You are cordially invited to participate in the second Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) conference, which will be held from 7-11 September 2005 at Queens' College, Cambridge.

The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research and the Methuselah Mouse Prize), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, but instead enumerating the accumulating molecular and cellular changes that eventually kill us and identifying ways to repair -- reverse -- those changes, rather than merely to slow down their further accumulation.

50 other illustrious speakers are already confirmed. The provisional schedule for the conference is here.

SENS 2 will therefore continue and extend the superlative quality of the inaugural SENS conference held in 2003. The calibre of that meeting can be seen from the abstracts, the online audio recordings of the talks, and most of all from the proceedings volume, which was published as volume 1019 of the prestigious Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The proceedings of SENS 2 will be published in Rejuvenation Research, the only international peer-reviewed academic journal focused on the development of technologies to postpone and reverse age-related physical and cognitive decline in mammals and eventually humans.

The meeting will comprise invited talks, short oral presentations of submitted abstracts, and poster sessions. There will be no concurrent sessions. Talks will take place in the Fitzpatrick Lecture Hall. Poster sessions will take place each evening in the conservatory adjacent to the bar, with the customary free alcohol.

The conference will also feature the traditional punting on the Cam: an hour on the Backs for the faint-hearted and an afternoon or evening trip to Grantchester for the rest of us.