Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s — these are all diseases of aging, yet some people are willing to argue that aging is a good thing. That’s the question at hand at this Oxford University Scientific Society Debate between SENS Foundation Chief Science Officer Dr. Aubrey de Grey and neuroscientist Prof. Colin Blakemore. It happens live in the UK at 11am PST and I’m told the video will be online soon after. I’ll link to it when it is available.

Here’s a fun app from my friends over at 100Plus, the company (I’m an advisor). They are releasing this app at SXSW, but you can try it out even if you’re not attending.

Here’s a great article by Forbes columnist Bruno Aziza on big data and staying healthy. It also mentions 100Plus, a cool new company started by Chris Hogg that focuses on predicting your health. If you’re an engineer, designer, data hacker or communicator who is super-interested in these issues, the company is hiring. Check it out!

Here’s my latest Big Think interview — this time on longevity and the family.

From the transcript: “When we can live longer and healthier lives, there’s the question of what happens to many different areas of our lives. The family is one that’s super important. What happened the last time we doubled human life expectancy? Human life expectancy in 1850 in the United States was 43 years. Today it’s around 80 years. We’ve roughly doubled it already. And so the question is, is well what happened to family life during that time?”

The DOD is funding a lot of great work in regenerative medicine. Here’s yet another example developed at the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center. Thanks, DOD (and the folks over at DARPA).

Here’s a great article from PandoDaily discussing what gene sequencing companies like Halcyon might do now that another company (Oxford Nanopore) has managed to do cheap, fast, sequencing first. Halcyon board member Elon Musk has this to say:

Halcyon has a lot of hardcore technology and awesome engineers. No one has or is about to jump ship. Halcyon is one of the few companies where I’m an investor vs being part of the founding team, but I’m nonetheless committed to supporting them for years to come.

If this other tech really works and can do perfect DNA reading, including knowing which genes are expressed, then Halcyon will shift its focus to writing genes.

Below is the video and here you will find the article that goes along with it. Jeff Glor, the correspondent who interviewed me, Peter Thiel, and Cynthia Kenyon, was super-smart and did a great job.

Here’s a link to an op-ed I wrote for a London-based financial newspaper on longevity and economics.

I was interviewed about 100 Plus by Dr. Michael Roizen today. He is co-author of the book, You The Owner’s Manual (with Dr. Oz). Dr. Roizen knows his stuff, making the interview really enjoyable since all the questions were super-relevant. I believe the podcast will be up soon at this link.

A 30-year old man in Baltimore had his cancerous trachea taken out and replaced with one grown for him in the lab. Now, he has a second chance at life and his 4-year-old daughter will have her father around. Scientists like Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, director of the Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, are true heroes.

Here’s the full story in the New York Times.

Happy New year! In case you missed it, John Stossel hosted a fun series right before Christmas called “what a wonderful world” where he featured various authors and scientists, including me. Here’s a link to the video:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/index.html#/v/1343254393001/do-you-want-to-live-to-be-200/?playlist_id=87530

Here’s the entire segment which also features Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Dr. Bill Andrews. (100 Plus bit is at the 2:18 mark)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From the NYT:

Medical researchers in Britain have successfully treated six patients suffering from the blood-clotting disease known as hemophilia B by injecting them with the correct form of a defective gene, a landmark achievement in the troubled field of gene therapy.

It’s worth pointing out that gene therapy hasn’t been “troubled” in the last few years, and instead, there have been some rather amazing successes. Some I detail in my book, 100 Plus, and here’s an example that was also covered by the NYT.

Donate to the The Methuselah Generation documentary and get a signed copy of my book.

Vivek Wadhwa, who has just joined us at Singularity University, wrote this article for the Washington Post on hacking DNA. Much of his argument echos what I say in 100 Plus: “Just as the personal computer revolution brought information technology from corporate data centers to the masses, the biology revolution is personalizing science”

Here’s a link to my recent interview with ‘Big Think’ where I mentioned Timothy Brown, the only man who has ever been cured of AIDS.

This is an interesting article from The Scientist. Here’s an excerpt:

According to economists Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg, young scientists making groundbreaking contributions to their fields are becoming an endangered breed. In a study published November 7th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that the chances a Nobel Prize winner at the turn of the 21st century produced their winning work by the age 30 or even 40 is close to zero.

Their analysis of 525 Nobel Prize winners (182 in physics, 153 in chemistry, and 190 in medicine) between 1900 and 2008, revealed that while the mean age at which they did their Nobel-prize winning work was around 37 for the three fields in the early 20th century, they are now around 50, 46, and 45 for Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, respectively.

This is the latest in a series of studies to show that aging can be manipulated. If scientists were able to do for humans what these Mayo Clinic researchers did for mice, many more people would be in much better health at older ages. Now, why isn’t everyone who cares about the cost of health care rallying for more work in this area?

Here’s a Wired report on the work as well as one by the Economist.

From “What Happens When the Average Lifespan Hits 100?” by Megan Erickson:

“Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it,” said W. Somerset Maughm. Which is, of course, the way most of us would prefer it.

For all our willingness to play with fire, the human species has quite a flair for not getting burned. The same combination of irrationality and ingenuity that we bring to finding new ways to fight each other also informs our quest for eternal life. We don’t just want to survive. We want to be immortal. We want to defy illness, build utopia, and track down the fountain of youth. We may soon get our wish, says Sonia Arrison, a writer and futurist, thanks to the “coming longevity revolution.”

Here is my review of the new Justin Timberlake longevity-themed movie for Slate Magazine. This Hollywood-created world gets everything wrong about what life in a longer-lived society would look like. While its dystopian nature was disappointing, it was still an entertaining flick. Now, the challenge is for someone to write an exciting movie closer to reality!