SENS 3 Media For Your Edification

The SENS 3 conference was held from 6 - 10 September, 2007, at Queens' College, Cambridge, England. The third in a series of informational meetings (involving numerous biologists, gerontologists, and medical professionals) to discuss the technical aspects behind the Strategies for Engineerered Negligible Senescence, I've only just started poking at the media from this conference.

Anyone who wants to get a sense of what sorts of things are being discussed by longevity-oriented scientists these days might be interested in downloading the audio (or watching available video if that's your thing) of the SENS 3 talks.

I'm going to be monitoring a test setup tomorrow for work (as an electromagnetics engineer, sometimes I get to quite literally stare at a screen for hours on end to make sure nothing goes funny on the product when it is exposed to prescribed levels of radiation), and believe me, I will be very grateful for my iPod during this testing!

These SENS talks are a great example of longevity medicine as healthcare that will hopefully come to benefit everyone at some point. I'm quite interested in learning more about things like:

- The efficacy of cancer vaccines to prevent cancer in the elderly

- The potential for virus modulation of cell death pathways

- Immunological approaches for amyloid beta clearance toward Alzheimer's disease treatment

As you can see...no mooning over mythological notions of "fountains of youth" here. Just good, solid investigative science geared toward helping mitigate problems like cancer in the elderly, cell death leading to other health issues, and Alzheimer's. And you definitely don't need to be a biologist in order to appreciate media like this -- all you really need is to be interested in the subject matter. Even if you don't know what the speakers are talking about at first, you will likely start catching on after hearing a few presentations, at least enough to get the gist of what they are saying.

I'm just really pleased to see decent science media being offered -- thanks very much to the SENS 3 presenters who have allowed their talks to be posted online. With all the "anti-aging fluff" making the rounds these days, it's nice to know that some people at least realize how complex (and important) the task of helping expand truly effective medicine to the elderly is.