[ExI] Extrope Robert Bradbury Has Died

[spike]

Subject: [ExI] Extrope Robert Bradbury Has Died
Importance: High


    L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder, 
    Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group, reports:


I have just been informed by David Kekich (who heard from Robert's older
Brother) that Robert Bradbury passed away either late Saturday night or
early Sunday morning (in Florida where he was caring for his Father), of a
completely unexpected and sudden hemorrhagic stroke, for which no one was
prepared.




New timers: Robert was a regular poster on ExI in the 90s.  He was a most
original and imaginative thinker.  He will be missed.

http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/sg.html


Robert Bradbury Signature Page

Brief Biography: 

I was born October 5, 1956 in Melrose, Massachusetts and lived the first 18
years of my life in Saugus, Massachusetts, whose claim to fame is the Saugus
Iron Works National Historic Site. My paternal ancestors are the English
Bradbury family and my maternal ancestors are the Irish White family. I am
the eldest of 4 boys. My fondest memories as a child are of taking things
apart (electronic equipment my father collected over the years) and putting
things together (train sets, models ships and rockets, chemical reactions,
electronics projects, etc.). I enjoyed reading science fiction, starting
with the Tom Swift Series, many by author James Duncan Lawrence, followed by
Arthur C. Clarke (@Amazon, @Yahoo, A.C.C. Unauthorized Home page and Arthur
C. Clarke Links) and Isaac Asimov (@Amazon, @Yahoo) and the fantasy
alternate realities genre as described in J.R.R. Tolkien (@Amazon, @Yahoo, A
Tribute to J.R.R. Tolkein or Tolkien Links), Anne McCaffrey (@Amazon,
@Yahoo, WW Webguides Anne McCaffrey) or Piers Anthony (@Amazon, @Yahoo) -
Xanth Novels or Xanth Threads. One of the books that made me think about the
possibility of lifespan extension was Arthur Clarke's book Against the Fall
of Night which was later republished with an added sequel by Gregory Benford
as Beyond the Fall of Night" . 

For sports I generally did better at those based more on individual efforts.
I enjoyed swimming and track in junior high school and during my senior year
at Saugus High School was co-captain of the gymnastics team. In my 20's I
tried ballroom dance for a couple of years and then moved on to roller
skating and aerobic dance. In my 30's wind surfing, circus acrobatics and
scuba diving held my interest at various times.  I also snow and water ski
at an intermediate level. 

I entered Harvard University in 1974 as a physics major but rapidly
determined that my math skills were insufficient for physics and that my
logical abilities were better suited for computers. From 1975 through 1977 I
was the systems manager and programmer on the first and largest commercial
UNIX installation in New York City. It was a major event (for someone of 18)
when Ken Thompson (one of the authors of UNIX) visited our site to install
UNIX because we had more memory on our PDP 11/70 than he had at Bell
Laboratories. Returning to Harvard in 1977, majoring in Computer Science
with a minor in economics but determined that the opportunity costs of
continuing my education were unjustified and returned to New York the
following year. 

During my high school years I worked as an an electronics technician for
Measurmatic Electronics, a company which made high torque stepping motors.
Through the late 1970's and early 1980's I spent time employed or consulting
for a variety of firms, as a UNIX guru and C compiler expert gathering
experience in a variety of fields; Commercial Union Leasing Corporation
(financing), Graphic Management Systems (graphic analysis), Time Inc. (news
& publishing), Yourdon Inc. (structured design), Logicon Intercomp Corp.
(real time systems) and Triad (embedded microsystems). Starting in 1981, I
began to spend much of my time working for Oracle Corporation in Menlo Park,
California. There I was responsible for the development of their C Compiler
for IBM mainframes and putting the Oracle Relational Database Management
System on UNIX platforms. I was employee number 28 at Oracle and worked
through 1987 as the UNIX product development manager. During that time I was
also Oracle's representative to the ANSI X3J11 committee which was in the
process of trying to standardize the C Programming language. Several library
functions now part of the C standard were my direct contributions. My final
contribution to Oracle in 1988-89 was to produce the first version of Oracle
to run on Novell's NetWare 386. 

Having worked in the computer industry for 15 years, I decided to do
something completely different, so I "retired" and went back to school at
the University of Washington to study biology and related fields in the hope
of learning how to apply computers to protein structure modeling. My
instructors there included George Martin, an expert in aging theories and
Alzheimer's Disease, and Larry Loeb, a leading researcher in DNA damage and
cancer. By 1991, I had taken most of the microbiology and biochemistry
courses available and was trying to determine a future direction. In August
of 1991, there was a seminar series, Pathology 507, which hosted number of
leading researchers including Bruce Ames and Richard Albertini. Their
comments on the involvement of mutations and oxidative damage in cancer and
aging caused me to spend the rest of 1991 and most of 1992 in the library
studying why and how humans age. 

My basic conclusions were that aging is a multi-factorial process involving
a number of gene defects predisposing one to the diseases of premature death
combined with a program which fails to maintain and repair sufficiently for
extended longevity. As there were a number of experiments which I wanted to
do to test various aspects of these theories, I began to look for routes to
do those experiments. There seemed to be three choices, (a) to go work as a
graduate student for a leading gerontologist, (b) to try to start a company
in the U.S. to do the research and (c) to arrange contracts with other
researchers, perhaps outside of the U.S. to conduct the experiments. For a
variety of reasons I chose to execute (c) with a number of Russian
scientists. This has lead to a number of interesting results which included,
in part, the formation of a WWW Aging Resource site in 1994-1995.  Late in
1995 we interested investors in expanding our efforts and we opened a
laboratory in Seattle.  In March of 1996, financing arrangements were
concluded and I became the president of Aeiveos Sciences Group.  During 1996
and 1997 ASG conducted research into the longevity genes of centenarians,
the changes in gene expression in aging mice and the free radical protection
genes in birds.  Changes in my interests combined with problems in the
research directions, management team and investor interests led to a
separation between myself and Aeiveos Sciences Group in late 1997.  Aeiveos
Sciences Group subsequently ceased all research activities. 

Since 1997, I have focused most of my time on understanding the real limits
to personal longevity and intelligence and the related areas of the
evolution of technological civilizations, how long they might survive and
whether any existing astronomical phenomena may be explained as
astronengineering efforts of highly advanced long lived civilizations. 

Over the years I have had the opportunity to travel extensively.  To the
best of my recollection, the countries that I have visited, in order, are:
Mexico, Canada, Italy, the Virgin Islands, Martinique, England, Pakistan,
India, Netherlands, France, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Turkey,
Russia, Indonesia (Bali), Germany, Turks & Caicos, Japan, Barbados, South
Africa and Costa Rica.