What Longevity Research Most Excites You?

Plastination and brain scanning already has a great deal of mainstream approval, with large projects underway at mainstream places like Harvard, because the scientific benefits for neuroscience are so compelling & obvious.

Oh, did you mean support for the emulation part? Well, the nice thing about your brain being plastinated is that you can afford to wait a few decades/centuries in a way you can't if you're cryopreserved and organizational continuity is a serious problem.

Or did you mean expected value? I don't expect much from mainstream medicine since it has failed to extend old-age longevity much, and even if SENS or caloric restriction was surprisingly successful and extends life by a few decades, you still die in a few decades. Background reading: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5qm/living_forever_is_hard_or_the_gompertz_curve/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/7jh/living_forever_is_hard_part_2_adult_longevity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/bl3/living_forever_is_hard_part_3_the_state_of_life/

I'm with you; of the items that christina originally listed, SENS is the really important one. Nonbiological nanodevices or nanoconstructs might be useful as delivery systems or probes, but mostly we should be interested in biology all the way, e.g. designer bacteria as "medical nanobots". Full-spectrum nanotechnology, and techniques for storing brain information, are really about opening the abyss of posthuman possibilities, and that's a severe challenge whose resolution ought to be intimately involved with however the human attempt at coexistence with artificial intelligence works out. But human rejuvenation is comparatively :-) straightforward and should be on everyone's to-do list.

I asked BenaGene, a company that also sells Oxaloacetate, why, if citric acid directly metabolize to oxaloacetate, I should take its product rather than having a bit of lime juice every day. I received the following response:

Back when the "antioxidant" theory was big, there were several lifespan studies done with various antioxidants including Citric Acid (citrate) and ascorbic acid. There was no increase in lifespan.

While under certain conditions oxaloacetate can convert to citrate, and vice versa, it does not create the conditions we want. We want to flood the cellular system with oxaloacetate so that it converts to malate.

So why not just take a bunch of malate? (found in apples). It's because during the conversion of oxaloacetate to malate, NADH also converts to NAD+. This increase in the NAD+/NADH ratio is the key to activating AMPK which leads to similar genomic changes similar to a calorie restricted state. These changes then lead to increases in lifespan.

On the other hand, lime juice is very helpful for making margaritas.....

In what quantity? How much citric acid would you have to take to get 100 mg of Oxaloacetate? Plus, all supplements sold without a prescription in the U.S. have to naturally exist within the body or be in "normal" foods. If resveratrol had proved to have anti-aging properties buying it wouldn't be a ripoff even though resveratrol is in red wine.

There appears to have been clinical human trials which "show an average reduction in fasting glucose levels of 25% in Type I and Type II diabetics".

And nematode studies.