk is statistically insignificant; however, these chlorination sterilization byproducts are especially dangerous to people who have a predisposition for cancer formation, whether it be from genetics, exposure to other carcinogens or poor life style. So what is a health-conscious person to do?

Fortunately we have an ideal solution. These unhealthy compounds can be removed from your drinking water by distillation. That’s why we sell the Water Wise distillers in our store. What’s more, we recommend these distillers to all our patients, and we provide them for all our doctors at Longevity Medical Clinic. So the bottom line is simple. I approve of adding chlorine to the water supply. The tragic alternative would be to let millions die from infectious disease. But chlorine has its downside, and a wise person takes common sense precautions. Chlorination is good public policy – drinking pure, clean safe distilled water is good personal policy. Ask us about it next time you call or visit Longevity Medical Clinic.