Today was the first day of the science part of the M Foundation’s aging conference at UCLA. There were many impressive speakers and academics, but the most impressive was Zheng Cui from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has discovered that white blood cells in cancer resistant mice can be used to [...]

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The Methuselah Foundation is hosting a conference on aging in LA this weekend. Most of it is scientific, but they will have one small session on policy issues. I’ll be there, and will report back on developments as they happen.

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Personalized medicine is touted as the wave of the future, but recent government action points to problems for Americans looking to join the health revolution. Last week, California’s Department of Public Health issued cease-and-desist letters to 13 genetic testing startups, threatening to deny service to consumers curious about their DNA.
“Any laboratory offering genetic tests to [...]

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This is a great article by Gordy Slack. He argues that we shouldn’t be so quick to write off creationists, as they do make some good points.

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Dr. Dean Ornish, head of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, CA, and his team showed that changing diet and exercise led to changes in what genes were switched on or off. Reuters reports that “the activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer [...]

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In case you haven’t noticed, life expectancy is growing. According to the US National Center for Health Statistics, “Life expectancy at birth hit a new record high in 2006 of 78.1 years, a 0.3 increase from 2005.” Here is their press release. AP also did a story on it, which can be found [...]

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The United States Federal Trade Commission recently began a formal antitrust investigation into Intel’s business practices. This action is not simply a problem for Intel, but should serve as a wake-up call for the entire technology industry and anyone who values innovation.
Some of the drivers behind the Intel inquiry are complaints by its competitor, Advanced [...]

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From Resveratrol Partners’ press release:
“Once mega-doses of resveratrol (more than 500 mg) began to be employed, side effects like anemia, Achilles heel tendonitis, anxiety reactions, numbness in the fingers, began to be reported,” says Bill Sardi, spokesperson for Longevinex® (long-jev-in-ex), a leading brand resveratrol dietary supplement. “This is probably because resveratrol is a copper chelator [...]

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This looks like it would have been a cool event. According to this report, “The discussion of aging was a closing event of the first World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science for the public that brought together researchers ranging from biologists to quantum physicists. Participants included Nobel laureates, business leaders and philosophers.”

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This op-ed by Brian Greene makes the eloquent case that science is more than just details, facts, and figures. He says that it also helps explain why we are here, why the sky is blue, and other important questions perennially asked by humankind. Here’s a paragraph that I found relevant to what I’m [...]

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The WSJ today reported that “New genetic research emerging from a major cancer meeting [annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology] could help doctors better identify the drugs most likely to work in their patients — but sharply reduce the market for certain blockbuster cancer drugs.”
Interesting that they are predicting more drug products [...]

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A brain-computer interface was implanted in a Japanese man’s motor cortex. Signals that would have made his own arms and legs move instead went to the avatar’s, making it move. Here’s the video and the story.

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CMU researchers may be creating technology that speeds up the progress of medical advances that can help us live longer. From Bio IT world:
“The researchers published their findings in a paper last month (“Graphical Models for Structured Classification, with an Application to Interpreting Images of Protein Subcellular Location Patterns,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, [...]

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This should be an interesting conference. The invite says:
“At Aging 2008 you will engage with top scientists and advocates as they present their findings and advice, and learn what you can do to help accelerate progress towards a cure for the disease and suffering of aging.”

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