For those interested in the cutting edge of ageing related research, I can highly recommend the Futures in Biotech podcast: http://twit.tv/fib74 http://twit.tv

For those interested in the cutting edge of ageing related research, I can highly recommend the Futures in Biotech podcast: http://twit.tv/fib74 http://twit.tv/fib74 There are some fascinating things to be learned, about ageing as an anti-cancer mechanism, and particularly about how much is being discovered right now. It seems that what we characterize as ageing is mainly a side effect of "cellular senescence" which may very well be treatable without increasing likelihood of cancer. There are people who say we basically have the means now to increase life spans by at least 15% but ... another fascinating aspect is that a huge blockage to research on ageing is that it is not classified as a "disease", which means firstly that it fails to qualify for funding from most public sources and further that it is every very difficult to get drugs through the FDA since the FDA will reject things that don't have a proven clinical benefit (hard to prove for something that isn't a disease in the first place). As a result, even though we could have a huge impact on cancer by funding ageing research, we don't - instead we fund cancer research and some little bits of that trickle into knowledge about ageing.