With all the geeks using Macs, I discover I have a Winferiority Complex.

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Aubrey de Grey is talking about postponing aging. He thinks the “war on aging” is only a decade a away and it “may be a very short war.”

He suggests some milestones: when we know all the elements of aging in mice, when we know how to fix them, etc.

He draws a simple diagram:

Metabolism ——> Damage ——> Pathology

Gerontology intervenes before the damage but, Aubrey says, they intervene too early. Geriatrics kicks in after the damage of aging has begun. Engineering is the way to fix aging, he says. Don’t try to interfere with metabolism. Instead fix the damage.

He says there are only seven deadly types of damage involved in aging: our organs lose cells, nuclear mutations, mitochondrial DNA mutations, cell senescence, age crosslinks, extracellular junk, and lysosomal junk.

He says that not only are we confident that this is the complete list but “I know how to fix them.” All seven. He adds, “In principle.”

He wants to “break the log jam” by appealing to philanthropists to spend $100M/year for 10 years. He wants to know if anyone in the audience knows people who can fund it. People laugh good-naturedly.

In response to a question: It will be a world without children.

Provocative and entertaining.

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Michael West is talking about cells that can become any type of cell and that don’t die. He’s showing photos of nerves, folllicles, heart muscle and much more, all made in the lab.

The cells W authorized for NIH funding would all be rejected by foreign bodies, i.e., you and me. Michael’s proposing therapeutic cloning, i.e., taking a cell from the body and making it young and embryonic again, and then making what the patient needs. (This is different, obviously, from reproductive cloning.) He shows footage of a cell being cloned: it looks way simple and mechanical.

By introducing young, cloned cells into the body, there’s data that they start to reline our aging arteries. And they can be targeted to kill the tumors that attract them. And we’ve now injected cells into a heart after it had a heart attack; the cells relined the thinning heart muscle with new tissue.

He talks about using “search and replace” to alter a DNA sequence. Someone in the audience asks if there’s spellcheck.

Whitfield Diffie asks what will happen when a lesbian couple clones a baby, “thus proving that men are dispensible.”

Someone from the audience says that Jews don’t resist stem cell research “Because in our tradition, a fetus is a fetus is a fetus … and then it becomes a lawyer.”

Excellent presentation. Much more info than I’ve captured. Quiet passion.

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Alan Goldstein is a biomaterials engineer. He says he’s going to convince us that xenobiology is an oxymoron, he says. Biology will not get out of the 21st century alive, he says. (He hasn’t explained what xenobiology is. It’s got something to do with alien life forms. Here’s the wikipedia on it.)

I’m not actually understanding much of this. The main points seems to be that the life we find or make (not sure which) will not be carbon based and that we should be worried about unrestrained scientific adventurism in this (which?) field. Ah, at the end he says:”The take home message? Nanotechnology trumps biotechnology.”

Ok.

A questioner asks what the problem is. Alan says that the question is whether bioengineering ought to go ahead as it is with no questions being asked.

Allow me to give myself a big fat D’oh! When I first posted this, I thought the speaker was Michael Braungart because that was the name in the schedule. But Braungart had to cancel, and Goldstein subbed for him. (Thanks to Jessie Scanlon for the correction.)

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Golan Levin has done a concert by carefully ringing the audience’s cell phones. He’s telling us about abstracting from communication processes. For example, he has a web site that lets you create your own alphabet; it looks like you enter a scrawl and it uses evolutionary algorithms to generate the letters.

He also is the one who wrote a program that tests the online popularity of numbers 0-1,000,000. It’s a beautifully designed, interactive site.

He shows an astounding app he wrote that turns your quick scribbles into audible clouds of swirling threads. Impossible to describe but hypnotic.

In another installation, as you speak shapes representing them float out of your shadow. For all its weirdness, it seems exactly right.

Wonderful stuff. His site is www.flong.com.

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Peter Ward says that the most important word is methane…and how it will change the world. He suggests a few ways diversity on Earth will come to an end: Accidentally: comet/asteroid, supernova, mass extinction (e.g., greenhouse), human-caused (runaway non, nuclear war).

It’s an amusing, huge-focus presentation on the arc of life. We are, he says, on our way back to becoming Planet Yogurt: bacterial life will continue until the Sun pulses and explodes.

Shorter term, he thinks we’re heading for an ice age.

He says the next presidential election is the most important in history because we’re facing climate changes that we can forestall and that would be cataclysmic.

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Larry Lessig is talking about — guess what — copyright. And more. He is a fabulous presenter. You feel smarter just hearing his voice.

He begins by wondering what would had happened to photography if the courts had decided that you had to have permission before taking someone’s photo. In fact the courts did decide this, but went for

In 1800, only the publication of commercial works was regulated by copyright. You could transform it without permission. And all non-commercial works were free. Over time, the law of copyright was changed to cover more non-commercial works. In 1909, the word “publish” was replaced with “copy” in order to cover things like copying statues, but the “copy” word accidentally meant that the scope of the law was increased as there were more machines for copying. Had “publish” been kept, we would not have been tempted to regulate, say, photocopiers. By 1995 and the Internet, we’ve lost the division between the commercial and noncommercial because the law is regulating copying. Copyright now covers uses of content, not just the publishing of commercial content.

Larry asks whether this is, overall, good or bad. We can agree (he says) that it’s good to protect commercial published works on the Internet. Even transforming copyrighted published materials is good: Grisham can control and benefit from the movie that’s made of his novel. But is it good for non-commercial copying and transforming? Maybe it makes sense to control some of the non-commercial. But we need to ask.

Larry shows the hysterical mix of Bush and Blair singing a love song to each other and points out that it’s illegal. “We should be changing the law to fit the changing technology.” We have to protect authors of course, but our response has been to go to war…a war against our children. We should in fact lock up the real pirates who run off illegal CDs. But transformation of culture, fan fiction, and 12-year-olds sharing content should not be the subject of our war. “We’re seeing a land grab.”

The consequence: If you think about what we could be doing if we were free to share and transform. We are squandering our opportunity “because those who have the power and time and patience to spend time in Wasington are succeeding in redefining the rules to mean that to share or transform you need permission.”

What do we do? Larry at first thought we should reform the law “because the tradition speaks on our side of the battle…We’ll just appeal to the values of our framers.” It is, he says, hopeless. Instead, Larry is working to change within the law: Creative Commons. It’s a set of tools to mark content as free…to let a reasonable layer of permission sit on top of copyright law.

“It’s been framed as pirates vs. property. But there’s also a tradition in which we build upon our pasts and we want to give people permission to be part of that tradition.”

Someone asks about civil disobedience. Larry tells of an RPI student who was sued for indexing RPI files, 25% of which were MP3s. The RIAA sued, asked how much the kid had saved, and settled for that amount ($12,000). Disgusting and depressing.

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On a mailing list, Kim Alexander points us to an article in the UK Independent about voting machines:

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

The question is whether we can trust our voting machines. And this is a question that is going to get very big very soon, I believe.

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Christine Peterson is being very funny and knowing about nanotech. She begins by reacting against the excessive informationalism of the previous speakers: “Atoms are cool too.” Right on.

Nanotech, she says, has not been overhyped. It can change our relationship to matter. Nano, she says, is about changing the structure not just of nanos but for objects of any size.

Why focus on machines, she asks, instead of on electronics or sensors? Because it’s “machines that can make all the others better.”

She wants to see the issues — pro and con — discussed seriously in public. The “short attention bozos” get all excited but then they lose interest and the real discussion can begin. (Hey, I’m one of them bozos!) We need, she says, to fight bad patents, balance protecting investments and encouraging openness, defend the public domain (Lessig is sitting on stage, the next to speak). What is the safest country to develop this potentially dangerous technology? How do you prevent abuse? She suggests that it’s probably cooperative development and stable institutions.

She recommmends foresight.org and nanodot.org. The guy next to me points to Utility Fog. Christine suggests a possible future: You have one object in your house and it changes into the various objects you need.

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Greg Stock asks: What is the relationship between the revolutions in information and biology? He argues for the importance of flesh. But what he cares about is our ability to “adjust and modify” our biology. “This will revolutionize health care and medicine, of course, but it will change the way we have children, how we manage our emotional states, probably change the human life span itself,… and it will carry us to questions of what it means to be a human being.” [Close to accurate quote]

Greg reminds us that we’re at a unique time in the history of the universe and everything will be different. [Yes, this is too much boosterism for my taste.]

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