The intercom in Death’s office buzzes. With a slightly frustrated sigh, Death lifts his skeletal head from the newspapers he was reading, takes a puff of his cigar, stretches out a little, and presses a button on the intercom.
— I swear, all this work is going to kill me one day. I said I didn’t want to be interrupted, Miss Coffins; what is it?
— I’m sorry, Mr. Death, but Mr. Aging insists that he needs to see you right now. He says it’s urgent.
Over the past 100 hundred years, the average human lifespan has increased dramatically, thanks to exponential advancements in science and technology. While living to 80, 90, and even 100 is a possibility, humans have long been in search of the ultimate discovery – immortality.
In order to achieve immortality, scientists have identified four key issues that must be overcome. These include telomere shortening, chronological aging, oxidative stress, and glycation. If these could be drastically reduced or even eliminated, immortality may just be in our reach. However, there are some promising technologies that are prolonging the human lifespan right now, and could eventually lead us to immortality.
It is definitely a creepy a concept to think about, but studies have shown that regular blood transfusions sourced can extend the human lifespan by 10–20 years. Scientists have found that a protein called GDF11 is very common in the blood of young mice, and has been shown to increase skeletal muscle and increase heart strength. This protein has been deemed to have anti-aging properties, making it a promising technology in extending human lifespan.
Scientists from global biopharmaceutical company MSD will come to the Crick next year to tackle a range of conditions associated with ageing such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
A new team of around 15 MSD chemists and pharmacologists will be based at the Crick over the next five years, working to develop new understandings of diseases that affect the UK’s ageing population.
The scientists will be based at the Crick while MSD establishes their new discovery science centre and UK headquarters in London, the location of which is being finalised. Their work will complement the MSD neuroscience cell biology team already established at the London Bioscience Innovation Centre, and both teams will eventually move to MSD’s new centre.
Early Bird ends soon!
Have you got your tickets yet? If not, then you just have a few days to do so and save €200.
After the incredible success of the 2018 Undoing Aging Conference with 350 participants from 36 countries and over 40 brilliant speakers,\xA0 SENS Research Foundation \xA0and Michael Greve’s\xA0 Forever Healthy Foundation \xA0 are pleased to announce that Undoing Aging 2019 will take place in Berlin at the Umspannwerk Alexanderplatz from March, 28 to 30.\xA0.
The annual Undoing Aging conference is focused on the cellular and molecular repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control. Unding Aging 2019 will again focus on\xA0bringing together scientists and startups from around the globe in their r espective fields, who are leading the charge in maintaining and restoring full health in old age.
Speakers include leading researchers from around the world focused on topics including stem cells, senescent cells, immunotherapies, biomarkers and drug discovery.
Researchers at UCLA have managed to guide pluripotent stem cells into becoming adult T cells, the cells that patrol the body to kill cancer and other diseases and that are trained in our thymi.
The study, published in Cell Stem Cell, was led by senior author Gay Crooks, M.D., a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of pediatrics. Dr. Crooks is the co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA.
Biological life extension may hit limits. “Clearly, there are biological reasons for each species’ average lifespan, so why would anyone think that people could live for much longer than we do now?” Perhaps new breakthroughs will nudge lifespans upwards, but maybe these scientists are correct. This is why I still work on artificial death (non biological uploading to MVT awareness engines). Even if average ages go up many folks will still become terminally ill, and apart from MVT artificial death (second best to life) they will only have expensive cryogenics or doubtful religious faith as alternatives.
The average age of people over 110 has not increased for nearly 50 years.
Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss in seniors, and existing treatments are few.
But now, experiments in pigs and rats suggest that stem cell therapy might help curb at least one form of the disease.
The results could soon lead to the first human trials of this therapy for macular degeneration, according to researchers from the U.S. National Eye Institute (NEI).
Today, we chronicle the progress of OSKM and discuss how this powerful treatment may be able to reprogram cells back into a youthful state, at least partially reversing the hallmark of epigenetic alterations and other hallmarks as well.
The birth of cellular reprogramming
In 2006, a study by Drs. Takahashi and Yamanaka showed that it was possible to reprogram cells using just four master genes named oct4, sox2, klf4, and c-myc, or OSKM for short [1]. Prior to this, it was assumed that egg cells (oocytes) would contain a complex array of factors needed to reprogram a somatic cell into becoming an embryonic cell. After all, the feat of transforming an aged egg cell and reprogramming it to make a new animal must be controlled by many factors present in the egg cell, or so they thought.
LEAF writer Nicola Bagalà recounts meeting an old lady on the street and considers what might have happened in a world free from age-related diseases.
I would like to share a story about an encounter I had a couple of years back, when I was nearing the end of my university studies. At the time, I lived in a student apartment pretty much on the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland. Like most of Finland, this area is beautiful and brimming with green everywhere in the summer, but at the end of March— which is when the story takes place—it still looks like a barren, icy desert, and during a late evening like the one on which I had my encounter, it can be very cold and dark.
That evening, my girlfriend and I were coming back from the nearby supermarket, carrying two or three heavy bags full of groceries and looking forward to being home. We were talking about something I can’t recall when we passed right next to another person whose figure I could not make out very well. I had a feeling that it was a woman, but that’s all I could tell. As we walked away from her, I thought I could hear a voice calling—maybe it was her, but I told myself that she was probably talking on the phone or something. I heard her calling again, at which point I turned around to check if she was actually trying to catch our attention.
I was right—she was a woman. More specifically, an old Finnish lady, looking quite lost and tired. What follows is an account of the conversation I had with her—my girlfriend can’t really speak Finnish. I had actually written this down somewhere not too long after it had happened, but I could not remember the conversation line by line, and I had to improvise a little to fill in the blanks here and there as I translated it from Finnish. It is as accurate as I can possibly make it.