2022 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk
Victor Bjoerk
Happy New Year 2022!
The year 2021 went way too quickly; more than ever I feel time moving at an extremely fast pace. The definition of a year is rather arbitrary, and it does not even match when the Sun is actually is at the lowest/highest point. It does not feel that long ago I was a kid counting down the seconds to the year 2000, and people were talking about all the changes the new millennium would bring.
What is time really? If there is no united answer in physics except being a property of the universe that gets heavily warped when matter travels close to the speed of light, then to what extent does it matter? (Pun intended.)
So yes, New Year’s celebrations might be an arbitrary tradition, but that can be said about any holiday, and I think it is good to have a “set point” to think about the past and what can be improved in the future.
A lot of things happened during 2021 for me; as in previous years I am motivated by the mission of impacting the longevity field and I am happy to know so many wonderful people in the process.
I also want to say thank you to the Rejuveron Life Sciences AG, Foresight Institute, LongevityTechFund, Vitalic, Heales, as well as others I have collaborated with during the year to help grow the longevity space. Our initiatives in the longevity ecosystems are enormously important to make therapies happen!
Think about the perspective of this: life is 4.5 billion years old… The chain of evolutionary events that has shaped what we define as a human is nothing short of incredible. Now you, the person reading this text, happen to be exactly on the cusp where we can use all molecular tools to eradicate diseases deemed incurable in the past. Whether we die from dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease or not is up to us and the correct funding of the biotech companies involved.
With that I wish you a happy fruitful 2022!
Victor Bjoerk (Victor Björk) has worked for the Gerontology Research Group, the Longevity Reporter, the Fraunhofer-Institut für Zelltherapie und Immunologie, BioAge, and Ichor Therapeutics. He has promoted awareness throughout Europe of emerging biomedical research and the efforts to reverse biological aging. In his honor the U.S. Transhumanist Party organized the Victor Run 2020 and 2021 Virtual Races. Watch the USTP Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Victor Björk, which took place on June 13, 2021, here.
On Sunday, June 13, 2021, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invited molecular biologist Victor Björk to discuss his work in longevity research, his extensive advocacy for reversal of biological aging, as well as his interest in running and the Victor Run Virtual Race, which was organized by the U.S. Transhumanist Party in his honor in 2020 and 2021. Victor Björk is a Director of the Healthy Life Extension Society (Heales), a Brussels-based NGO think tank that organizes conferences and events on aging biotechnology. He studied molecular biology at Uppsala University. He is an expert on aging, drawing upon over 12 years of experience tracking companies and daily reading of scientific publications on aging. He previously worked at two leading companies in the field, BioAge Labs in San Francisco and Ichor Therapeutics in New York. He has been a speaker at multiple conferences and for different organizations on the topic of aging.
One thought on “2022 New Year’s Message by Victor Bjoerk”
Thanks for this message Victor.
Whether we die from dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular disease or not is indeed partly up to us. And the most important part is a correct funded research.
But I’m pretty sure the correct funding means only giving money when it is in a context where scientific knowledge is shared. Patents, Non disclosure agreements and other IP laws are a big way to slow down technological progress along with other bureaucratic problems coming from public authorities
So correct funding means of biotech companies not to give money to biotech companies or public authorities without conditions related to common good (as soon as possible, longevity for all those who want it). I hope you agree about this.