Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers at the University of California discovered a key way that cancer manipulates the genetic code using DNA methylation that has important implications for the treatment of cancers. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Up until now, scientists haven’t fully understood how DNA methylation causes changes in our genetic code that enable cancer to thrive.

Now, a team led by associate professor Jikui Song at the University of California Riverside have deciphered the crystal structure of an enzyme that plays a crucial role in DNA methylation that allows tumors to survive and grow.

Continue reading “Researchers crack secret code to genetic changes causing our cancer” »

#Transhumanism in the Sunday Times of London. 750,000 copies out today. My pres campaign in it briefly, as well as other transhumanists.

The new Netflix series Altered Carbon is set in a dystopian future where the super-rich can avail of technology that allows them to upload their consciousness to a new body every time they die, in effect giving them immortality.

It’s science fiction, of the kind previously explored in the novels of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, movies such as RoboCop and The Terminator, manga comics like Ghost in the Shell and even the Man-Machine album by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk — but only until it comes to pass.

Continue reading “It’s transhuman life, but not as we know it” »

Netflix’s new original series Altered Carbon explores a world where, in just a few centuries, humans can live forever. WIRED asks the experts if that’s true, then how do we get there?

In partnership with NETFLIX

Continue reading “The world in 2384: Is it possible to achieve immortality?” »

Eliminating disease is an admirable ambition but it seems it’s the lack of education, environment and lifestyle that is really holding people back and causing them to lose interest in life.

Is anti-aging technology and increasing the human mortality rates helping to create a more fulfilled, life worth living. Let’s look at this question…

But Altered Carbon is only the latest bit of transhumanism to hit TV recently. From Black Mirror’s cookies and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams’ mind-invading telepaths and alien bodysnatchers to Star Trek: Discovery’s surgical espionage and Travelers’ time-jumping consciousness, the classic tropes of body-hopping, body-swapping, and otherwise commandeering has exploded in an era on the brink, one in which longevity technology is accelerating more rapidly than ever, all while most people still trying to survive regular threats to basic corporeal health and safety.

Nobody wants these dumb meat-sack bodies anymore. Now TV is asking if what replaces them will be any better.

If humans are destined for deep space, they need to understand the space environment changes health, including aging and antibiotic resistance.

A new NASA project could help. It aims to develop technology used to study “omics”—fields of microbiology that are important to human health. Omics includes research into genomes, microbiomes and proteomes.

The Omics in Space project is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The project was recently funded by NASA’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health four years of study. Over that time, NASA hopes to develop 3D printable designs for instruments on the International Space Station (ISS), that can handle liquids like blood samples without spilling in microgravity. These tools could enable astronauts to analyze biological samples without sending them back to Earth.

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We wanted to bring your attention to an open-access publication in which the researchers suggest that the age-related decline of the thymus is more important than DNA mutation as a cancer risk factor[1].

Repairing the damage

As we have discussed in this article, cancer is caused by DNA damage that creates mutations. Damage to our DNA happens all the time, and we have various repair systems in place for it.

Dr. Atala is the Director of Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest School of…