Lifeboat Foundation

“In a sense, we’re all meat robots.” Chief Scientist at Hanson Robotics blurs the lines between biological and engineered robotics in this short yet fascinating excerpt.

“As our technologies have gotten more advanced, [we have] more and more control over…deeper levels of biological life.” — Bradley Cantrell.

Engineers have programmed cells to remember and respond to events. This approach to circuit design enables scientists to create complex cellular state machines and track cell histories.

Transhumanists will know that the science fiction author Zoltan Istvan has unilaterally leveraged the movement into a political party contesting the 2016 US presidential election. To be sure, many transhumanists have contested Istvan’s own legitimacy, but there is no denying that he has generated enormous publicity for many key transhumanist ideas. Interestingly, his lead idea is that the state should do everything possible to uphold people’s right to live forever. Of course, he means to live forever in a healthy state, fit of mind and body. Istvan cleverly couches this policy as simply an extension of what voters already expect from medical research and welfare provision. And while he may be correct, the policy is fraught with hazards – especially if, as many transhumanists believe, we are on the verge of revealing the secrets to biological immortality.

In June, Istvan and I debated this matter at Brain Bar Budapest. Let me say, for the record, that I think that we are sufficiently close to this prospect that it is not too early to discuss its political and economic implications.

Two months before my encounter with Istvan, I was on a panel at the Edinburgh Science Festival with the great theorist of radical life extension Aubrey de Grey, where he declared that people who live indefinitely will seem like renovated vintage cars. Whatever else, he is suggesting that they would be frozen in time. He may actually be right about this. But is such a state desirable, given that throughout history radical change has been facilitated generational change? Specifically, two simple facts make the young open to doing things differently: The young have no memory of past practices working to anyone else’s benefit, and they have not had the time to invest in those practices to reap their benefits. Whatever good is to be found in the past is hearsay, as far as the young are concerned, which they are being asked to trust as they enter a world that they know is bound to change.

Questions have been already raised about whether tomorrow’s Methuselahs will wish to procreate at all, given the time available to them to realize dreams that in the past would have been transferred to their offspring. After all, as human life expectancy has increased 50% over the past century, the birth rate has correspondingly dropped. One can only imagine what will happen once ageing can be arrested, if not outright reversed!

Continue reading “Beware the Rise of Gerontocracy: Some Hard Lessons for Transhumanism, Not Least from Brexit” »

Over the past several years, Northwestern Engineering’s Michael Jewett did the seemingly impossible. He overcame the critical barrier to making mutant ribosomes, the core catalyst in cells that are responsible for life.

Now, with funding from the Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) program, Jewett is ready to take this research to the next level. Along with a multi-school team, he plans to use engineer and repurpose the ribosome to make new kinds of polymers for flow batteries.

“We are in a new era of biomaterial design,” Jewett said. “So far, the ribosome has been this untouchable biomolecular machine — one that we couldn’t engineer or modify. Now, armed with recent advances in our ability to construct new versions, new applications may only be limited by our imagination.”

Continue reading “Repurposing the ribosome for synthetic biology” »

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund have now found a way to pinpoint the positions of individual molecules while at the same time measuring their activity and interactions in the same living cell. A dedicated cooling protocol on a microscope allows to pause cellular life at subzero temperatures, to let it continue to live again after warming. From the series of individual snapshots obtained, the researchers are able to form a precise spatial-temporal picture of the activity patterns of individual molecules within individual cells.

Fluorescence microscopy allows seeing where biological molecules are in cells. However, what Werner Heisenberg formulated for quantum physics to a certain extent has its analogy in biology: In the living state one can observe the collective movement of molecules in cells, which makes it however difficult to determine their exact positions. Paradoxically, the molecular dynamics that sustain life have to be halted to record the position of molecules using high-resolution fluorescence microscopy.

Living matter maintains its structure by energy consumption, which results in dynamic molecular patterns in cells that are difficult to observe by fluorescence microscopy, because the molecules are too numerous and their movements too fast. To tackle this problem a choice needs to be made: to precisely record the position of the molecules in a ‘dead’ state or to follow their collective behaviour in the living state. Although researchers have been able to stop movements in cells by chemical fixation, such methods lead to irreversible cell death and the acquired images of molecular patterns are not representative of a living system.

In part 2 of our plant synthetic biology series we teamed up with Cameron Tout of the Legume Laboratory blog to introduce some of the tools of plant synbio and how these are being applied to agriculture.

Over 9000 years ago the first domesticated varieties of wheat were created in South West Asia. What was remarkable about these plants is that they were selected by humans to retain their seeds rather than dispersing them by wind. This meant that wheat became dependent on farmers for propagation, but allowed people to harvest grain without the pods shattering in their hands.

Since then, humans have been modifying plants in ever more sophisticated ways, the 20th century saw the introduction of mutation breeding and hybrid technology, resulting in massive gains in crop yields.

Continue reading “From Plough to Pipette” »

A new “nano scalpel” enables scientists at DESY to prepare samples or materials with nanometre precision while following the process with a scanning electron microscope. The Focused Ion Beam, or FIB, microscope which has now gone into service also allows a detailed view of the inner structure of materials. The device was purchased by the University of Bayreuth, as part of a joint research project on the DESY campus funded by the Federal Ministry of Research. The FIB will be operated at the DESY NanoLab jointly with the University of Bayreuth.

“The microscope is not only able to examine microscopic defects, cracks or point-like corrosion sites underneath the surfaces of materials, but also to machine the surface of samples with extremely high precision, on a nanometre scale,” explains Maxim Bykov, project scientist from the University of Bayreuth. A nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. The ion beam can be used to remove material as though it were a microscopic milling machine; as a result, the combined ion beam and electron microscope is particularly interesting for a wide range of applications in nanotechnology, materials science and biology.

“Apart from examining the structure of materials, the ability of the ion beam to remove material also leads to a wide range of different applications,” says Natalia Dubrovinskaia who is a professor at the University of Bayreuth and in charge of the joint research project (No. 05K13WC3). One example is the preparation of tiny diamond anvils, which are used to hold samples during ultra high-pressure experiments. The diamonds used for this are so small that there is no other way of preparing them. The ion beam microscope allows so-called double-staged diamond anvil cells to be prepared with nanometre precision. The ultra high-pressure experiments are carried out at DESY’s Extreme Conditions Beamline (ECB) P02.2, headed by DESY scientist Hanns-Peter Liermann.

Continue reading “‘Nano scalpel’ allows structuring of samples with nanometre precision” »

Nice.

Networks are mathematical representations to explore and understand diverse, complex systems—everything from military logistics and global finance to air traffic, social media, and the biological processes within our bodies. In each of those systems, a hierarchy of recurring, meaningful internal patterns—such as molecules and proteins interacting inside cells, and capacitors and resistors operating within integrated circuits—determines the functions or behaviors of those systems. The larger and more intricate a system is, however, the harder it is for current network modeling techniques to uncover these patterns and represent them in organized, easy-to-understand ways.

Researchers at Stanford University, funded by DARPA’s Simplifying Complexity in Scientific Discovery (SIMPLEX) program, have made progress in overcoming these challenges through a framework they have developed for identifying and clustering what mathematicians call “motifs”: essential but often obscure patterns within systems that are the building blocks of mathematical modeling and that facilitate the computational representation of complex systems.

Continue reading “Mathematical framework that prioritizes key patterns in networks aims to accelerate scientific discovery” »