Meredith Averill Posted November 4, 2011 Report Share Posted November 4, 2011 What a pleasure to welcome you all here to the CR Society’s 7th Conference! As Chair of the Society’s Board of Directors, I’m the lucky one who gets to welcome you and open the festivities today. Rest assured that all the other board members welcome you, too. In fact, in case you don’t know all the board members by sight, even after last night’s reception, we will give you a chance now to put faces to names. So, when I say your name, board friends, please stand so that people can see you and know who you are. On this occasion the most important board members are the ones who have done almost all the work to make this conference a reality. Dr. Robert Krikorian is a Director and Program Chair of the conference and hails from Ohio. David Stern is Conference Local Arrangements Chair, as well as Treasurer of the Society and comes to us from Illinois. Next, I’d like to introduce Paul McGlothin – Besides being a Director, he’s the Society’s Vice President for Research and lives outside of New York City. It’s my pleasure to introduce a man whom you will see more of shortly: Dr. Tim Calmeyn, from Illinois, is both a Director and the Society’s Chief Information Officer. Having introduced all the board members present, I would like to say that two others had to be absent: Brian Delaney lives in Sweden and is experiencing more passport red-tape than usual and Bob Cavanaugh had made a family commitment for these days. Both send their greetings. As you probably all know, this is a special date: It’s the 10th anniversary of our first CRSociety conference, held in 2001, in this city – in this hotel with many of these same faces. Will everyone who was here for CR I please raise your hand and let us all recognize you here ten years later?! To be sure we’re all on the same page regarding the Society’s and the board’s activities, since the last conference – that’s Atlanta, 2009, the board has done a bunch of things while focusing on two important aspects of the work: Web site development for upgrading CRSociety.org, led by Tim Calmeyn and CR Research, led by Paul McGlothin The CRONA study, based at UCSF, was initiated by Elizabeth Blackburn's lab. And you may remember that she won the Nobel Prize for her discovery of the relation between telomeres, as well as telomerase, and aging. So imagine our complete delight when The CR Way phone rang and it was Dr. Janet Tomiyama, now Principal Investigator, representing Cynthia Kenyon, Elissa Epel, and Elizabeth Blackburn – mentioning the Nobel Laureate first! So when we thoroughly understood what they had in mind, sharing it with the CR Society was clearly what to do. If you didn’t already know this story, you still won’t be shocked to learn that one of areas of research will be the effect of CR on telomere length. Five other star scientists are involved with this research. We mentioned two of them: • Cynthia Kenyon of microscopic worm fame: she’s made them live twice their normal life span. • Elissa Epel, whose standout work has linked stress with increased rates of aging, The other three are • Anne Brunet is famous for her work with "longevity genes," FOXOs and Sirtuins. • Pankaj Kapahi, known for his work on the TOR pathway’s effect on aging: He will also be here at the conference if he’s not already. • Eric Verdin, whose lab focuses on histone deacetylases, a family of genes that play a major role in CR effects: Sirtuins are members of this family. All are studying our data from their own perspectives, so the overall results should be very rich indeed. Now for the update: The data have been gathered on both the CR cohort, composed almost entirely of Society members, as well as the controls. And the PI – Janet Tomiyama, has moved to Rutgers, has set up her lab, and is hard at work – crunching the numbers. We certainly look forward to the results. Turning now to work you are all familiar with, the Effects of long-term CR, that we have been doing at Wash U. with Luigi Fontana, who is scheduled to be with us shortly. Out of that work has grown a separate study by Steve Spindler, who will also be with us shortly. Having the scientists with us is a real pleasure. Web site As CR Society members, you are no doubt familiar with our Web site CRSociety.org, though you may spend more CR Society time on the list. And before I move from this idea of spending lots of time on the list, I want to single out one member who makes an inestimable contribution to the richness of the list. And that person is Dr. Al Pater. We thank you, Al, for the CR information that you share with us. Soon I won’t be able to say that you spend more time on the list than the site because this is about to change – based not insignificantly on a vote taken at the Atlanta conference. The members agreed that the CR Society should move with technology into a more user-friendly environment for our communications, using technology that has more functionality and allows us to accomplish our mission more effectively. That is forum technology. We will start with three forum rooms: CR Science CR Practice Community -- intended for posts about longevity broadly: mentioning CR is fine I will spare you the details of the work to get to today’s very exciting point – the point of unveiling the site – to you, today! Tim Calmeyn – undoubtedly the person in the room who is most familiar with our newly upgraded site –joins me now to give us a look. CR Society Forum and Website Redesign Posted by: Tim C. (IP Logged) Date: October 29, 2011 06:56PM I am pleased to announce the CR Society forums available at the redesigned website: [www.crsociety.org] In the 2009 Atlanta conference the subject of switching to forum software was discussed. Many of the advantages were discussed at this week's Las Vegas conference. - embedded pictures, video (YouTube, e.g.) - edit posts, remove duplicates - move posts to the correct forum There are email support functions so that you can be notified based on specified criteria - watch an entire forum - watch a specific thread - be notified if you are quoted This change should allow for greater numbers of people to learn about the practice of CR and the ongoing, promising research. Regarding logging on to the new site, if you had a crsociety.org account, those credentials should still work but you may need a password reminder (especially signups in the last month). If there are any technical difficulties, please contact me offlist. Regarding the archives, if you click on the "Forum" link, you will see a button for "Email List Archives". Eventually, we would like to integrate those into the forum so one search can go through all the old email posts and new forum posts. Welcome to the redesigned site -- Welcome to the Conference! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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