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Category: life extension

An interview from the recent Ending Aging conference in Berlin with Keith Comito which we did in collaboration with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, which saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

As we had arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers. Anna has also published an article based on this and other interviews taken during the conference which you can find here.

During the conference, Anna and Elena interviewed LEAF president Keith Comito about crowdfunding and the challenges we face as full-time advocates in the field. Anna (A), Keith (K), Elena Milova (E), and Steve Hill (S) were all present and can be identified by the corresponding letters in the dialogue below.

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Scientists at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine have conducted experiments and found that stem cell implants in the brains of mice can stop aging and help the treated animals remain fitter for longer.

What part of the brain controls aging?

The experiments have helped researchers identify that a part of the brain called the hypothalamus is intimately involved in the aging process. The investigators hope to launch trials in humans to see whether similar treatments with neural stem cells can prolong the life of treated individuals.

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Much mystery surrounds the physiological processes by which humans age, but scientists are learning more all the time. With this knowledge come new possibilities around how we can not only slow them down, but possibly even reverse them. A new breakthrough at the University of Colorado is the latest advance in the area, demonstrating how a chemically altered nutritional supplement may well reverse aging of the blood vessels, in turn giving cardiovascular health a vital boost.

The human body is pretty good at fending off oxidative stress when we’re young, protecting molecules from critical damage caused by rogue molecules known as free radicals. These are molecules that have found themselves with at least one unpaired electron, so they set off in search of a match, often robbing another molecule of theirs and setting off a chain reaction of irreversible molecular damage.

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An interview from the recent Ending Aging conference in Berlin with professor Brian Kennedy which we did in collaboration with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, which saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

LEAF arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, so it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers. Anna has also published an article based on this and other interviews taken during the conference which you can find here.

Today, we have an interview that Anna did with professor Brian Kennedy during the conference. Professor Kennedy is an important figure in the aging research field, and he studies multiple mechanisms known to influence lifespan, such as sirtuins and the TOR pathway.

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Some time ago, we discussed the matter of beauty in the context of life extension; in particular, we tried to dispel the belief that the motivation behind life extension might be simply vanity. The article argued that there is nothing wrong with wanting to preserve youthful looks and attempted to explain the evolutionary reasons for our perception of beauty, but it did not discuss a perhaps even more important fact: aesthetics are not the main problem of elderly looks. The main problem, as it always is with age-related decay, is a decline in health and functionality.

What do elderly people look like?

If I ask you to imagine an old person, you’re likely to imagine somebody with grey hair, slack, wrinkled skin, and weak and flaccid muscles. While these features may vary from person to person, this is an accurate enough description of anyone past the age of 70, and it generally gets worse and worse as aging progresses. Exercise might help improve your physical condition, and perhaps a good facial cream might make you look slightly younger than your chronological age, but, after a certain point, the signs of age-related decay are unmistakable and irreversible.

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Today, we have a guest article from Dr. Marion Tible, a scientist, and author over at the aging research-focused blog Long Long Life. What follows is an introduction to the senescent cell-clearing therapies known as senolytics, these therapies are poised to enter human trials and if successful could revolutionize how we treat age-related diseases.

What are senolytics?

Discovered in 2015 by a team from Mayo Clinic and the Scripps Research Institute in the United States, senolytics are a growing trend in the anti-aging community. They are very promising drugs in the fight against cellular senescence, a hallmark of aging.

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During the recent Undoing Aging conference in Berlin, we worked with Anna Dobryukha from Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses. We collaborated on a series of interviews, including this one with Dr. Jonathan Clark from the Babraham Institute.

The Undoing Aging conference, a collaboration between the SENS Research Foundation and Michael Greve’s Forever Healthy Foundation, took place on March 15–17 in Berlin, and it saw many researchers, advocates, investors, and other important members of the longevity community gather together to learn about the latest progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

LEAF arranged a travel grant for Anna Dobryukha, one of the best Russian journalists writing about aging, longevity, and rejuvenation research, to join us, so it made sense to collaborate with her on the most interesting interviews. Anna works for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the largest Russian publishing houses, which has a newspaper, a radio station, and a website with over 40 million readers.

During the conference, we had the opportunity to interview Dr. Jonathan Clark, who has recently been focusing on skin aging and the interactions of collagen in this process. He is the head of the biological chemistry department at the Babraham Institute, where his group carries out aging research. Dr. Clark has some interesting research which he presented at the conference but which has yet to be published, this means that he could not tell us everything he had discovered in this interview, but don’t worry, we have agreed a follow-up interview with him once his data is published.

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We found that Caloric Restricción CR and Genetic manipulations.

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“Old age isn’t a battle,” she says, quoting Philip Roth, “old age is a massacre.” In the past few years, she has given up on screenings and scans. Not that she is lazy or suicidal. But at 76, she considers herself old enough to die. All the self-help books aimed at her age group tell her otherwise; they talk of “active ageing”, “productive ageing”, “anti-ageing”, even “reverse-ageing”, with a long life promised to anyone who makes an effort, regardless of factors such as genetics or poverty. But to her, ageing is “an accumulation of disabilities”, which no amount of physical activity or rigorous self-denial can prevent. If she has symptoms, she’ll have them investigated. But when a doctor tells her there could be an undetected problem of some kind, she won’t play along.

A great iconoclast has written a polemic about ageing that sends up New Age platitudes and is full of scepticism of the wellness industry.

Blake Morrison

Thu 12 Apr 2018 02.30 EDT Last modified on Fri 13 Apr 2018 19.10 EDT.

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