The Coun­cil on the Age­ing Soci­ety is one of the Global Agenda Coun­cils cre­ated by the World Eco­nomic Forum in 2008. It addresses global issues asso­ci­ated with our age­ing soci­ety and has the task of chal­leng­ing pre­vail­ing assump­tions, mon­i­tor­ing trends, propos­ing solu­tions, devis­ing strate­gies, and mak­ing pub­lic pol­icy pro­pos­als. It is com­posed of sci­en­tists, pub­lic pol­icy mak­ers, aca­d­e­mics, physi­cians and busi­ness lead­ers, includ­ing our very own Alvaro Fernandez.

The first report of the Coun­cil on the Age­ing Soci­ety was pub­lished this month in Global Pol­icy. In this first pub­li­ca­tion Read the rest of this entry »

Head­ing to Dubai today (a 15-hour direct flight!), com­ing back to San Fran­cisco next Monday.

Last year I wrote about this remark­able new ini­tia­tive by the World Eco­nomic Forum here (pro­posal) and here (reflec­tions, emerg­ing dis­cus­sion). This year’s update:

• Overview: Net­work of Global Agenda Councils
• List of Coun­cils: Here
• List of Mem­bers: Here
• Mem­bers of Age­ing Soci­ety Coun­cil: Here
• Info on 2009 Sum­mit: Here
• Report from 2008 Sum­mit: Here (opens PDF in new window)

Twit­ter: #WEF­Dubai. Will tweet dur­ing the event, and blog about it next week.

Wel­come to the third edi­tion of Hour­glass, the monthly vir­tual gath­er­ing of blog­gers to dis­cuss the Biol­ogy of Aging.

For today’s edi­tion, let’s imag­ine all par­tic­i­pants sit­ting around a table lead­ing a lively Ques­tions & Answers ses­sion, dis­cussing as a group, lis­ten­ing, talk­ing. (And, well, aging.)

Q: What is aging?
Ms. Wikipedia: “Age­ing or aging (Amer­i­can Eng­lish) is the accu­mu­la­tion of changes in an organ­ism or object over time. Age­ing in humans refers to a mul­ti­di­men­sional process of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and social change. Some dimen­sions of age­ing grow and expand over time, while oth­ers decline. Reac­tion time, for exam­ple, may slow with age, while knowl­edge of world events and wis­dom may expand.”

Aging may not be the sex­i­est  of words in our vocab­u­lary. Unless, of course (as I heard some­where recently but can’t prop­erly credit), you con­sider the most com­mon alternative.

Q: If the objec­tive of anti-aging research is to extend lifes­pan, isn’t there a risk that we may neglect qual­ity of life. After all, would peo­ple really like to spend more years afflicted by the dis­eases and the decline that often come with age?
Ed (dragged to the dis­cus­sion by Chris and Alvaro): I have rel­a­tively good news to share. A recent Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark found that the pro­por­tion of elderly Danes who man­age to remain inde­pen­dent holds steady at Read the rest of this entry »