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Life Extension: How to Reach a Societal Turning Point — Talk by Keith Comito at D.N.A. Conference

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Keith Comito on stageKeith Comito on stage

Keith Comito, President of the Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation and the Lifespan.io crowdfunding platform, discusses progress in building a grassroots movement in support of healthy human life extension and details a comprehensive plan to increase support for related research on a societal level.

The talk begins with the history of how early cancer advocates, such as Mary Lasker and Sydney Farber, created the War on Cancer via effective PR maneuvers such as the Jimmy Fund, leveraging the ensuing support to create societal change.

The topic then transitions to pairing growing grassroots support with continual calls to action, such as the projects on Lifespan.io, to enlist thought leaders and synergistic groups, such as YouTube science communicators and video game charities, into the cause and thus engage an increasingly wide audience.

The discussion also addresses how the life extension community can find commonalities with diverse religious groups and overcome the cognitive biases that inhibit laypeople from thinking deeply about longevity.

This presentation is part of the Designing New Advances conference held by the Institute of Exponential Sciences in the Netherlands, which is orchestrated by Demian Hoed and Lotte Van Norte.

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Eterna is a clothing company with a focus on longevity.

 
CategoryAdvocacy, News
About the author

Keith Comito

Keith Comito is a computer programmer and mathematician whose work brings together a variety of disciplines to provoke thought and promote social change. He has created video games, bioinformatics programs, musical applications, and biotechnology projects featured in Forbes and NPR. In addition to developing high-profile mobile applications such as HBO Now, MLB At Bat, and most recently Disney+, he explores the intersection of technology and biology at the Brooklyn community lab Genspace, where he helped to create games which allow players to direct the motion of microscopic organisms. Seeing age-related disease as one of the most profound problems facing humanity, he now works to accelerate and democratize longevity research efforts through initiatives such as Lifespan.io. As president of LEAF, he is a leading advocate for the increase of healthy human lifespan, participating in numerous speaking engagements and press appearances around the world, and working to produce high-impact media projects to inform and engage the public regarding this critical topic. He earned a B.S. in Mathematics, B.S. in Computer science, and M.S. in Applied Mathematics at Hofstra University, where his work included analysis of the LMNA protein.