I waddled into the Anchor Pub and there was Aubrey with a beer. He asked what I was drinking and I said “One of those” and pointed at his beer and soon had one because he brought me one and I was very tired and very merry and surrounded by excellent comrades.

I had my first conversation with Michael Rae. We talked about Christopher Sykes‘ recently-widely-net-viewed documentary “Do you want to live forever?“, which focuses on Aubrey. Michael had said in a Methuselah Foundation forum post that he intensely dislikes it. I wanted to know why.

I thought its excellent production values and on-balance pro-Aubreyness overcame its cartoonishness, contrived melodrama, shallowness, and emphasis on sex and sentiment. Combining heads with Michael I’m not sure whether or not its existence is a net favor.

I think what Joe Layboy takes away from the film is “there’s this weirdo genius dude who thinks he can make us live forever and what’s next on the telly?” Vastly preferable would be to make Joe Layboy incredibly mad that we’re all going to die and only 1 in 1,234,567 people are doing anything about it.

Our best minds haven’t yet succeeded in inciting riots. The first great documentarian of our movement might figure out how. Perhaps Christopher Sykes has lubricated the path a little, but pro-cures bloggers and writers have squeezed out a lot more lubricant collectively. They just haven’t made documentaries with non-crap production values yet.

Next post: more hanging out at the Anchor Pub, the day before the conference.

I’ve been back from SENS3 for five days, and my brain remains scrambled. In reporting it I can only ramble - as evidenced by last Friday’s H+ Club weekly meetup in Tucson, where I exploited the SENS3 online meeting program to linearize my desultory observations before a nicely crowded Tubac Room.

As my brain floats back together, I’ll retro-blog the conference, starting with my first day in Cambridge, where I met up with world-champions against biological suffering while ramping up expression of socially helpful enzymes. Then we’ll move to the technical meat of the conference, the talks themselves, and interlace that with WKD-fueled world-saving intrigue between and after the talks.

H+ members will soon be attending three upcoming conferences:

• Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), Third Conference
• The Singularity Summit 2007
• Challenges & Opportunities: The Future of Nano & Bio Technologies

We now plan to cover these events via Frontier Channel, with live, or near-live posts throughout these events! More details soon.

Please see Frontier Channel’s coverage of this event.

• Third “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” Conference (SENS3)
• Queens’ College, Cambridge, England
• September 6-10, 2007
• Description:
  

  The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research and the Methuselah Mouse Prize), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, but instead enumerating the accumulating molecular and cellular changes that eventually kill us and identifying ways to repair — reverse — those changes, rather than merely to slow down their further accumulation.