Part 3

(13:46) Can you address the viability of current cryonics techniques (vitrification) and whether or not companies like Alcor should enjoy continued operations?

So SENS foundation does not work on cryonics, of course, we’re interested in helping people avoid the need to be cryopreserved by fixing them up and repairing their bodies so that they maintain youth while their heart is still beating. However, it’s reasonable to regard resuscitation of a cryopreserved individual as a natural extension of that repair process. Therefore I actually am very positive about the eventual future of cryonics and I’m certainly very interested in it. I would say that at the moment, the situation, the prospects for cryopreservation and the revival of people cryopreserved with the best technology that exist today, are pretty good. The most serious problem that used to exist, until maybe ten years ago, which was the problem of crystallization caused by taking someone down to a temperature below freezing, has now been comprehensively solved with the development of cryoprotectants that can achieve complete vitrification, that is to say, turning the body into a glass rather than into a crystalline solid. There are problems that remain, including the toxicity of these cryoprotectants, and the fracturing that occurs as a result of simple thermal stress, but these problems too are succumbing pretty rapidly to research. So I think even for those that are perhaps a little less optimistic than myself about the revivability of people who are cryopreserved today, we can look forward only a little way down the road at a decade or two or three to cryopreservation techniques that really are going to work really well. Of course everything is going to change enormously when we see a mouse actually revived having been at liquid nitrogen temperatures. And that’s not going to happen tomorrow. But I certainly think that Alcor and Cryonics Institute and the other cryonics organizations are doing sterling work and I support them strongly.

(15:51) What unconventional things should I be doing now (I’m 26) to extend my life to hitherto unreachable levels?

Really the biggest thing you can do, and this is true at any age, is to work to make it conventional to support the defeat of aging with medicine. Make it conventional! And what I mean by that, is any number of different types of things, it could be working on the relevant biomedical research so as to make it look more realistic because what has already been done, it could be advocacy in the media, you know writing as a journalist about this, it could be organizing conferences, there’s all manner of different ways to do advocacy. But really the thing is that if you don’t do that, if you just focus on diet and lifestyle and such like, then you will only make a minimal difference. Whereas if you if you work to hasten the development of therapies that really defeat aging, you can make a big difference. And here’s the key: not just for yourself, but also for an amazing number of other people. An absolutely incalculable number of other people. This is really why I focus on all of this. Another thing is of course that people can do is to invest in companies that are working in this area, or to donate to nonprofits that are working in this area. I would say that the donation to nonprofits is the most urgent, because once something’s gone far enough to attract investors, it generally attracts a lot of investors. And so one’s going to make more of a difference by donating to nonprofits that are working on the earlier stages of all of this, such as of course SENS Foundation.

(17:32) For those that wish to join your field, what areas of study are the most relevant? What would be a good Grad School path for people who want to become researchers in the aging biology and regenerative medicine fields, and which Grad Schools are considered top with regards to aging research?

The thing about grad school, and actually about everything beyond grad school in scientific research, is that you’re more or less required to be a very narrowly focused researcher, and to actually just focus on one very small thing. And in aging of course, there is an enormous amount going wrong, so there is an enormous number of different fields. What makes the situation even harder for an incoming grad student to analyze, is that many of the fields that are relevant to the biomedical defeat of aging are not normally classified as coming under gerontology. In fact the whole of the SENS concept comes from the merging of gerontology with expertise from regenerative medicine and other areas, even as far afield as environmental decontamination. So we’re talking about a very very broad area. I think therefor, the best way for an incoming grad student to choose which area to work in is, well first of all, to get a nicely comprehensive understanding of where the SENS program currently is, so start with my book Ending Aging for example, as a summary, and of course look at the SENS.org website and the publications in the peer-reviewed literature that we’re sponsoring. And then, to get a feel for which areas are most fascinating, which areas one feels one has the most talent to actually pursue. Certainly do not be guided by things that call themselves gerontology because that will artificially restrict you before you’ve even started making the choice.

(19:15) For those of us who didn’t study science or engineering at university, how can we help/contribute/get involved?

There’s really a one-word answer to this question that really encompasses everything. And the word is advocacy. Advocacy simply means educating and reassuring people about the prospect of medically defeating aging and about what it could mean for humanity. I use education very advisedly here, because ultimately when I talk to people who have concerns, whatever those concerns may be, about the defeat of aging with medicine, and who are ambivalent as a result about whether we should be pursuing that task as quickly as possible, I normally find that their concerns come down to misunderstandings of one sort or another. Either about the nature of the therapy and you know, what it would actually do in terms of extending healthy life rather than extending the undesirable frail part of life. About what it would do in terms of the economy, people think it would be terribly expensive and therefore might increase inequality, whereas in fact the truth is that this would pay for itself in society extremely rapidly and therefore it’s definitely going to be made universally available, people are worried about sociological and environmental consequences arising from the prospect of overpopulation, but again it seems very clear that that’s not going to happen because of the trends that we’re already seeing in terms of birth rates and in terms of age that women have their children on average. You know, all of these things are simply a matter of giving people the right information. But in order to do that, of course, first of all you need to educate yourself. I actually quite often find that our most ardent supporters who just ‘get it’ and just don’t feel that there’s any reason to worry about these things, have not always educated themselves very well, and so they don’t always give the most persuasive, and the most important, the most useful answer to people who come to them with a contrary view. It’s all about advocacy.

Part 4 (Last one, I swear)