24 replies to this topic

[reason]

Looks like Aubrey de Grey managed to wrangle a webcast at SAGE Crossroads:

http://www.sagecross...s.com/index.cfm

Of course, their web master runs on slow time, so no sign of it other than the front page...

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[Bruce Klein]

Yes.. I heard that listening to one of the IABG conference presentations that Aubrey would be joining SAGE to debate Life Extension.. the IABG presentation was Arthur Caplan on which you can also hear Kevin Perrott asking him a question.. listen here

---

ah, here we go...

How Soon will we be Able to Control Aging?
November 5, 2003 11am

Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge vs. Richard Sprott, Ellison Medical Foundation

Moderator: Morton Kondracke

While headlines blast announcements of discoveries that delay the aging process, how soon can we expect these discoveries to go from the lab to our medicine cabinets? Find out whether there is hope or just hype that we will be able to significantly increase our life spans in the next century.

Join us at AAAS Auditorium, 1200 New York Avenue, Washington, DC or online at www.SAGECrossroads.net

Ref: http://www.sagecross...sts_preview.cfm

---

http://www.ellison-m..._bio.jsp?pid=72

Richard L. Sprott, Ph.D.
Richard Sprott began his undergraduate studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He completed them at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning a B.A. with honors in Psychology.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Behavior Genetics) at U.N.C. he went on to a post-doctoral fellowship in Behavior Genetics at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Following two years of teaching at Oakland University, Dr. Sprott returned to The Jackson Laboratory where he conducted a research program on single gene influences on behavior and the interaction of aging variables with those genes.


VS





Aubrey de Grey - Aubrey's ImmInst Interview and Chat

[DJS]

That's interesting, Mort of the BeltWay Boys will be moderating. I think I saw another video clip of him moderating another conference. I find Mort to be an interesting person because I know that he is a (moderate) conservative and some what religious, yet at the same time he has a wife who suffers from (I believe) Parkinsons. As a result he has a vested interested in the advancement of medical science and has been more than a little critical of the current Administration's stance towards stem cell research. Basically, I see him as a free thinker and I like to hear his take on things because it gives me a pretty good idea of what people with "middle of the road" religious belief (who are not ideologs) will find acceptable.

[Bruce Klein]

yeh, you're right: he's written about her..

Saving Milly: Love, Politics and Parkinson's Disease
Morton Kondracke,


Kondracke chronicled his wife Milly's struggle with Parkinson’s disease in his 2001 book entitled Saving Milly. Personally and professionally dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson's disease, he is a member of both the Parkinson's Action Network and the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.

[DJS]

Holy cow, what a wierd husband wife combination -- (Mort+Milly) [:o]

[Bruce Klein]

heh.. remember mork and mindy..

[Utnapishtim]

How Soon will we be Able to Control Aging?
November 5, 2003 11am

Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge vs. Richard Sprott, Ellison Medical Foundation

Moderator: Morton Kondracke

While headlines blast announcements of discoveries that delay the aging process, how soon can we expect these discoveries to go from the lab to our medicine cabinets? Find out whether there is hope or just hype that we will be able to significantly increase our life spans in the next century.

Join us at AAAS Auditorium, 1200 New York Avenue, Washington, DC or online at http://www.SAGECrossroads.net

..................................................

This is a discussion I am definitely excited about and is in my opinion long overdue. Too many of these discussions in the past have been about ethical handwringing. I really hope that they will stick to discussign the practical/technical obstacles rather than becoming another philosophy fest.

[Bruce Klein]

I'm also looking forward to this one.. Gustavo, an ImmInst member may be able to attend as he lives in DC.

[Da55id]

I will be going to this one as well.

[Bruce Klein]

Nice... please do let us know your thoughts when you return.

[kevin]

Thanks for the post Ut..

If Aubrey's laserlike focus at the IABG was any indication.. I'm sure we will see him sticking fairly closely to the issue of the responsibility of the current researchers who state privately that conquering aging is possible and even likely if everyone gets off their BUTTS!

I would dearly love to be there.. but can't get to every 'dog and pony show' as my dear ol' dad would say.. I hope we can get some posts from those who are able to attend..

[Bruce Klein]

I've merged these two topics (one from Utn. and other from Reason) and have moved here to Announcements.

[Da55id]

It looks to me as though this debate will be webcast from the Sage site. I'm going to try to get some broadcast/radio coverage going from this end. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What can we do to drum up interest and "listeners" to the webcast?

[Bruce Klein]

I'll post something to our homepage and send out info in the next ImmInst newsletter...

[kevin]

BJ... maybe an e-mail to the boys at betterhumans as well as the WTA might be something else to promote the webcast?

[Bruce Klein]

looks like simon (betterhumans) already has it in their calendar.. and yeh.. we could post this to the WTA talk list and to Extropy chat list..

[Da55id]

I'll also shoot it to the LEF push weekly email editor

[reason]

We should bug Simon anyway, see if they can give it a more prominent box on the Betterhumans front page for a few days.

Reason
Founder, Longevity Meme
reason@longevitymeme.org
http://www.longevitymeme.org

[Bruce Klein]

Dave, great question you asked about the War on aging.

I was very impressed, as always, with Aubrey's calm under pressure.

Well worth the watch.. quick link here.

[Da55id]

Thanks - FYI, We've secured the URL's "WarOnAging.com and WarOnAging.org"

I particularly happy that we are still getting significant contributions and every day we have more and more websites linking to us in more and more permanent ways. So, here and now we'll all be able to say that we were there when the first shots were fired in this War on Aging! Much much more to come...

Dave

[randolfe]

Don't be taken in by the name "American Association for the Advancement of Science". I excitedly attended one of their forums, on cloning in 1997, expecting some sort of intelligent and open discussion.
I ended up hearing everyone on stage agreeing with one another about how dreadful and immoral cloning human beings would be. The only dissenting volice on stage was an ethicist from the AMA who told the other members that philosophically speaking, the argument that it would be better not to be born at all than to be born through cloning "simply didn't hold water". The audience was filled with establishment types, ethicists from Catholic Universities, etc.
I am sure that a Leon Kass mentality will be much in evidence when this group tackles physical immortality.

[Bruce Klein]

randolfe..

I agree. Sprott epitomizes this entrenched mindset.

Welcome to ImmInst.

[Jay the Avenger]

I have just read the transcript of the debate. This is my overall impression:

Where Aubrey has a very solid plan, Sprott doesn't really seem to understand what is going on.

Sprott has mentioned that people that are 80 years of age, will not want to add 50 more years of decline to their lives. This, ofcourse, is a fundamentally wrong view on the whole anti-aging thing. The idea is to extend life with quality years.

Also, I do not think that one can seriously expect to get away with the car-analogy (which is not even true to begin with). Speaking of life-extension in terms of cars comes off as a little sophomoric in my point of view. It sounds like something you'd say to your 4 year old kid when he asked you for the first time why people die.

And then there's the fact that Sprott never argued with Aubrey's solid plan. Here are two guys, one with a plan and one without, and the one without doesn't even *try* to take the bull by the horns. He simply didn't make an effort.

I can't help but think that this has something to do with the man's age. No offense to older people ofcourse. It's just that I think that older people have problems adjusting the way they look at life. Just imagine growing up from the first part of the previous century, and having your brain all wired up to cope with a society that *seems* to change quite linearly. Then, all of a sudden, the explosive power of exponential growth becomes evident. Ideas on immortality, and what have you, are thrown onto the net.

Sprott does not realize what can happen in 27 years of science in these days (while we are at the knee of the curve according to many). Aubrey *does* realize what can happen. This is why the two differed on this subject. Effectively, this situation is just like that one situation that Kurzweil has written about: Nobel prize winners that state self-replicating nanotechnology will not be feasible for centuries to come.

And so Sprott is left with obsolete ideas that are fundamentally wrong, and because of the hardwiredness of his own brain, he cannot (or does not want to) switch to another view. And so, he is left with an erratic view, for which he must build a case. Leon Kass does not really differ from Sprott in this aspect.

Just my two cents.

[brokenportal]

Im building a group in msn to pull msn surfers in msn groups into the life extension arena of thought. Is that the kind of group youll link up to? Its at http://groups.msn.com/LifeExtension Im still building it so it hasnt taken off yet. The key is to get a substantive amount of posts for about 3 or 4 weeks in a row.

[manowater989]

I can't help but notice that the phenomenon Jay mentions is interesting: think about it, since what we're discussing IS life-extension, after all. Since it's true that older people have more outmoded attitudes, won't that be even more true when we have 1000-year-olds? Will their attitudes eventually update? Maybe 200-year-olds act like teenagers, for all we know. What happens when people who make history start to outlive it, instead of the other way around? Imagine, for example, if Napoleon Bonaparte was still alive, just nobody cared anymore.