X-Message-Number: 18285 From: Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 16:36:48 EST Subject: NewYrNews&Thoughts from Ron Havelock Today's issue of the Washington Post brings 2 pieces of important medical news of interest to life extenders. Leading on the left top front page, "A Cancer Fighter is Linked to Aging." Protein p53, "a central cog in the cancer-fighting machinery of many animals" also shuts down body's ability to renew organs, bones, muscles, etc. Study group headed by Lawrence Donehower at Baylor College of Med, Houston, found that mice they had tried to breed with weakened p53 were hyperactive producers instead. What they later discovered, by accident, is that while they resisted tumors, they aged much more rapidly than controls. Study published in respected journal Nature suggests a key factor in aging may have been discovered along with the dilemma: do you want cancer or do you want to get old fast? Ultimately, I assume as do they, that we can get around this Hobson's choice one way or another, but in any case the knowledge advance may be huge. So says Arnold Levine of Rockefller U and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins, leading ca researchers. The other item which may be nearly of equal importance is NEJournal of Med study by US and Italian researchers studying autopsied heart tissue of transplant recipients. Turns out that as much as one fifth of donated heart was rebuilt by recipient. Heart muscle and blood vessels "grew rapidly" in the new hearts after transplant, apparently from stem cells which may have circulated in the blood. I am no authority on medical matters but as a lay person I am very impressed by 2 such reports on one day, Jan 3 , 2002 from such respected sources. These 2 items are but a small symptom of the flood of new medical knowledge that has been coming in over the last 10-20 years. Sooner of later the implications of all this for life extension should become obvious to a much larger public and at that point I believe [or perhaps just hope] there will be a rather sudden upsurge of interest in cryonics, particularly among those who can see the dawning medical future but realize also that their own age prevents them from extending their lives into that future by normal means. This suggests to me a target audience and a marketing strategy to appeal to optimistic futurists. There are a lot of futurists out there but they belong to three very different camps. The first and perhaps the largest is the pessimists, those who fear the consequences of technology along with population growth and the hedonistic tendencies of modern culture generally. These people, many of them classified as 'liberals', and, ironically, many as religious conservatives, will strongly oppose cryonics to the bitter end. They have strong belief systems defended by what they consider 'facts' that effectively block out our messages. The second group of futurists I would describe as the fantasists, people who love to absorb themselves in science fiction without serious consideration of the science content or the probabilities of a real future based on what we now know. They will flock to Vanilla Sky and then The Lord of the Rings and maybe Harry Potter without the least concern for what might be possible or even conceivable. They just want to be entertained. I doubt if this is a very good audience for serious cryonics interest but I don't know. Then there is the third group of futurists, people who believe that progress is connected to science and technology, people who are impressed as well as thoughtful about what it all means but set it within an essentially optimistic framework both for themselves and for humanity as a whole. These people are out there and they should be our friends. How do we reach them? Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18285