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[Recap]

Chris Heward discussed his work on the “Kronos Longitudinal Aging Study (KLAS)” as a measurement of human aging. KRONOS Science Laboratory is a research institution in Phoenix, AZ, USA.

Heward showed a graph of progress in life expectancy at birth and at 65. Life expectancy at birth has experienced obvious improvement, but not so for life expectancy at age 65. Looking at particular biomarkers of again, we follow a peak around age 20 with a downhill degeneration to death. Once measures of life expectancy can be developed, than potential interventions can be tested against these biomarkers for effectiveness.

Data is collect in a database based on a variety of tests. For most Kronos participants, this includes one or two data collection events. Longitudinal studies require repeat testing over many years.

One of the best known biochemical biomarkers Kronos has found for aging is DHEA-SO4. The lower the level, the older the patient. However, although a line has been drawn on a graph to show this, the individual results actually do not cluster very well. Kronos next compared biomarkers with each other, but found little correlation, suggesting aging is not just one underlying problem, but multiple.

Kronos’ approach to aging is to assess and prevent issues earlier than people are usually treated. They focus on the top killers, like cardiovascular disease. They look for oxidative stress, with the goal of providing high levels of protection and reducing damage.

Their latest findings suggest it is difficult to assess a person’s oxidative stress using only one biomarker. Damage is variable over different testing periods.

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Christine Peterson presented “Good News, Bad News, Surprising News” about life extension. She now spends about half time studying life extension as an enthusiast.

She began by stating that terminology matters. Which terms are best: life extension, health extension, anti-aging, longevity, immortality, or permanent health?

Since we are made out of meat, we enjoy the pleasures of life, but we end up aging and dying. Life extension enthusiasts want a pill to extend life, but nothing like that exists now. Medical doctors, researchers, and the FDA are not interested in life extension, in addition to the overall challenges of the biology of aging and possible research into ways to extend healthy lifespan.

She surveyed quickly those for and against life extension, including Leon Kass, Bill Clinton, Aubrey de Grey, and others. There are soft and hard approaches to the problem, including SENS and nanotechnology, and eventually nanomedicine.

A list of things that will help to buy some time until radical life extension technologies are available:

[Recap]

Calvin Mercer asked “Cryonics and Religion: Friends or Foes?”  Cryonics, Mercer believes, will require support from more people than just scientists, including religious people.  How should cryogenics supporters present these ideas to religious people?

How the discussion will play out, according to Mercer, will include debates between liberal and conservative viewpoints, anthropocentric versus theocentric beliefs, materialism versus the supernatural, pragmatic versus dogmatic outlooks, and revisionists versus traditionalists.  This will show up as supporters and critics in the various Christian religions.

Mercer seeks to generate discussion about radical life extension among liberal religious people and someday among conservative religious people, starting with academics.  He provided two examples of success, including sessions at a conference and a book.

Liberal religious people are most concerned about issues of justice and fairness.  They worry that these technologies will not be available for everyone.  On the right are the conservatives, and Mercer said there are degrees of conservatism, but with common characteristics like belief in the supernatural and dogmatic thinking.

Mercer believes some conservatives will in fact embrace radical life extension.  They will be torn between their beliefs and their desire to get “being a good Christian” right to avoid going to Hell.

Christian faith includes the concept of the “miracle” of resurrection.  On the one hand there is resuscitation of the dead, like Lazarus. On the other there is transformation of the dead, like Jesus.  The dialog between radical life extentionists and religious people could be started around their ideas about “indefinite” lifespans and “infinite” existence, respectively.

[Commentary]

I would not expect an Alcor Conference talk about “Cryonics and Unicorns.”  I would not expect talks about “Cryonics and Astrology,” “Cryonics and Baseball Players,” or “Cryonics and Intelligent Design.”  However, I do understand that the majority of people are religious or spiritual.  Mercer presented this talk as an academic, rather than a theologist.

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Popcorn, cookies, and pretzels. We talked to a couple who are musicians and Alcor members about how art can be used to promote life extension and transhumanism.

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[Recap]

Calvin Mercer asked “Cryonics and Religion: Friends or Foes?” Cryonics, Mercer believes, will require support from more people than just scientists, including religious people. How should cryogenics supporters present these ideas to religious people?

How the discussion will play out, according to Mercer, will include debates between liberal and conservative viewpoints, anthropocentric versus theocentric beliefs, materialism versus the supernatural, pragmatic versus dogmatic outlooks, and revisionists versus traditionalists. This will show up as supporters and critics in the various Christian religions.

Mercer seeks to generate discussion about radical life extension among liberal religious people and someday among conservative religious people, starting with academics. He provided two examples of success, including sessions at a conference and a book.

Liberal religious people are most concerned about issues of justice and fairness. They worry that these technologies will not be available for everyone. On the right are the conservatives, and Mercer said there are degrees of conservatism, but with common characteristics like belief in the supernatural and dogmatic thinking.

Mercer believes some conservatives will in fact embrace radical life extension. They will be torn between their beliefs and their desire to get “being a good Christian” right to avoid going to Hell.

Christian faith includes the concept of the “miracle” of resurrection. On the one hand there is resuscitation of the dead, like Lazarus. On the other there is transformation of the dead, like Jesus. The dialog between radical life extentionists and religious people could be started around their ideas about “indefinite” lifespans and “infinite” existence, respectively.

[Commentary]

I would not expect an Alcor Conference talk about “Cryonics and Unicorns.” I would not expect talks about “Cryonics and Astrology,” “Cryonics and Baseball Players,” or “Cryonics and Intelligent Design.” However, I do understand that the majority of people are religious or spiritual. Mercer presented this talk as an academic, rather than a theologist.

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[Recap]

Steven Harris is a researcher developing “Rapid Body Cooling for Prevention of Brain Damage.” Rapid body cooling technologies are important to both cryonics and emerging short-term treatments. Hypothermia induced by lowering the body temperature by 4 degrees Celsius in five minutes could allow sufficient time for medical care workers to work to treat a patient, say, after a stabbing wound or other life-threatening injury.

Post-resuscitation hypothermia was discovered by accident in 1980 in dogs. Brain damage can be prevented and the animal resusciated after clinical death. The first human clinical trials failed, because it took too long to start cooling the patient’s body. Two other trials have been positive, including resusciation of cardiac-arrest patients.

Harris is working on a technology to rapidly cool the body. Using Cold Perfluorocarbon Liquid Lung Lavage, Harris has been able to lower the temperature 5.3 degrees in 5 minutes in a dog. The next day, the dog was up and active again.

[Commentary]

This is an incredibly exciting technology, but Harris seemed to be very pessimistic about popularizing it. According to Harris, because of short patents and socialism, new resuscitation technologies are difficult to develop and spread. There were a lot of technical details in the talk, and the speaker had to skip over many of them when time ran out. He ended with a video of a dog that appeared to be fine 24 hours after use of the technology.

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Day two of the Alcor Conference. The day began with the “Human Cryopreservation and Critical Care Medicine Panel,” including Alcor’s Tanya Jones, critical care physician David Crippen and bioethicist Leslie Whetstine and moderated by Aschwin de Wolf.

[Recap]

The panelists discussed the various definitions death, including legal and biological, and the ethical issues of cryonics. A diagnosis of brain death is required for organ procurement as well as cryopreservation, but determining death is difficult. There are several steps within brain death and it is difficult to determine exactly what part of the process a brain may be in at any particular time. These difficulties and complexities require negotiation between hospital and Alcor personnel, and there are similarities and differences with organ donor requirements.

Alcor prefers the pronouncement of cardiac death over a pronouncement of brain death. Whetstine argued, however, that cardiac death is problematic. If the heart is dead, but the brain is not, and as technologies improve, then this could lead, according to Jones, to a time when the first steps of cryopreservation will transition from an after-death procedure to a medical procedure requiring trained medical personnel.

[Commentary]

The inclusion of a bioethicist in the panel added some drama to the proceedings. Whetstine appeared to be arguing (and this is a vast oversimplification of her argument) that it is okay to declare someone dead if their heart stopped, but it is wrong if you then want to cryopreserve the patient.

So when is a patient dead? When is it okay to cryopreserve them? Right now, Alcor must work within a legal and cultural framework that does not view cryonics as feasible and where the definition of death is changing. Jones said she believes Alcor will need to go on the offensive based on positive results, instead of waiting to be attacked. Whetstine was argumentative, but I found her arguments unclear. She obviously finds cryogenics problematic, but she kept repeating things like “but then they are not really dead” and “that is not death.” She works on the definition of death and believes it needs to be changed.

Some Alcor members were concerned about how their own personal wishes would affect decisions made upon their death. Crippen felt that physicians generally honor their patients wishes, but Whetstine felt patients’ consent should not be part of a declaration of death. Crippen said Alcor members need to get over thinking of consent as something that trumps legal and cultural issues.

Both Jones and Crippen believe that the framework will need to change for cryonics to be more acceptable. Alcor, said Jones, must be open about their arrangements to ensure a more positive future for Alcor.

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[Recap]

Does Aubrey de Grey really need an introduction at this point? His public proposal for repairing and reversing the damage of aging, SENS, and his public admission of being an Alcor member were the topics he discussed in “Is it Politically Safe for a Biologist to Support Cryonics Publicly?”

According to de Grey it is an important decision for a scientist to admit to supporting cryonics. A public acknowledgment of their support can affect their professional work. One of the dangers of being a leader in admitting to support is the lessened ability to procure funding. Funding peer review can be more difficult than publication peer review.

A cryonics leader provides public outreach and information. As other speakers have emphasized, legal death is only a convenience that needs constant review as technologies advance. Some people who are legally dead have in fact been revived, and this is something de Grey suggests the public be reminded of. Brain death is itself a complicated concept. Not only can a person be legally dead, they can be legally alive but functionally brain dead, via dementia, for example.

Cryonics supports can also provide ethical leadership. Cryonics supports can help demystify death and cryonics, promote cryonics as life saving, and provide facts for a useful ethical debate. Some people find cryonics “yucky” but a straightforward approach by scientists, rather than anger or ridicule, could be especially effective in demystifying the technology.

Science politics will also be affected by leadership. While mainstream cryobiologists support organ preservation, they do not generally embrace brain preservation. Leaders can point out this apparent discrepancy.

Leaders in this situation may be one of those lucky few who do not have to worry about dangers to their careers, funding, etc. De Grey believes he was lucky to have entered this field and “make trouble” without destroying his career. These lucky few should be able to help each other, until there is a tipping point toward broader support of cryonics.

De Grey believes he made the right decision to go public about his support of cryonics and Alcor membership.

[Commentary]

Leaders are important to any movement, and technologies themselves can be movements when tied to ideas like radical life extension. Cryonics support can be positively affected by people standing up and admitting they support the idea.

But what will be sacrificed when one stands up and stands behind such ideas? How does one talk about cryonics? These are important questions, and I think a review of other movements and how they address their own topics may be helpful.

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Ice cream! Networking! Being nearly run over by busy organizers!

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[Recap]

Another approach to recovery of cryonics patients, or patients prior to requiring cryonics, is regenerative medicine, that is, the ability to use stem cells to rebuild tissues. Michael West from Advanced Cell Technology discussed “Immortal Cells: The Prospect of Regenerative Medicine.”

The biology of aging remains a mystery, and West provided a history of thoughts on aging, including a reference to August Weismann in 1891 who predicted that cell division in somatic cells is finite. His research, however, was ignored. Researchers have since determined the finiteness caused by a “clock” in somatic cells, through telomere shortening on the tips of DNA over multiple cell divisions. The germline maintains telomere length. West and his research team tried to take this ability in germline cells and apply them to somatic cells. According to West “it worked!”

A reservoir of “immortal cells’ turned out to be human embryonic stem cells. These cells, even in the laboratory, will differentiate into a wide-range of tissues. According to West, nuclear transfer does reset the “aging clock,” despite the common belief that research showed this was not to be the case, with Dolly the cloned sheep commonly believed to have been “born old.”

Where is the field of stem cell research currently at? West and his company are working on technology to sort stem cell precursors to various mature tissues.

[Commentary]

Recent research into the environment of stem cells, as opposed to stem cells themselves, suggested you cannot simply inject stem cells into the body, especially an older body, and hope they regenerate and rebuild the necessary tissues. Particular factors in the environment of these stem cells appear to be important for letting the stem cells do what they need to do, according to researchers like Irina Conboy. West said that there are definitely unanswered questions, but so many promising avenues of research that something good will come from this activity.