22 replies to this topic

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

Hello there.

as a student, which apparently is not the best person to be, everyone wants you to be an expert; anyway i was wondering if and what i have to do to say get a job at Alcor UK or SENS or some place in nevada... apart from being a genius and a fully qualified ninja. I mean this is my lifes dream, to research the only thing that interests me, and i have no idea where to start or what i need.


any nudges in the right direction or advice on who and where would take in an enthusiastic young scientist would be gratefully apreicated.

yours,

Ill.

[kevin]

Talk to some scientists doing work you're interested in at your local university to start with. I think you'll find them (well at least some of them) quite approachable. They are usually quite open to discussing their work and the potential for jobs. If you can, do some summer work in a lab to gain some experience.

If you really want to meet people involved in a particular field, spend the bucks if you can to go to a conference where many of them gather and introduce yourself. You might be surprised at how quickly an enthusiastic and bright (of course you would have done some homework on the speakers and talks prior to going) individual could get a job offer.

Kevin

[John Schloendorn]

everyone wants you to be an expert

So should you [tung]. Seriously, it helps heaps when you have a clue what you want to do. What's your favourite life-extension idea? What do you think has the most near-term chances of success? Which idea do you think is crap?

I have just described some of my personal experiences in this thread, which I think is in its entirety quite well worth reading. In brief, I think the greater danger than finding no job is finding the wrong job, i.e. one that vaguely relates to aging research but does not yield any human life-extending application. There's heaps of that kind out there!

And do heed Kevin's words! Any plans yet for SENS2??

[Mark Hamalainen]

it helps heaps when you have a clue what you want to do.

Indeed, come up with a detailed proposal for the experiments you want to do (run it by this forum if you'd like) then send it to some labs and you'll probably get lots of responses if your ideas are good. There isn't anywhere (yet) that you can go now and say "I want to help with SENS, put me to work"...

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

thankyou for your help. so far i havent really thought too much of exact experiments i would like to do, and i think i am at fault there.

My favourite life extention idea would be to put the gene that creates telomeres and telomerases into somatic cells, it would be a good start. As far as short term goals go i think that low calorie and high nootropics/vitamins is a good start, with alot of emphasis on low calorie to make the body work slower, and avoid getting annoying things like diabetes. Worst idea, cryonics, the fact that as soon as i have wasted money on a house and a marriage i am getting my cryonics dog tags and moving near alcor uk, it is still quite risky and poorly thought out.

Oh, and all the scientist i work with are really mathamaticians and computational biologists that really are in it 'cus sums and challenges are fun rather than any large goals, they might think i was a bit of an extremist if i started ranting about trying to work for SENS or some other research company rather than go to work for Nestle, smithkline beecham, or some vaguely sensible place of research in their eyes.

[John Schloendorn]

Interesting. Do you want to do the telomere thing in mice? If so, I would not go for it earlier than as a phd project, because it sounds big. Do you have an idea for an undergrad project that you could do earlier?

Also, what would you do about the increased tumor incidence at old ages that seems to be responsible for the shortened life-span of telomerase knock-in mice[1]? Would you combine CR, vitamins plus telomerase?
Ideally, you might be able combine this with other life-extending interventions, such as GHR knockout or that catalase thingy everyone is talking about.

they might think i was a bit of an extremist

Get used to it. It's what you are, there's no point in hiding it [thumb]

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

noooo.my reply. it dissapeared.nooo.

guess i will have to write it again. maybe in bullet points.
yeah i checked out the catalase page, though i would have thought as cells actively scavenge these particles an increase in cytosolic catalase would be better also.
thanks for that idea, i would like to add to that experiment by what i feed the mice and see if there is any huge differences. maybe a mixture of nootropics and gene therapy might yeild unexpected results. good or bad.
there might be a problem with mice, it seems as at my university socialism and hippies are the in thing, or just protesting as they have nothing better to do. Anyway, one of our experiments using quantagous amounts of rat blood was cancelled.
mice are the way to go. i hate fruit flies. i reckon humans are cool, but i dont go to uni in iraq or somwhere.
thanks guys, although you missed a better, more lengthy reply with the odd joke in when my computer ate it when i submitted it.

Ill.

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

i just woke up again, and with an idea for study. i wanted to run this past some peers.

firstly, start a series of say 50 mice, with telomere and telomerase gene kock-ins.
secondly give these mice gene to increase [catalse] levels in mitoc. feed these mice all the nutrients and everthing they need.
then run biochemical assays and biopsies on mice to show what is killing the mice.
the next big problem should stare back at you, and then you could deal with that next, and so on in a borg like systematic biopsy approach to making the mice live longer. right? as the mice have lived for longer, then there should be more obvious reasons for death as more of the thing we need to change(that is killing the mouse) will have happened, in an overexpression type way. keep finding out what next is making them die until they stop dying. viola.

Have i figured a good experimental method. please dont smash my dreams and say:

a- that it is obvious.
b- aubrey de grey said it (he is the pimp daddy).
c- somebody with a less cool beard said it.

Ill logic prevails.

Edited by illuminatus, 08 May 2005 - 01:27 PM.

[John Schloendorn]

One issue I see with this learning by trial-and-error apporach is that in the "longevity" (as opposed to "rejuvenation") scenario, it will take a loooong time to wait for all these mice to grow up and then do it all over again. But you can work in parallel to some degree.
The guy with the beard is de Grey, and he is usually more on the rejuvenation side of things.

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

Right. but could you kill them after a certain time, and see if anything on a cellular level or organ level was going wrong, to speed up the process. plus, wouldnt a long time scale experiment be worth it. run some other experiments at the same time, work on another project. multitasking.

[Mark Hamalainen]

My favourite life extention idea would be to put the gene that creates telomeres and telomerases into somatic cells, it would be a good start.

Hasn't the telomere myth died out by now?

Its great that you're enthusiastic, but I recommend you do a lot of reading. Start with Aubrey's publications and the biotech threads on this forum, then pubmed.

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

i think that every field needs to be researched, as an immortal can die from just about anything, so nothing needs to be left unnacouted for. plus, how do you suppose to have any DNA left to make new copies of cells from, surely immortal cells will replicated an infinite amount of times.

[Mark Hamalainen]

It is thermodynamically impossible for a cell to be immortal if its information flows linearly from an ultimate reference [1]. Information must be imported, or the cell must be replaced. Replacement is much easier.

Understanding and control of telomeres is necessary, but for other reasons [2].

[1] Hamalainen. Thermodynamics and information in aging: why aging is not a mystery and how we will be able to make rational interventions. Rejuvenation Res. 2005 Spring;8(1):29-36.

[2] de Grey ADNJ, Campbell FC, Dokal I, Fairbairn LJ, Graham GJ, Jahoda CAB, Porter ACG. Total deletion of in vivo telomere elongation capacity: an ambitious but possibly ultimate cure for all age-related human cancers.

[John Schloendorn]

Hmm I do think telomerase in combination with other things has some potential. These critters do have increased wound healing, vitality and the likes.
But Osiris, I understand that your critique is mainly that the "longevity" strategy is fundamentally on the wrong track if one wants to do anything that helps real humans. I think this is very true. The "rejuvenation" (rejuvenating the old) methods are very different from the "longevity" (engineering the unborn) methods. Only the former will, by definition, have any impact on existing humans. Specifically, specializing in longevity strategies will make us ignore the extremely promising field of cell replacement therapy.
As for WILT, hmmm.... I still don't quite buy the telomere part of the plan. In particular, deletion of telomere lengthening capacity presupposes other mature cell ablation methods to get rid of the first generation of cells. And those methods would kind of make deletion of telomere lengthening capacity unnecessary. Anyways, I do not see the need to decide that before the regenerative part of the plan is much farther advanced than now.

Edited by John Schloendorn, 09 May 2005 - 01:25 AM.

[John Schloendorn]

i think that every field needs to be researched, as an immortal can die from just about anything, so nothing needs to be left unnacouted for.

That's right if there were no time pressures. But for now I must insist that spending their extremely limited resources on fixing things that are not broken (yet), or don't kill anyone by being broken, is the biggest threat to immortalists of this time.

[Mark Hamalainen]

Why? (a short paragraph explaining this statement would be more helpful to the reader and more likely to draw attention to your citation for further elucidation)

Laziness on my part I admit. The paper's origin is a lab meeting that I hosted because I was tired of explaining this idea repeatedly to many different people...

By the 'telomerase myth' I mean the premise by which Geron Corp started: that extending telomeres could extend human lifespan. Amazingly, this myth is far from dead, I encounter it on a regular basis from academics. Myths like it, and too much focus on longevity, need to be deconstructed.

Understanding and manipulation of telomeres will certainly be important, and I mentioned WILT as an example.

[Mark Hamalainen]

The explanation can be found here:

http://www.imminst.o...f=175&t=5821&s=

They hype surrounding Geron Corp at its beginning was partly for the potential effects on life span of extending telomeres. From the Rej. Res. interview with Michael West:

The whole goal of those who had been working on the aging of human cells, as opposed to other animal models of aging, was to understand at least the mechanisms of the Hayflick phenomenon, and assuming that it played a role in some aspect of human aging, to utilize telomerase to reset the clock in that tissue.

I'm not sure exactly how much faith West had in telomeres as a real anti-aging treatment, I haven't read his book yet although I intend to.

[Illuminatusdarksoul]

Osiris, i read your paper. a nice peice of work. sorry for testing your patience with anti-knowledge(myths).

So now i know that it is not longevity i want to research but rejuvenation or regeneration (which one is the proper word?)

Does anyone know whether in the rejuvination process whether viruses can be used as vectors to infect and inject the perfect DNA (fully repaired DNA of host but inside virus) back into the host cells, spreading the good DNA like a contagion through the body. Is this flawed logic or another myth? because vectors alway interested me.

[John Schloendorn]

Your flexibility is remarkable. It usually takes me much longer to abandon a "myth" [thumb]
Most current viral gene therapy vectors can deliver only single genes, and even that is dangerous (you can barely control where in the genome it goes) and inefficient (the same virus won't transfect all types of cells, or the immune system just fends it off). Most of these problems are being worked upon, but I would guess that genetic payload will remain a limiting factor for in situ gene therapy of whole chromosomes for a very long time.
Osiris already suggested what I too believe is the promising way to handle all of these problems: Make cells in vitro with "fully good" DNA, plus fully good mitochondira, epigenetics, proteasomes, junk levels, ect. and use the cells themselves as "vectors" (via whole cell replacement and/or cell fusion).
But in the end, it should not be our rant that determines your choice. Others, and more expert ones than us, have other opinions. You need to become able to judge these things yourself as fast as possible. Only then can you do the creative part of the work, which is what really matters. Go to pubmed and get yourself some reviews on any topic that you suspect could be relevant and find out what's really going on out there. It is tough at first, but you will find that the ability to read research papers like others read the local sports news will come in time. If you then grow fond of a topic, and stay it for a while, then you can go ahead and try to publish some of your ideas in that field.

[Mark Hamalainen]

Osiris, i read your paper. a nice peice of work. sorry for testing your patience with anti-knowledge(myths).

Thanks, and no problem.

Does anyone know whether in the rejuvination process whether viruses can be used as vectors to infect and inject the perfect DNA (fully repaired DNA of host but inside virus) back into the host cells, spreading the good DNA like a contagion through the body.  Is this flawed logic or another myth? because vectors alway interested me.

Sounds like the Godseed proposal by João Pedro de Magalhães. Such a strategy is not impossible, but its much, much farther from our current capabilities than tissue therapy. Chromosome synthesis would be necessary to make 'perfectly' healthy DNA. As I say in my paper, chromosome synthesis or something equivilant will eventually be necessary... so although it may not be initially necessary for escape velocity [1], it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it pre-emptively.

[1] Aubrey de Grey. Escape Velocity: Why the Prospect of Extreme Human Life Extension Matters Now. PLoS Biol. 2004 June; 2(6): e187.