Robert Bradbury Signature Page

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.