Do you want to live forever?

Who wants to live forever? Do you? If people are honest with themselves, most people would answer "yes" to my question. Yet, since time immemorial this wish has co-existed with its hopelessness. To live forever, has been, for all this time, an absolute impossibility. Indeed, for most of the history of Mankind, to live to adulthood was unlikely enough, since most didn't achieve it. So, why do I ask this question, then? I do so, because we live in a time of change...a time in which it may soon, indeed, be possible to live forever.



At this point, I may have lost half of my readers. Well, to the half that remains, I would like to say this: thank you for being open-minded enough to read this far.



Now, as long term readers of my blog will know, I never broach a topic without much thought upon it and justification for my views. Today is no exception. You see what makes living forever less of an impossibility these days is the considerable progress made in understanding aging, the considerable proofs that it is possible to extend life (in a huge range of laboratory animals) and the nearness of drugs to achieve just that. Something else has changed too, in some quarters of the anti-aging world: the philosophy of how to approach the issue of preventing aging, debility and death. One such change is the proposals of Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University scientist, formerly a computer scientist, latterly a self-taught biologist with a PhD to prove it. Aubrey de Grey is, by the way, a most appropriate name, I think, for a man concerned almost solely with the prevention of aging! How serendipitous to find himself so named and so preoccupied! Anyway, Aubrey de Grey has proposed an approach to end the tyranny of aging and death. He calls this, quite attractively, SENS, (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). What this means is, quite simply, the ways and means to stop you getting old...ever. His strategy is revolutionary in that it doesn't seek to understand aging, in the way almost all gerontological scientists are trying to do. No. He seeks, instead, to REPAIR THE DAMAGE done by aging. His contention is that it is much easier to repair the effects of aging, than to understand the underlying causes of aging and its mechanisms so as to be able to intervene to stop them in the first place. That problem, he admits, is far harder. By repairing the damage, rather than preventing it in the first place, Aubrey de Grey envisages a world in which periodic treatments would prevent people from getting old. They would, potentially, live not for seventy or eighty years, but for thousands of years. That is right, we could live for millenia. Some people indeed would never die. (There is a non-zero change of someone literally living forever if the safety of the environment increases and risk of death lowers over time, according to Aubrey de Grey's work).



Unfortunately, for us all, Aubrey de Grey's work needs funding. The SENS initiative is fairly radical and, in this world, radical ideas are slow to attract the funds they need, since most funding bodies prefer near term, safer options. However, there is something you can do, today to help. There is a competition running between SENS and a rival. They are in competition to see who can secure the most comments on a site. The winner receives $5,000 US dollars as a prize which will be used for research. The money doesn't sound like much...but it could be enough for a researcher to try out an idea and to put one more brick in the edifice that is SENS. A step forward will have been made - so it is worth it. The other side of it is that if enough people post comments in support of SENS (please try to think of something interesting to say...but it is OK if you don't...the comment itself is helpful), then other funding bodies may see that the cause is popular and come forward to support it.



To help research into stopping aging and help us all live longer, all you have to do is to go to this link and either sign in to the site and then comment - or, sign in to your GOOGLE account (the one that comes with GMAIL) and then register a comment. The latter is probably easier for many people.



http://www.facebook.com/l/65f50;3banana.com/m/0JQ/-kDPA_iEv7i



Please help SENS win this competition. You never know, it might be the step that prevents your own aging and gives you a much longer life...



Ask your friends to sign in and comment, too. Why not post the initiative on your facebook pages and get other people to sign in, too and comment. Let them all understand that it is a way to raise money for anti-aging research. It costs them nothing...but could benefit everyone.



Please let me know in the comments below, if you have made the effort to comment at SENS (and perhaps you could copy your comment below, to let me know how it is going). It would help me to know if this kind of initiative is of interest to my readers, since there are other things I could write about this area, in future, if people like it.



Thanks, in advance, for your help in supporting SENS rejuvenation research.


P.S: There is a time limit to the competition and I don't know when that is...so hurry. If I have posted too late...sorry, but I tried. Thanks.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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