For some people, nothing should exist outside a state of complete regulation, every choice you could potentially make hemmed in by rules made and enforced by faceless others. It is somewhat strange that people are comforted by regulatory control: even when they obviously have no say in the results of that control, even when the consequences of that control are obviously terrible; even when such control is obviously more along the lines of suppression and destruction. That latter results when habitual and empowered controllers, unable to conceive of any other response to the new, are faced with something they do not understand.

Or perhaps this is all not so strange; many people would - and do - choose suffering over change, the familiar over the new, no matter how terrible the familiar might be at the moment. Human nature is, at heart, terribly flawed in many ways.

Community attitudes to the regulation of life extension:

Technologies purported to extend human life are already being marketed widely, and are being used by community members, despite a lack of evidence on their efficacy or safety: in fact, the use of some putative anti-aging technologies (e.g., human growth hormone) is illegal. Existing regulation is proving to be ineffective, especially in the face of Internet sales.

Further advances in the field of life extension are a distinct possibility, exacerbating the need for a policy response. This paper presents the preliminary results of a study of community attitudes to life extension, with a focus on attitudes to the control and availability of strong life-extending technologies.

Can't be having those advances, now, can we? I'm always deeply suspicious of people waving terms like "society" and "community." Invariably, those in fact mean something along the lines of "we who would like to think of ourselves as elites, but who prefer not to say so quite so openly."

It's rather sad that we live in an era of the downward spiral, right at the time at which there is so much progress in technology and human capabilities to be seized. Ever greater control and abrogation of personal responsibility leads to an irresponsible, demanding, passive-aggressive population, which leads to ever greater centralized control and destruction of freedom. We're overdue a revolution, a sea change in attitudes, or an unpleasant dip once more into comparative poverty of choice, vision and opportunity.

Researcher Chis Patil of Ouroboros has been blogging this year's scientific meeting of the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation, a gathering of scientists involved aging (and longevity) research and other medicine funded by the Foundation. Links and a few highlights:

2007 Hillblom Meeting: Morning session 1:

Getting down to brass tacks and emphasizing the real-world applications of the work, Kenyon described a brave new world in which the 40-year-old men of the future will find themselves unwittingly, but enthusiastically, hitting on 90-year-old hotties in singles bars.

2007 Hillblom meeting: Morning session 2:

Bill Mobley (Stanford) began with the bold claim that all neurodegenerative illnesses are ultimately breakdowns of neural circuitry - if not etiologically, then symptomologically. He went on to summarize and review the body of evidence supporting the view that axonal dysfunction contributes to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) pathology, focusing especially on the idea that decreases in neurotrophic factor signaling and retrograde transport play a causative role in AD.

2007 Hillblom meeting: Afternoon session:

Lithgow begins from a simple premise: Given that genetic manipulations have revealed significant plasticity in the rate of aging, shouldn’t we be able to discover drugs that phenocopy, simulate or even outstrip the effects of longevity-extending mutations? Thus far, early screens for both stress resistance and lifespan extension per se have generated several lead compounds that delay aging in yeast, worms and flies (and in at least one case, both species). Studies from multiple labs are beginning to converge, with the ultimate goal of testing multi-species hits in mouse models of aging and age-related diseases. In closing, Lithgow acknowledged that understanding of the mechanism of action of these compounds is lagging behind their discovery, in part because some of the most promising molecules have mystifyingly large numbers of candidate targets.

Interesting stuff; that last quote is an excellent summation of the metabolic manipulation school of longevity science, the presently dominant view of that part of the aging research mainstream that supports initiatives to extend the healthy human life span.

Patil is off to the Keck Futures Initiative meeting on "The Future of Human Healthspan" next - more of what you get to do when you're one of the scientists actually working on aging and longevity research.

Possibly the most crucial near-term technical hurdle on the way to sky's-the-limit regenerative medicine and organ regrowth is the matter of blood vessels. Unless you have a way of putting the blood vessels where they need to be, at every scale, or convincing blood vessels to grow according to plan, you simply can't engineer significantly sized pieces of tissue.

I noticed an article today that does a good job of illustrating why this is so, whilst loudly declaiming the significance of one particular research achievement:

Imagine being able to grow new tissue in a laboratory from cells that can later be used to repair damaged organs. This possibility is becoming a reality, as Cornell researchers make remarkable strides with the development of an artificial microvascular system.

This technology mimics the vascular system of the human body, carrying oxygen, sugar, proteins and growth factors to cells contained within a scaffold. The system is composed of microchannels embedded in a water-based gel, holding millions of living cells which can be formed to fit desired shapes.

“Whereas most microfabrication is done into silicon or glass, here we are microfabricating into a living tissue to put in these capillaries,” said Prof. Abraham Stroock, chemical and bio-molecular engineering, a co-author of the study, “and we can then use these capillaries as the microvascular system to keep the tissue alive and direct the tissue towards the desired structure and biological function.”

...

“One of the limitations of growing tissue outside the body is that they’re not hooked up to a vascular system that nourishes them in the body,” said Prof. Lawrence Bonassar, biomedical engineering, another co-author of the study. “We can create an artificial vascular system to keep these tissues alive for longer and potentially make larger tissues than can be made with other existing technology.”

...

“One of the main limitations of building tissue like liver or pancreas or kidney is the fact that they are vascularized inside the body,” said Bonassar. “Growing them outside the body or even taking them fully grown from outside the body and inserting them requires some connection to a vascular system. In many ways, this [microvascular system] could potentially be a very enabling technology for those kinds of efforts.”

...

“These microchannels are analogous to capillaries within tissues. Even though this is an improvement, the ultimate goal is to build something that not only has microchannels but where the microchannels can coalesce into a larger microvessel that we can attach to blood vessels already present in the body,” Spector said.

A lot of work is left to be done, but this is only one of a number of competing strategies aimed at solving the same problem. For example, the tissue printing community recently demonstrated a proof of concept that suggests blood vessels of any size can be fabricated as a part of new tissue using rapid prototyping techniques and a little reliance on the innate properties of cells:

As the tissue structure begins to form, the cells go through a natural process called 'sorting,' which is nature's way of determining where specific cells need to be. For example, an artery has three specific types of cells - endothelial cells, smooth muscle cells and fibroblast cells, each type needing to be in a specific location in the artery. As thousands and thousands of cells are added to the bio-paper under controlled conditions, the cells migrate automatically to their specific locations to make the structure form correctly.

Competition and the forging of multiple paths forward are always the most promising of signs.

Methuselah Foundation volunteer Kevin Dewalt has penned a couple of good posts in the past week or two. You should head over and take a look:

Bad Reasons to NOT Cure Aging 1 - Foundation:

Ultimately we will figure out a way to undue this accumulated damage and prevent the diseases that will kill 90% of us. Whether we solve this problem in time to save the lives of our parents, us, our children, or our children’s children depends on how difficult these problems ultimately prove to be and how hard we work to solve them.

So with this foundation, it seems that we really don’t have to continue the debate unless you believe that solving this problem will create other problems that are both (a) Worse and (b) Unsolvable.

Although this reality can seem surprising at first, that’s basically it. If you strip away your emotional reactions to this issue - your cognitive dissonance - you’ll see that this discussions are rather silly. Reversing aging solves a huge, horrible problem, and it makes every sense to pursue it as fast as we can to make sure that we and the people we love will be able to take advantage of it.

Bad Reasons to NOT Cure Aging 2 - Overpopulation:

Ok, reversing aging may cause new problems. We just need to evaluate whether these problems are (1) worse than the horrible death of 100,000 people a day and (2) unsolvable.

I’ve been trained by our education system and media to worry about the dangers of human population explosion. I’ve been told that we will soon have billions more people than the Earth can support. Humanity is an inevitable time-bomb of exploding population that will outstrip our available resources.

Fortunately, like most doomsday predictions, the facts don’t support this conclusion. Human overpopulation may well be a total myth. Consider how we could choose to use the Earth differently, and I think you’ll conclude that how we use the available resources at our disposal is more influential than the total number of people using them.

I am absolutely of the school that overpopulation is a myth, a grave and unfortunately widespread misunderstanding of economic reality. Poverty certainly exists, thanks to human selfishness, bad governance and the inhumanity of man unto man. The Malthusians will call poverty a lack of resources per person, but it is always, always poverty in the midst of potential plenty - ample resources squandered, wasted through inefficiency, or left untapped.

The Immortality Institute, a watering hole for many of the advocates and volunteers of the healthy life extension community, hosts a regular Sunday evening chat at 6:30 PM central time US. This coming Sunday November 11th the chat will be with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey:

I am happy to announce that the Immortality Institute Sunday evening chat has returned. The regularly scheduled time for the chat is 6:30 p.m. central time U.S. You can log into the Imminst chatroom by following the instructions found here:

http://www.imminst.org/chat/

This week, Sunday November 11th, the Institute proudly welcomes [biomedical gerontologist] and co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation - Aubrey De Grey.

Stop by, relax, and talk SENS!

It's a good opportunity to ask those questions about the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - and the plausible path to greatly extended healthy longevity - that you've been saving up for just such an occasion.