Group items tagged

If development of metabolic manipulation therapies to slow aging continues to dominate, progress towards enhanced longevity will be much slower, and the resulting therapies will be of no use to those already aged.

From what I've seen, the Millards have money, influence, and the intelligence to use it well

The Millard Foundation has been moving towards earnest funding of longevity science over the past few years: there have been initial donations, conference attendances, meetings with movers and shakers. All the normal activities and preparation by people who take investing very seriously.

Kevin Perrott

Kevin Perrott, Executive Director of the Mprize

was invited to participate in the efforts of the Millard Foundation in developing a strategy to serve the mission. Unsurprisingly, Aubrey is a consultant on the project and will play an increasingly important role as we move forward - the ideas of SENS are part of the project's DNA

This might as well be language lifted from a mythical government release on the Full Employment Act for Gerontologists. It's all so grey and tired - rescue the scientists, pay the scientists, help the scientists. Note the utter absence of any sort of discussion of goals or results. What are these scientists actually doing? What is the value of it? Where are they going? When will they get there? What does it mean to me?

Another thought: the languishing of aging science - in comparison to, say, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering or cancer research - makes $2.8 million a big deal. $10 million from the Glenn Foundation to establish the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biological Mechanisms of Aging was a big splash in the pond. With those numbers for comparison, note that the Methuselah Foundation has $4.8 million pledged to Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) research.

'Curing aging is not an endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly. Instead, both men say, they are working to ameliorate the diseases of aging." For so long as unelected government employees can declare, with no accountability and full force of law, what medicine is permitted and what is not, there will be no direct venture funded efforts to cure aging - or even to take the first steps by aiming to repair specific, identified age-related damage in order to intervene in the aging process. There is no lack of companies, research groups and billions of dollars ready to be directed to that end, as any brief survey of the biotechnology marketplace will show you - but the ignorant few who write policy continue to bury all that potential.