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What You Can Do By Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah Foundation Chairman and Chief Science Officer
This is one of my five FAQ ("Frequently-Asked Questions") pages: it covers queries about how one can help the SENS effort. The other FAQ pages respond to:
- General challenges to the “credibility” of SENS,
- Criticisms of how I’m going about making SENS a reality,
- Concerns that defeating aging is a bad idea or at least a low priority, and
- Questions about how long people of what current age may live.
Note: even though there are links to separate items below, I recommend reading this page straight through from start to finish.
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Doing the science
IF YOU'RE A BIOLOGIST: read my papers on the technologies we need to develop in order to defeat aging. If you think I'm being too optimistic in those papers, read the key experimental work that I cite and see if that changes your mind. Also, listen to the talks from the conference, IABG 10, that I ran in September 2003, and the talks from my most recent conference, SENS 2, which occurred in September 2005 and was if anything even better than IABG10. If you're still skeptical, to say why -- you might be right, but I deserve the chance to hear your reasons! Conversely, if you're inspired to work in any of these areas, , so that I can put you in touch with others who are working on the same topic.
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Learning to see biology as an engineer
IF YOU'RE AN ENGINEER, COMPUTER SCIENTIST, ETC: learn some biology. I started making really well-received contributions to biogerontology after I'd been reading the literature for TWO MONTHS - no kidding. Maybe I was lucky, but maybe it was just that scientists really need input from people with a different training and mindset. Don't take the easy way out of thinking that you can't help because you haven't got the right expertise. The best way for someone with mathematical or computer training to get into biology is just to dive in and not be scared of how many facts there are. Start with a graduate-level cell biology textbook, such as "Molecular Biology of the Cell" by Alberts et al. (If the phrase "graduate-level" scares you, another book by some of the same authors and targeted at undergraduates may be a good stepping stone: it's called "Essential Cell Biology" and it has been highly praised.) It's important to learn masses of biology - certainly the whole of graduate-level animal biology - because aging is a chaotic interaction of lots of system failures going on all together and you won't understand it well enough to make a useful contribution if you only understand selected bits of how we work when we're young. If you want to go back to college and get seriously educated in the relevant fields, that means that at undergraduate level you should aim for the most general biology course, covering all aspects of animal biology - genetics, biochemistry, molecular biolog, cell biology, physiology, the lot.
- Solving biology's greatest computational problem
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Publicising SENS
IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST: write about my work - but most importantly of all please interview other mainstream biogerontologists (the more senior and high-profile the better) and ask them to explain why they don't think we'd cure aging any time soon by the approach I advocate. And also listen to the talks from IABG 10 and SENS 2.
WHOEVER YOU ARE: add a link to sens.org to your email signature file! This sort of advertising really gets noticed.
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Donating to SENS research
IF YOU WANT TO HELP FUND SENS RESEARCH: read about the proposed Institute of Biomedical Gerontology (IBG) and contribute to SENS research funding, which will eventually support the IBG and is already, in a much smaller way, supporting the LysoSENS pilot project in two US universities.
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Donating to the Methuselah Mouse Prize
IF YOU WANT TO HELP FUND LIFE EXTENSION RESEARCH IN GENERAL: contribute to the Methuselah Mouse Prize fund. No amount is too small! -- the number of individual donors is just as important as the size of the prize fund, in terms of showing public support for this effort.
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Linking to this site
IF YOU HAVE A WEBSITE, A BLOG, ETC: link to my site, spread the word to sites more popular than your own, do all the things a web site is good for. I'll link back to you from my general links page if you do.
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Translating this site
IF YOU ARE FLUENT IN A LANGUAGE NOT LISTED HERE: and especially if you know lots of biology, so that your scientific language is reliable, please to ask about translating some of my web pages.
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Funding the science
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Donating air miles
IF YOU HAVE SOME SPARE AIR MILES: please consider donating them to the Methuselah Foundation to support my travel expenses, which constitute a large proportion of my biogerontology-related outgoings. I get quite a few expenses-paid invitations to conferences, but I also attend a lot of conferences where I pay my own way, and the Methuselah Foundation subsidises that.
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Promoting SENS to friends/colleagues/family
WHOEVER YOU ARE: talk to your friends/family/colleagues about what life would be like without aging and find out what they don't like about the idea. Get better at rebutting their arguments. You'll find that they will very quickly realise they have no arguments, but then it gets harder, because they will try to change the subject. Don't let them get away with this. Read my reasons why I claim people should be working now to cure aging as soon as possible, and if there are ways in which you think they can be improved or added to. In fact, you're welcome to contact me with any suggestions you may have for how the SENS effort can be expedited, whether by improvements to this site, activities of the Methuselah Foundation, whatever.
IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE FITTING ANY OF THE ABOVE DESCRIPTIONS: why are you still reading? Go and tell them what they can do to help, and make sure they do it!
IF YOU'RE NONE OF THE ABOVE: well, become something! You will be surprised that achieving goals gets much easier and much more fun, once you are personally fully motivated for something and understand why you are.