We are nearing the September 15th deadline for early registration for the Seventh CR Society conference:
The next CR Society conference will be in Las Vega, Nevada Oct 26 – 29, 2011. This conference will mark the 10-year anniversary of CR I which was held in LVOct 25 -28, 2001. We plan to make this 10th anniversary conference similar tothe first with a mix of research presentations and social events with guest scientists and CRS members speaking. The topics will include aging, effects of calorie restriction, and practical aspects of human CR.
This will be a unique opportunity to interact with CR comrades – not to be missed!
There will be an informal welcome reception on Wednesday evening October 26.The conference presentations will run from Thursday morning October 27 through Saturday October 29 mid/late afternoon. The conference will be held at the Best Western Mardi Gras Hotel (The site of our first conference in 2001).
We have a single or double occupancy group rate of $44 for Wednesday and Thursday, and $54 for Friday and Saturday. (There is about a 12% tax). Call the hotel at 1-702-731-2020 (8:00 am - 6:00 pm PST) andrequest the CR Society group rate. The rates will be available until September 30 (unless our block sells out).
All rooms have mini refrigerators.
The early bird registration fee will be $250 for paid CR Society members and$290 for non members. [Registration for spouses of attendees is only $150 -MR] There will be banquet style lunches on Thursday and Saturday, and a banquetdinner on Friday. The menus will be posted soon, but unfortunately they will not be organic.
I'd really like to encourage everyone out there to attend if you have any interest at all in CR science, or if you just want to hang out for once with people who fucking GET IT on the value of life and making choices to hold onto it, from 'healthy eating' thru' to extreme CR fanaticism. I almost didn't go to the first one, which was mostly just the lot of us getting together in a cheesy Vegas hotel (where we're reuniting this year ) and talking shop (smoothies, supplements, software), and that would've been a huge mistake -- it was a BLAST! It was WONDERFUL to meet so many folks in the flesh, great to have the immediacy of real dialog, and just being able to hang out with the like-minded was like easing a tired and aching body into a hot bath.
Subsequent Conferences have been even better. The second Conf was set up at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, so that we could easily (and cheaply!) attract Richard Weindruch and the other CR (and CR-hangers-on) researchers there, including most of the folks working on the primates. This made it diametrically different from the first: very intellectually exciting, but SO packed with scientific presenters as to be a bit wearying, and left little time for socializing.
Robert Krikorian and David Stern (who have spearheaded all of these events) exceeded their previous results in the subsequent Confs, managing to harmonize these 2 extremes to create overall events that were truly superlative "holistic" experiences, with lots of exciting and encouraging research, plenty of space for debate and discussion, and still lots of opportunities for socializing.
Here's what you missed ifyou didn't go to CR VI two years ago, held as a part of The Gerontological Society of America's 62nd Annual Scientific Meeting at the Hilton Atlanta:
Richard Miller: Debunked tryptophan restriction, and went into great detail about mehionine restriction. Talked about the surprising differences -- including some completely opposite effects -- in the metabolic pathways involved in CR and methionine restriction, and some of the effects on MetR animals' health and the potential mechanisms. Also, surprising similar diametrically opposed results on longevity pathways involving Migration Inhibition Factor (MIF): CR and the IGF-1 mutant mice all elevate MIF expression, but MIF genetic *knockout* also extends life!
Holly Brown-Borg: Effects of life extension regimens on methionine metabolism, including homocysteine and glutathione.
Jim Nelson: a first preview of this rather disquieting bit of research, revealed privately to us a month before it was released in the electronic pre-publication.
Don Ingram: His work with putative CR mimetics, including 2-deoxyglucose and resveratrol; also a few bits on blueberries.
Luigi Fontana: The lecture that really set me on the path toward reversing my position on protein. Multiple citations on CR and IGF-1 mutant mice dying with no visible pathology in their tissues. Discussion of the role of inflammaation in CR, and the short-term and longer-term effects of CR on the different blood cell types in the immune system. The striking story of the fingernails of the CR people in the WUSTL study, which have such strong disulfide bridges that the guy they had lined up as a scientific collaborator to do a study on the subject refused to go ahead, because he didn't believe they could really be that systematically strong (fingernail S-S bridging are an emerging, putative surrogate marker of the strength of the protein in bone).
Feinman: Making the case for low-carb. Completely rejuvenated April's enthusiasm for CR, and set her into a career in public health (she's now taking an MPH).
There are Video clips of some of the Conference presentations (along with for-purchase DVDs of the whole shebang) and outtakes of Conference attendees on the website:
http://crsociety.org/Conferences
... and on YouTube and Google Video; Dean P and Miss Tenacity (Andrea Feucht) put up notes from some of the presentations from CR III (search the Archives
).With the exception of the third conference in Charleston, the catered meals over which we've chatted (with CR scientists and each other) have been EXCELLENT: every meal is laid out as a huge CR buffet, with a wide range of fresh fruits and veggies, lean protein, and a huge spread of Walden Farms dressings to try out on them. David and Robert clearly take a lot of pain to make sure that things are set up well for us, with enough diversity to meet any style of CR, and crack the whip with the staff whenever needed to ensure that our very particular needs were met -- and really, we *are* often a pain in the ass to the poor catering staff, with incessant demands to refill the salad greens, and for double- and triple-checking that we had the right meat, but they kept up to the challenge.
For other meals, people fend for themselves: I tend to hide in my room with my scales and stews, but others stage near-takeovers of carefully-chosen local restaurants, where our numbers let us collective-bargain with the wait staff to get foods customized to teh occasion (Cobb salads without the bacon, cheese, and egg yolks, with healthy dressings on the side; etc) without the usual social awkwardness when doing this with dinner company unaccustomed to thinking about the consequences of the crap they put in their bodies.
As to what it feels like to be there ... the Wellspring of the Waters of Youth recorded some of her impressions of the first one (where we met in RW) on her old blog:
http://aprilcr.blogs...charleston.html
http://aprilcr.blogs...r-brothers.html
http://aprilcr.blogs...eally-need.html
http://aprilcr.blogs...-side-then.html
http://aprilcr.blogs...ant-change.html
Oh, and I met the love of my greatly-extended life at the third one
http://mprize.org/blogs/
(As She always hastens to add when mentioning this, however: Results Not Typical).
If you care about staying young and healthy through low-Calorie,
high-nutrition eating, and want to keep that lifestyle up sustainably,
and if even the flat interaction with science and other CR
practitioners over email engages you, you should be there. Heck, if a
cantankerous, introverted, antisocial bastard like myself can have such a good time, anyone who actually has some social skills will love it.
Be there -- or age and die like your neighbors
.
