Category Archives: Transhuman News

The purpose of our studies: to understand the mechanisms of aging and longevity in order to extend healthy and productive human lifespan. This scientific and educational website contains over a hundred of scientific and reference documents relevant to longevity and aging studies. It is receiving about 1000 visits per day from many prestigious organizations including the US Library of Congress, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and from the Royal Society - the UK National Academy of Science. This website is rated as the top # 1 website on longevity science topic in such major search engines as Google, Yahoo!, Alltheweb, etc. (when searching for longevity science term).Breaking News:

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Dr. Natalia S. Gavrilova Center on Aging NORC at theUniversity of Chicago 1155 East 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637-2745 Fax: (773) 256-6313 Phone: (773) 702-1375 E-mail: Brief Biographical Sketch, NIH Biosketch Detailed Curriculum Vitae Resume Expertise Profile Statement of Research Interests

We also maintain close scientific contacts with Dr. Bruce A. Carnes at the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Yulia Kushnareva at Burnham Institute, La Jolla, CA

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THE RELIABILITY THEORY OF AGING AND LONGEVITY Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2001, 213(4): 527-545. Abstract To download full text click here For Press Release click here For Media Coverage click here

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Longevity Science: Unraveling the Secrets of Human Longevity ...

Retirees bowl in Sun City, Ariz., at America's first active retirement community. Human longevity is a confluence of so many factors interacting in so many complex ways, making it unlikely that there will ever be a surefire way to live to 120.

Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

In an age of breakneck technological and scientific progress, it can seem at times like anythings possible. Cars are driving themselves. Robots are tooling around Mars, taking pictures, and beaming them back to Earth. People are moving things with their minds.

For all the exponential advances, though, some technologies remain firmly in the realm of science fiction. We cant engineer genius babies. Were never getting our hoverboards. And, perhaps most dispiritingly of all, we havent figured out a way to cheat death.

It isnt for lack of trying. Research centers around the world have teams devoted to the study of human longevity, and scientists have been working furiously for years to uncover the secrets of long life in everything from mice to yeast to hydra. In fact, theyre making a lot of progress, and theres good reason to be optimistic that theyll someday hit on a breakthrough that will allow people to live significantly longer than they do today. But if youre sitting around waiting for the singularity, you might want to stand up and go for a jog instead.

Recent headlines make it seem like the cure for old age is just around the corner. Brain Experiment Could Give You an Extra 20 Years, one promised. Telomerase reverses ageing process, another declared. Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? asked the New York Times Magazine. And National Geographics May cover featured a beaming infant and a tantalizing claim: This baby will live to be 120*. You might think the asterisk would point to a disclaimer, but its a fakeout: The disclaimer reads, Its not just hype. New science could lead to very long lives.

Sadly, such bold predictions are in fact mostly hype, says Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The story was great, Olshansky said of the National Geographic piece, which detailed the rapidly growing body of scientific research on the genetic and molecular mechanisms involved in the aging process. But the titles all wrong. They shouldnt be making up numbers like that. So far, only one person has verifiably lived to be 120, and no one since the year 2000 has even come close.

The legitimate good news is that scientists are finally starting to tackle the problem of aging in a serious way, and some of their early findings are encouraging. Whereas medical research has focused for centuries on finding the causes and cures of specific diseases, a new crop of researchers is taking a different approach. Theyre looking for the mechanisms involved in the aging process itself. The thinking is that if you focus on curing just one disease, like diabetes, people will simply die from cancer or a stroke instead. But if you can figure out what makes the body more vulnerable to a broad range of diseases with each passing year, the impact on human health and longevity could be far greater. Olshansky calls this the longevity dividend.

Key to this quest are a number of long-running studies of specific populations of especially long-lived people. In rural Ecuador, researchers have pinpointed a genetic mutation that appears to make an isolated group of villagers unusually small of staturebut also less vulnerable to cancer and diabetes. In Hawaii, studies of Japanese-American centenarians pointed to variations in a gene called FOX03 that has also been tied to longevity in other species. And studies of centenarian Ashkenazi Jews in New York City homed in on the apparent genetic source of their unusually high levels of good cholesterol, which seems to fight heart disease. Several of the genes and mechanisms identified in these studies have been shown to affect the aging process in lab experiments on mice and other species.

The New York study is helmed by Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He told me hes optimistic that a breakthrough in understanding human aging could be on the horizon, given the pace of recent discoveries. But he also pointed out some obstacles.

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Human longevity: Research on animals and centenarians shows ...

John R. Wilmoth, Director

University of California, Berkeley

Vladimir Shkolnikov, Co-Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements).

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 37 countries or areas:

For more information, please begin by reading an overview of the database. If you have comments or questions, or trouble gaining access to the data, please write to us (hmd@mortality.org).

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Human Mortality Database

Biodemography is a multidisciplinary approach, integrating biological knowledge (studies on human biology and animal models) with demographic research on human longevity and survival. Biodemographic studies are important for understanding the driving forces of the current longevity revolution (dramatic increase in human life expectancy), forecasting the future of human longevity, and identification of new strategies for further increase in healthy and productive life span.

Biodemographic studies found a remarkable similarity in survival dynamics between humans and laboratory animals. Specifically, three general biodemographic laws of survival are found:

The Gompertz-Makeham law states that death rate is a sum of age-independent component (Makeham term) and age-dependent component (Gompertz function), which increases exponentially with age.

The Compensation law of mortality (late-life mortality convergence) states that the relative differences in death rates between different populations of the same biological species are decreasing with age, because the higher initial death rates are compensated by lower pace of their increase with age.

The Late-life mortality deceleration law states that death rates stop to increase exponentially at advanced ages and level-off to the late-life mortality plateau. An immediate consequence from this observation is that there is no fixed upper limit to human longevity there is no special fixed number, which separates possible and impossible values of lifespan. This challenges the common belief[1][2] in existence of a fixed maximal human life span.

Biodemographic studies found that even genetically identical laboratory animals kept in constant environment have very different lengths of life, suggesting a crucial role of chance and early-life developmental noise in longevity determination. This leads to new approaches in understanding causes of exceptional human longevity.

As for the future of human longevity, biodemographic studies found that evolution of human lifespan had two very distinct stages the initial stage of mortality decline at younger ages is now replaced by a new trend of preferential improvement of the oldest-old survival. This phenomenon invalidates methods of longevity forecasting based on extrapolation of long-term historical trends.

A general explanation of these biodemograhic laws of aging and longevity has been suggested based on system reliability theory.

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Biodemography of human longevity - Wikipedia, the free ...

By Richard Halstead Marin Independent Journal

The Buck Institute sits nestled in the hills of Novato, California on Thursday, Mar. 28, 2013. (IJ photo/Frankie Frost)

A new study by scientists at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato suggests that it may be possible to extend life span far longer than previously thought.

Experimenting with nematodes, the researchers combined two techniques that have previously demonstrated effectiveness in increasing the life span of a variety of organisms in the laboratory: yeast, nematodes, flies and rodents. The results, which are reported in the current online edition of "Cell Reports," surprised them.

The worms lived to the human equivalent of 400 to 500 years, about five times longer than the scientists had expected.

"When we got this result, it was kind of a shock," said Pankaj Kapahi, the lead scientist on the study and a Buck faculty member.

Kapahi said in addition to implications for human life extension, the study's results could also lead to new approaches for battling age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Kapahi said the research suggests the possibility of employing combination therapies for aging in much the same way as is done for cancer and HIV.

One of the life extension techniques used in the experiment was the drug rapamycin, which is already licensed for use in humans.

"It was a well-known anti-cancer drug. Later on, it became clear it has life-extension effects," Kapahi said. "It also slows down a number of other age-related diseases."

Scientists discovered rapamycin's life-extension capability while searching for a drug that mimics the effects of caloric restriction, which had previously been identified as a means of extending life in laboratory studies.

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New Buck Institute study extends life span to human equivalent of 400 to 500 years