Vanguard Life extension research: now a serious thing with LongeCity!LongeCIty: not just a forum: you can contribute to life extension research, FOR REAL!LongeCity: building the future together: CONTRIBUTE!Introduction: lessons from the pastMachines and physics are often taken as examples that progress can be very fast where reluctance occured for idealogical reasons. For example, a few centuries ago, flying was reserved to birds, trying to fly like Icar (Greek mythology) should certainly be punished by God. But some people tried to make flying machines, with the success that we know. Similar things can be said about motors (vs animals), digital cameras etc.
But such things also happened in biology and medicine.
- Only a few centuries ago, people thought that opening a dead body to analyse its structure should be punished by good. As a result, it wasn't even believed that blood was circulating throughout our body. This is not so long ago! Luckily this obstacle was overcome by temerous persons, to lead to modern medicine.
- Until a few decades ago, heart was considered a holy organ that would surely be too complex for our mere human intelligence. Then a mindshift occured; now bypassed surgery and defibrilators are standard and save lives everyday, building full mechanical hearts is even becoming an industrial challenge.
- Very recently, something similar happened with stem cells. After considering that using embryonic stem cells was playing god, other stem cells were found and even generated, and this is becoming a very promising area in numerous very serious institutions.
- A few decades ago, lifespan tests were recently performed in animals. It was found that randomly tweaking genes in caenorhabditis elegans would lead to life extension 10% of the time! Recently it was found that NDGA, aspirin, rapamycin and others robustly extended lifespan in mice! How could so easy solutions to such long-term-dreams be found only now??? Answer: mindset.
LongeCIty: building the future together!Example: Cryonics, now a serious thingWith LongeCity, the same is now happening with cryonics. Some animals (worms, flies, frogs...) can undergo cryonics and by revived some time later. In drosophila and caenorhabditis elegans, you do it pretty much every time you go to vacations, to do other experiments when you come back. It is playing god? Certainly not.
Perhaps we can do like those animals! Like flying, this certainly requires numerous trials and improvements. But
imagine a future where it would be standard to cryonize you if you experience a severe disease, until the cure is developped; just like you are anesthetized today during a surgery -- far fetched?... not necessarily. Some temerous researchers have started the journey, and we are here trying to help them because we have reasons to believe in that quest and we voted that we're going to help them!!!
We here have all the elements to try to make cryonics a big topic for the medical and scientific community:
- the research we are financing is conducted by
very serious and reknown researchers, such as Joa Pedro Magalhes!
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LongeCity members will be able to participate, by analyzing the bioinformatics data they will provide!
Indeed, not only we are showing the path to a breaking new medical-and-life-extension technique, we are also showing the path towards a new area where science is not anymore restricted to latin-speaking-scientific persons! Indeed with some forms of research, including bioinformatics, numerous non scientists could now contribute to science and life extension!!
Wow! All this for so little money?Yes, absolutely. Thanks to very devoted directors LongeCIty is carefully looking at the money it receives from your membership and donations (
Finance report - Members only) and trying to optimize it towards supporting small-money -- high-impact research.
Optimization is really needed. Even here, due to the very limited budget of LongeCIty, the decision to accept the second-and-quasi-ex-eaquo project had to be done with what-would-elsewhere be considered as a ridiculous amount of money compared to what science generally costs. These last weeks, some of the most active members of LongeCity, well aware of the situation, didn't hesitate to give quite a lot of personal money, because they believe in this research and because they really want to give it a try.
You too, donate, DONATE!. This is not a blurry enormous institution where you don't know where your money goes. This is small money for big impacts. You know how much I have challenged Imminst/LongeCIty, you know that I continue because I want to really contribute to making longer and healthier lives a reality. Well, I have been working in research labs, I have seen various research grants, needs to spend all the research account every year in order to have the same amount the next year... and I have participated in LongeCity discussions: here, really,
every few dollars count. BE A MEMBER!!: the few dollars per month that you pay are very wisely used here. Contrary to many large institutions,
you have the power to vote towards how to use the money for your preferred research projects, you can view Finance reports and suggest potential optimisations.
This is not just a forum: you can
contribute to life extension: FOR REAL.
Edited by AgeVivo, 10 March 2012 - 05:28 PM.
