HAPPY 150TH BIRTHDAY: A NEW ERA LOOMS FOR OLD AGE (article)

Coincidentally, when I turned 50 a few years back I made a committment to live to at least 150 years old.
Figured it would be long enough to accumulate a small dose of wisdom and mature the immortal potential within myself……
The external science is still in its early stages, but the thought form shift is the most significant. The INTENTION to live longer aligns the shen and commands the chi. The internal science has of course been around for millenia…
m

HAPPY 150TH BIRTHDAY: A NEW ERA LOOMS FOR OLD AGE
Reuters
March 15, 2006

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060315/hl_nm/old_age_dc

Modern medicine is redefining old age and may soon allow people to live
regularly beyond the current upper limit of 120 years, experts said on
Wednesday.

It used to be thought there was some built-in limit on lifespan, but a group
of scientists meeting at Oxford University for a conference on life
extension and enhancement consigned that idea to the dustbin.

Paul Hodge, director of the Harvard Generations Policy Program, said
governments around the world — struggling with pension crises, greying
workforces and rising healthcare costs — had to face up to the challenge
now.

“Life expectancy is going to grow significantly, and current policies are
going to be proven totally inadequate,” he predicted.

Just how far and fast life expectancy will increase is open to debate, but
the direction and the accelerating trend is clear.

Richard Miller of the Michigan University Medical School said tests on mice
and rats — genetically very similar to humans — showed lifespan could be
extended by 40 percent, simply by limiting calorie consumption.

Translated into humans, that would mean average life expectancy in rich
countries rising from near 80 to 112 years, with many individuals living a
lot longer.

Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University, goes
much further. He believes the first person to live to 1,000 has already been
born and told the meeting that periodic repairs to the body using stem
cells, gene therapy and other techniques could eventually stop the aging
process entirely.

De Grey argues that if each repair lasts 30 or 40 years, science will
advance enough by the next “service” date that death can be put off
indefinitely — a process he calls strategies for engineered negligible
senescence.

His maverick ideas are dismissed by others in the field, such as Tom
Kirkwood, director of Newcastle University’s Center of Aging and Nutrition,
as little more than a thought experiment.

Kirkwood said the human aging process was intrinsically malleable — meaning
life expectancy was not set in stone — but researchers had only scratched
the surface in understanding how it worked.

The real goal is not simply longer life but longer healthy life, something
that is starting to happen as today’s over-70s lead far more active lives
than previous generations.

Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois in Chicago is confident that
longevity and health will go hand in hand and that delaying aging will
translate into later onset for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart
disease.

But to get to the bottom of understanding the biology of aging will require
a major step-up in investment.

Olshansky and his colleagues have called on the U.S. government to inject $3
billion a year into the field, arguing the benefits of achieving an average
seven-year delay in the process of biological aging would far exceed the
gains from eliminating cancer.

Ethically, the extension of life is controversial, with some philosophers
arguing it goes against fundamental human nature.

But John Harris, professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester,
said any society that applauded the saving of life had a duty to embrace
regenerative medicine.

“Life-saving is just death-postponing with a positive spin,” he said. “If it
is right and good to postpone death for a short time, it is hard to see how
it would be less right and less good to postpone it for a long while.”