Some interesting material from a scientific study of attitudes to healthy life extension and enhanced longevity is posted to Cryonet:

The age of the respondent was related to life-extension attitudes [with] the older respondents tilting in the pro-longevity direction.

Pro-longevity attitudes were strongest in the separated-divorced group and weakest in the single group.

From a utilitarian, economic action viewpoint, that is much as I would expect. I think there's ample circumstantial evidence to suspect that those who claim to be fine with aging and dying will mostly change their minds when they get there. The unpleasant future is all to easily hand-waved away for another day - until that day finally comes home to roost.

The study presented subjects with a range of positive and negative viewpoints on healthy life extension. The viewpoints vary widely in validity, with those on the economic side of the house being particulary bad, but I don't think that's too important when it comes to drawing conclusions from the reactions of study participants:

I. Personal Emotional Rejection (PER) reflects a harsh rejection of life extension with endorsement of items focused on pointlessness and waste, and contrary-to-nature aspects of extending life span. Other items reflect the personal cost of life extension (e.g., delaying commitments or prolonging goals, inducing boredom).

II. Utopian Vision (UV) points to the many advantages of life extension for older people and for society at large.

III. Social Economic Burden (SEB) highlights the economic burdens on the individual and the health-care system flowing from life extension. The highest loading items stress preference for health over longer life and a fear of financial dependency for the individual, and exhaustion of resources for the society.

Age was significant for each of the factors. ... The older the adult, the more likely is he or she to reject the harsh negativity toward life extension reflected by the items loading on factor I. Correspondingly, chronological age is positively associated with endorsement of items that promise a Utopian future with life extension (Factor II). Finally, the outcome for Factor III is somewhat counterintuitive as we observe that older adults are significantly more disposed to endorse anti-longevity items. These items concern the added costs of health-care and social welfare and hence raise the possibility of exhaustion of financial resources.

That last point only reinforces my conviction that economic ignorance is one of the greatest threats to the future of healthy life extension (and indeed to all meaningful advancements in technology). It is a strange world when so many believe that more healthy people working away to produce value and trade with one another will somehow make us all poorer:

• Jealousy, Fear, Envy and Economic Ignorance - Powerful Poisons
• If We Fail, It Will Be From Ignorance
• Death (For Everyone) Before Inequality (For Anyone)

The points that found the most favor in the study might lead us to a little more optimism, however:

Of the positive survey items, these were the most stable across the studies:

Longevity improving life more time for goals
Extending life giving respect to old age
Longevity research as duty to future generations
Long Term Relationship (LTR) quality will increase with longevity
Society will benefit from greater wisdom
Increase budget for this research

Other positive items from the LEQ:

Favor longevity research even if product unaffordable
Extend life to have more leisure time
Estimate satisfaction greater at age 110 than 75
Families benefit from cross-generation interaction

I'm sure you'll recognize a number of these in past material produced by longevity advocates, myself included. Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey in particular has argued for duty to those yet to live - in his view, who are we to decide that our grandchildren's lives must be as short as our own? By failing to heed the moral imperative to longevity research, we condemn future generations to have no choice in their own longevity.

Far too much energy is spent on looking at what presently exists, our present state of being in ever greater detail and fine degree of measurement, when rampant change is the nature of the day. Why are people willing to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy examining and debating which narrowly separated socio-economic groupings of humanity live a year more in health here or year less in health there? This is an age of foaming scientific revolution and rapid progress in biotechnology and medical science, in which all these factors are changing very rapidly. Time spent carefully drawing lines between groups of people - that will be erased almost immediately with the speed of change these days - is time not spent helping to make lives better.

It seems evident to me that I should spend far more effort in relation to progress in the fields that will add decades to healthy life spans in due course, swamping all minor variables of the human condition. Those small differences are insignificant in that context - and will become increasingly so as success in medical research continues.

So why is it that most people care so much more about the shiny, distracting trinkets of the now, a few years more or a few years less than someone else, in comparison to the far more important issue of the desired future and how to get there? I wonder. I seem to recall saying much the same thing in connection with research into telomere length and socio-economic status back in 2006:

[We should] recognize that time is far better spent acknowledging that we're all suffering from a condition that will deliver suffering, pain and death - and then doing something about it rather than simply observing it.

We are all doomed unless we dig ourselves out of the hole of aging via the future of medical technology. What does it matter that some of us are a handful of percentage points more or less doomed than others, largely through our own actions in exercise, diet and other controllable factors? It's still doom, and we'll all be just as rescued by technologies capable of repairing the damage that is aging.

My thinking was steered this way once more by a brace of recent articles on education level and longevity - which is just another correlation in the general pattern of wealth, use of medical resources, good health practices, and all that other fun stuff that fits in with "socio-economic status." I don't see more in the way of separating causation from correlation this time around - and the press is generally much more interested in playing the game called "who has more" in any case. Not a forward-looking group, mainstream journalists, nor much acquainted with context in terms of past and future. They are the voice of the shiny trinkets of the now. See what you think:

Harvard Researcher: Education Key to Longevity

"We looked at life expectancy at age 25," Meara says.

"How many additional years can you expect to live if you arrive at age 25 and your education has stopped at high school, or sooner? Versus how many years, can you expect to live if you've reached aged 25 and you've gone on to at least some college…"

Meara says they found that in 1990, a 25-year-old who only had some secondary school could expect to live for a total of 75 years. In 2000, a 25 year old with some secondary education could also expect to live to the age of 75.

In contrast, for a better educated 25-year-old, they could expect to live to the age of 80 in 1990. Someone with a similar education level in the year 2000, could expect to live to be more than 81 years, 81.6 years to be exact.

"If you look in recent decades, you will find that life expectancy has been increasing, which is good, but when you split this out by better-educated groups, the life expectancy gained is really occurring much more so in the better-educated groups," said lead researcher Ellen Meara, an assistant professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School.

The answer may lie with tobacco. About one-fifth of the difference in mortality between the groups can be accounted for by smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer and emphysema, Meara said.

A large chunk of the rest of the difference is likely related to exercise habits and excess body fat - obesity is at least as damaging to healthy longevity as smoking, and possibly more so when combined with lack of exercise. We can also throw in psychological stress for consideration; plausible evidence suggests that chronic stress damages biochemistry into more rapid aging over the years.

I could go on - there are all sorts of ways in which we can choose to damage ourselves, or let damage continue at a greater rate due to circumstances we can control. All of this is irrelevant and unimportant, however, when compared to the speed with which medical technologies for the repair of aging are developed. If we can make that happen rapidly enough, we're all rescued. If not, we're all doomed.

I'm pleased to note that the Immortality Institute folk will be offering incentive prizes to participants in the Longevity Meme Folding@Home team on a quarterly basis going forward:

The Longevity Meme has teamed up with the Immortality Institute to offer a quarterly prize to people who contribute to the Stanford Folding@home distributing computing project - aimed at curing disease through understanding the basics of protein folding.

...

Winners will be determined by how many points are accumulated over the course of three months as reported at the Stanford Folding@home statistics site. The first quarter of competition begins at 12:00 a.m. Eastern daylight time (U.S.) April 2nd and ends at 12:00 midnight, Eastern daylight time, on June 30th.

The Longevity Meme team has grown and performed very well in the years since its formation. It takes organization and active recruitment to break into the top 200 ranked teams; many of the Immortality Institute regulars have stepped up to provide that organization. Thank you all for helping to make the team a continuing success.

Futures are built, one brick at a time, on the self-organizing collaboration of many interested people. Those collaborative communities are built of many, many overlapping modest goals and projects, just like this one. I hope you'll consider joining in, contributing to the Folding@Home project, and through this effort, learning more about the greater goals of longevity science, curing age-related disease, and ultimately repairing the damage of aging.

Head on over to the Immortality Institute to learn how to register for the prize program or discuss Folding@Home in the team thread.

I'm pleased to note that the Immortality Institute folk will be offering incentive prizes to participants in the Longevity Meme Folding@Home team on a quarterly basis going forward:

The Longevity Meme has teamed up with the Immortality Institute to offer a quarterly prize to people who contribute to the Stanford Folding@home distributing computing project - aimed at curing disease through understanding the basics of protein folding.

...

Winners will be determined by how many points are accumulated over the course of three months as reported at the Stanford Folding@home statistics site. The first quarter of competition begins at 12:00 a.m. Eastern daylight time (U.S.) April 2nd and ends at 12:00 midnight, Eastern daylight time, on June 30th.

The Longevity Meme team has grown and performed very well in the years since its formation. It takes organization and active recruitment to break into the top 200 ranked teams; many of the Immortality Institute regulars have stepped up to provide that organization. Thank you all for helping to make the team a continuing success.

Futures are built, one brick at a time, on the self-organizing collaboration of many interested people. Those collaborative communities are built of many, many overlapping modest goals and projects, just like this one. I hope you'll consider joining in, contributing to the Folding@Home project, and through this effort, learning more about the greater goals of longevity science, curing age-related disease, and ultimately repairing the damage of aging.

Head on over to the Immortality Institute to learn how to register for the prize program or discuss Folding@Home in the team thread.

Some research groups are making the case that all roads lead to autophagy, the process of tearing down and replacing worn cellular components, when it comes to enhancing healthy longevity through adjustments to metabolism. Examples include calorie restriction (CR) - which you can manage all by yourself today - or drugs that mimic some of the effects of CR on regulatory mechanisms in our biochemistry, which you're going to have to wait a little longer for. But it's all down to increased autophagy, they say:

The better known life extension mechanisms in lesser animals are all driven by changes in autophagy - or so say the autophagy specialists. It's true that the various hyperspecialized communities of modern biology are overly cloistered and ignorant of one another's research, but the autophagy researchers are assembling compelling evidence for this position: "Here we show that mutational inactivation of autophagy genes, which are involved in the degradation of aberrant, damaged cytoplasmic constituents accumulating in all aging cells, accelerates the rate at which the tissues age in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. According to our results Drosophila flies deficient in autophagy are also short-lived. We further demonstrate that reduced activity of autophagy genes suppresses life span extension in mutant nematodes with inherent dietary restriction, aberrant insulin/IGF-1 or TOR signaling, and lowered mitochondrial respiration. These findings suggest that the autophagy gene cascade functions downstream of and is inhibited by different longevity pathways in C. elegans, therefore, their effects converge on autophagy genes to slow down aging and lengthen life span. Thus, autophagy may act as a central regulatory mechanism of animal aging.

Which is interesting, because other research groups are fairly sure that the enhanced longevity provided by these sorts of metabolic adjustment is accomplished through lowered levels of chronic inflammation and free radical generation:

This review focuses on the emerging evidence that attenuation of the production of reactive oxygen species and inhibition of inflammatory pathways play a central role in the antiaging cardiovascular effects of caloric restriction.

The evidence on both sides is compelling, but it can't be both all autophagy and all inflammation and free radical reduction, and it can't be just one or the other. Conflicting evidence and theories with good experimental backing on all sides are usually a good sign that there is something important left to be discovered, some shift in the overall picture of the field. For example, a comprehensively described link between autophagy, inflammatory processes and free radical generation. For now we're still missing a unifying view of the many known metabolic and genetic changes that increase longevity in mammals - how do they work?