X-Message-Number: 20467 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Wired.com: "A Few Ways to Win Mortality War" Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 17:24:44 -0800 A Few Ways to Win Mortality War By Kristen Philipkoski Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,56476,00.html 02:00 AM Nov. 20, 2002 PT NEWPORT BEACH, California -- People who want to live forever are often pegged as narcissists, heretics or just plain crazy. But about 200 people bent on immortality who did not appear to be crazy, narcissistic or sacrilegious (well, maybe a little) gathered in Newport Beach, California, over the weekend for Alcor's Extreme Life Extension Conference. Discussions among leading researchers in nanotechnology, cloning and artificial intelligence focused on much more than cryonics, the process of freezing the body in liquid nitrogen after death to be later reanimated. Cryonics is basically a backup plan if technology doesn't obliterate mortality first. About 1,000 people pay Alcor $400 a year and have named Alcor as their life insurance beneficiary to cover the cost of freezing just the head for $50,000 or the entire body for $120,000. Here's what experts say could one day lead to immortality. Cloning: Michael West, chief executive of Advanced Cell Technology, the company that has become famous for claiming to clone human embryos, was the celebrity of the conference. Well-respected in the medical "establishment," West also shares an interest with the Alcor crowd. He told the audience that cloning technology can replace failing organs and aging cells with young healthy ones. The trick is to get stem cell therapies to work. Stem cells -- very young cells that have the ability to become any cell in the body -- are a promising treatment for many diseases. The problem is they might be rejected as foreign by a patient's immune system. To avoid that, researchers hope to create cloned embryos from the patient's own body. No one knows if that will eliminate the problem, but West's company's work may prove it is the solution, one way or the other. Some people call stem cell harvesting murder, which baffles West, who claims he hates to kill an ant. "I'm a sucker for life," he said. His work is a baby step towards immortality. "Life is naturally immortal," West said. "Of course, it can fail, but it doesn't have to fail." Nutrition: Ray Kurzweil hopes to extend his life with a strict diet, exercise and 150 supplements a day. While not trained as a doctor, Kurzweil's track record in other areas of science and technology is impressive. He's a pioneer in optical character recognition, music synthesis and speech recognition. When doctors diagnosed him with type 2 diabetes 19 years ago, he came up with his own treatment, basically eliminating sugars and most carbohydrates from his diet. Kurzweil is writing a book on his longevity health plan with Dr. Terry Grossman called A Short Guide to a Long Life. They're also developing a line of food products that Kurzweil says will taste as good as regular cake and other carbohydrate-rich treats, but will be very low in carbs, sugar and salt. His goal is to stay alive long enough so that advances in nanotechnology and therapeutic cloning techniques can extend human life into the triple digits. "If we can all hang in there another 10 years, we may all be able to experience the remarkable future ahead," he said. Other researchers extolled radical changes in diet as a way to extend life, particularly calorie restriction. Of course, living on a fraction of the calories a typical American consumes is easier said than done. The good news is scientists are working on the pill. Stephen Spindler, professor of biochemistry at the University of California at Riverside and chief science officer at Biomarker Pharmaceuticals, described one approach, which is to make a drug that fools the body into thinking it's taking in far fewer calories, no matter what the person eats. With fewer calories, the body behaves as if it's much younger. Spindler based his work on a study of undernourished residents of Okinawa in the 1970s. Despite a low caloric intake, a large number of them lived to be 100 or older. A study of the centenarians showed they also had lower rates of many diseases, including Alzheimer's and many types of cancer. The study lead to the book The Okinawa Program: How the World's Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health -- And How You Can Too. Until Spindler and the other scientists develop the magic pill, however, eating fewer calories seems to be the only way to achieve the same results. Nanotechnology: Despite a lack of encouraging advances in their field, nanotechnology experts don't lack enthusiasm, including Robert Freitas, a scientist at Zyvex and a research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Freitas described two nanotechnologies he believes are first in line to stave off death: Respirocytes are artificial red blood cells -- nano machines -- that Freitas sees as an emergency treatment that technicians could, for example, inject into a patient who has suffered smoke inhalation. With an injection of just 5 cc's of respirocytes, he said, someone could run a 5-minute mile (12 mph) for 12 minutes without taking a breath. Microbivores, artificial white blood cells, would eat pathogens, then digest and excrete them. A microbivore could work 1,000 times faster than a real white blood cell, ingesting the pathogen in 30 seconds and expelling it within about an hour (normally it takes weeks). But these microscopic machines would have to cross the blood-brain barrier before they could work -- a sticky issue Freitas hasn't solved yet but expects to tackle soon. "Death is an outrage!" he said. "Let's do something about it." Kourosh Karimkhany contributed to this report. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20467