This is a presentation I am going to do for my High School biology class. I am also going to present this at a school assembly or something as well. Please tell me what you think of it and tell me how I can make it better. It doesn't look as good here because I had to copy and paste it from a word document. I am also going to make a PowerPoint presentation with this.
Speech about curing aging to my biology class.
Hello students,
You may or may not have heard about this movement I'm going to tell you about. It is the indefinite healthy life extension movement. It is a cause that aims to gather support for scientific research that will be able to repair the forms of damage to our bodies caused by the aging process.
Why cure aging?
Aging is a thief that robs us of the most valuable resource on this planet, life. Aging kills over 100000 people on earth a day. It is a disease that affects every person on this planet.
To not try to cure aging in my opinion is the most inhumane thing on this planet a person could do. How could anyone in their right mind want the deaths of over 100000 people condemned every day? That is over 35 million people every year. Aging is the disease that has killed the most amount of people in all of human history. The spanish flue killed about 50 million people in a 2 year period (whilst aging kills about over 70 million people in a 2year period and never stops) and AIDS kills about 2.8 million people a year.
All of the age related diseases and conditions you hear about like Alzheimer's disease, Arthritis, Cancer, Cataracts on the eyes, Coronary artery disease, hardening of the arteries, Osteoporosis, etc, is basically the damage of aging itself that has accumulated enough to cause problems for your body. It is a fact that if you live long enough you will get an age related disease and die from it unless something else killed you first. For example If someone died of alzheimers disease if they did not get alzheimers in the first place they would have died from something else such as cancer.
Fortunately the elimination of the world’s biggest killer will be curable and treatable in the near future.
What can be done about aging?
Why do We Age?
Biological aging is a progressive, degenerative process of decay. As aging damage accumulates in our functional cellular and molecular structures, the healthy order laid down in our youth slowly falls apart. This damage occurs as a result of a series of unintended biochemical side-effects of normal metabolism. As more and more of our cellular and molecular structures suffer this damage, functionality is lost, and health, resilience and vitality are slowly taken away from us, leading to increasing age-related pathology.
Thus, as laid out in the flowchart: metabolism causes ongoing aging damage, and accumulating damage eventually reaches a critical mass at which it causes age-related frailty, disability, disease, and ultimately death.
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geriatrics is the attempt to stop damage from causing pathology; traditional gerontology is the attempt to stop metabolism from causing damage; A new approach the engineering approach arrow represents the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) approach, which is to periodically eliminate the damage of aging, so that it keeps the damage below the level that causes death and age related disease.
The leading researcher on aging in the world is a biomedical gerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey PhD from Cambridge University in England. He calls his project to reverse the damage we call aging "SENS" (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He has proposed seven strategies for what he calls the "seven deadly things.
Seven Deadly Things
... and why there are only seven
Many things go wrong with aging bodies, but only a few of them are primary changes in the structure of the body itself — that is, aging damage. Other changes (such as increases in inflammation and oxidative stress) are the secondary consequences of this primary change: either the direct results of those damaged components' inability to carry out their normal role in metabolism, or the body's adaptive or maladaptive attempts to compensate for those changes. Thus, by removing, repairing, replacing, or rendering harmless the damage, we restore the normal functioning of the body's cells and essential biomolecules, and the secondary changes are given the chance to return to their normal, youthful baseline.
Scientists have spent decades looking for such changes in aging bodies, this research has led to the conclusion that there are no more than seven major classes of such cellular and molecular damage, shown in the table below.
Aging Damage Discovery SENS Solution
Cell loss, tissue atrophy/ 1955/ Stem cells and tissue engineering (RepleniSENS)
Nuclear [epi]mutations
(only cancer matters)/ 1959 1982/ Removal of telomere-lengthening machinery (OncoSENS)
Mutant mitochondria/ 1972/ Allotopic expression of 13 proteins (MitoSENS)
Death-resistant cells/ 1965/ Targeted ablation (ApoptoSENS)
Tissue stiffening/ 1958, 1981/ AGE-breaking molecules (GlycoSENS); tissue engineering
Extracellular aggregates/ 1907/ Immunotherapeutic clearance (AmyloSENS)
Intracellular aggregates/ 1959/ Novel lysosomal hydrolases (LysoSENS)
We can be confident that this list is complete, first and foremost because of the fact that scientists have not discovered any new kinds of aging damage in nearly a generation, despite the facts that research into aging has been accelerating and that we have had ever-increasingly powerful tools with which to investigate the aging body.
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The Methuselah mouse prizes
WHAT IS THE MPRIZE?
The Mprize competition is an exciting and viable mid-term strategy to deliver on the Methuselah Foundation's mission of extending healthy human life. It directly accelerates the development of revolutionary new life extension therapies by awarding two cash prizes:
1. one to the research team that breaks the world record for the oldest-ever mouse; and
2. one to the team that develops the most successful late-onset rejuvenation.
Previous winners have already proven that healthy life can be extended; each new winner pushes the outer limits of healthy life back even further...and each new winner takes us even further.
I believe that the Methuselah Mouse prize will be one of the biggest factors in the war against aging. The reason I believe this is because time after time, the method of a well designed prize has been shown to be very successful in helping turn the impossible into near term reality
What do the end of famine, the discovery of longitude, and private space travel have in common? Each of these world-changing innovations was created by an inventor seeking to win a prize. The Mprize is an ever growing, almost 5 million dollar prize to end the diseases of aging. Right now, brilliant minds all around the world are competing for this prize including:
David A. Sinclair Ph.D. - Harvard
Dr. Sinclair is an Associate Professor at the Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA. He studies the effects of the molecule Resveratrol on aging and longevity in mice.
Thomas E. Johnson, Ph.D. - U. Col. Boulder
Dr. Johnson is a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, Ph.D. - U of Fla.
Dr. Leeuwenburgh is an Associate Professor at the Biochemistry of Aging Laboratory, University of Florida, Gainesville
Craig A. Cooney PhD. - U of Arkansas
Dr. Cooney is renowned epigenetics expert and Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Michal Masternak, Ph.D. - S.I.U. School of Medicine
Dr. Masternak is an Assistant Professor on Geriatrics Research at the Department of Internal Medicine for the S.I.U. School of Medicine.
Leonard Guarente, Ph.D. - MIT
Dr. Guarente is a Novartis Professor of Biology at MIT, Boston, Mass.
Andrzej Bartke-SIU School of Medicine
Dr. Bartke studies the effects of endocrine signaling on longevity.
Stephen R. Spindler, Ph.D - U. Cal. Riverside
Dr. Spindler is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Riverside, California.
Richard Weindruch, Ph.D. - U. Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Weindruch is a Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin
Elise Sacane
The focus of Mrs. Sacane's research and development will be on the evaluation of the synergistic effects of fresh food diets, enriched housing and exposure to microbes on the behavioral aspects, life and health spans of wild type mice (Mus musculus).
Alan Cash - Terra Biological LLC
Mr. Cash is a physicist who has been studying the energetic pathways of cellular metabolism. Mr. Cash's research focuses on modifying cell signaling responses with small molecules that mimic the same molecular pathways as calorie restriction for health and longevity.
Christian Sell, Ph.D. - Drexel University
Dr. Sell is an Associate Investigator at Drexel University.
etc etc etc etc
How you can help
If you are interested in helping with the healthy indefinite life-extension cause, here are some ways you can help:
• Donate to the Methuselah foundation: I will be excepting all donations for 1 week. Or you could donate directly through www.mfoundation.org
• Join your local chapter: I will be creating an anti-aging club so if you are interested in joining please speak with me directly
• Register at Imminst.org today : www.Imminst.org is an online community of people who also think aging should be cured. There is quality intelligent discussion going on, and there is also many awareness projects you can work on.
Edited by The Immortalist, 11 February 2010 - 09:38 PM.