The 2nd SHARE Conference Showed Us How to Undo Aging
The second SHARE Conference took place in Belgrade from April 26th – April 28th. It is, as their website says, an epicenter of exchange of progressive ideas and knowledge in the field of society, technology, Internet, music and new media.
One of the most visited lectures was the opening lecture of the conference – Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. Sunde talked about how important it is to share and how we should cancel the middle man in that process. We all use things like Dropbox and Gmail, but that helps create a centralized internet and it is a bad course of development.
Last year Sunde remixed the letters to spell out a certain word by using A, R, S and E. This year he remixed SHARE’s letters to: ARISE. We are looking forward to seeing what he will create next year! 😉
On the second day, Elizabeth Stark, who co-founded Open Video Alliance, shared her vies on RIAA and the other supporters of PIPA/SOPA legislations. She is an influential open internet advocate that was deeply involved in stopping SOPA. Elizabeth referred to RIAA & alike as the MAFIAA and stressed out that they hate the open internet.
MAFIAA industries don’t like this. It is not about piracy, it is about something much bigger. It is a war on sharing.
Doctor Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist and the Chief Science Officer and co-founder of the SENS Foundation. He says that aging is a side-effect of being alive in the first place, which we could all agree on. 😀 Metabolism (by which he means all of the proceses in the human body that actually keep us alive) has side-effects and when those side-effects accumulate, it causes damage. Accumulating damage results in pathology.
There are two approaches to dealing with this problem: the “gerontology approach” and the “geriatrics approach“. The geriatrician will intervene when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try to stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. This is a very short-term strategy; it’s a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on.
The gerontology approach seems a little bit better, because it works on prevention, but right now we are not quite ready for that because we simply do not know enough about metabolism to actually know how to influence it.
De Grey points out that there seven problems types of damage that cause aging:
- cell loss/atrophy
- death resistant cells
- nuclear (epi)mutations (only cancer matters)
- mitochondrial mutations
- junk inside cells
- junk outside cells
- extracellular crosslinks
Let’s take an example of the junk that gathers inside and outside of our cells. If we could clean that junk out, and treat other five problems accordingly, we could become biologically younger in a meaningful sense: in terms of our youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of our risk of death from age-related causes. He calls this way of treating damage an “engineering process“.
He is working on these therapies and he believes that the person that will live 150 years is already alive today!
Share Conference 2 offered us a little bit of law, a little bit of science, a little bit of technology, social activism and a lot of good music and opportunities to meet interesting people and actually chat with the lecturers. If you skipped this one, make sure to attend the next one, which I am already looking forward to!
