Lifeboat Foundation

Come “ask me anything” right now!!! I’m trying to answer all questions I get asked:

Hi Reddit,

Thank you for having me here. My name is Zoltan Istvan, and I’m a futurist, journalist, and science fiction writer. I’m also the 2016 Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

Continue reading “AMA: I’m Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist US Presidential Candidate. Ask me anything!! : Futurology” »

Aging leads to diseases and ultimately death. Time for people to ditch the semantics and recognise that aging and disease are not two mysterious independent processes but are in fact one and the same.

Aging leads to the diseases of aging and the discussion is largely a matter of semantics.

“The concept of aging is undergoing a rapid transformation in medicine. The question has long been asked: Is aging a natural process that should be accepted as inevitable, or is it pathologic, a disease that should be prevented and treated? For the vast majority of medicine’s history, the former position was considered a self-evident truth. So futile was any attempt to resist the ravages of aging that the matter was relegated to works of fantasy and fiction. But today, the biomedical community is rethinking its answer to this question.

Continue reading “Aging, Just Another Disease” »

Science is making progress on the treatment of aging and age-releated diseases but should you rush out and start your own testing or not? This article weighs up some of the pros and cons.

Senescent cells accumulate with age, and secrete an unfortunate combination of signals that harms organs and tissues in numerous ways, such as via the production of increased chronic inflammation. This is one of the root causes of aging and age-related disease. Safe and effective clearance of senescent cells has been on the SENS rejuvenation biotechnology agenda for fifteen years, but only recently has progress in scientific funding and demonstrations of improved health and life spans in mice snowballed to the point at which startup companies could make a real go of it. Things are moving fairly rapidly in this field now. With the recent $116 million venture investment in UNITY Biotechnology’s work on senescent cell clearance, and other companies angling for their own launch, it is fair to say that this line of research and development is underway for real. Clinical trials of senescent cell clearance will be underway soon, funded by UNITY Biotechnology, and using drug candidates such as navitoclax developed in the cancer research community, noted for their ability to induce apoptosis, a form of programmed cell death. Senescent cells are primed for apoptosis, and it takes little to tip them over the edge in comparison to a normal somatic cell, which means that there may well be quite a large stable of existing drugs that will have some useful effect.

The question here is one that is only now starting to be useful to ask: should we all be running out today to obtain and take a drug (such as navitoclax) or drug combination (such as dasatinib and quercetin) that were shown to clear some fraction of senescent cells in rodents? Certainly there have been no shortage of people chasing after whatever the current hype of the day was in past years; I’m sure you all recall resveratrol and other alleged calorie restriction mimetics or telomere length enhancers. All a waste of time and effort. The difference between the science behind those and the science between senescent cell clearance is considerable, however. The items of the past have all been associated with altering metabolism so as to modestly slow aging, at best, and we have the very good examples of calorie restriction and exercise to show us the immediate bounds of the plausible on that front in our species.

Continue reading “On the Topic of Senescent Cells: Should We All be Trying to Take Navitoclax?” »

Bioquark Inc. (www.bioquark.com) Interview in MoneyWeek

Read whole story: http://moneyweek.com/who-wants-to-live-forever/

Rattling around inside a hard drive doesn’t sound like an awful lot of fun — but then, neither does death.

Both eventualities are rather difficult to imagine, but we’ll all have to give them some thought sooner rather than later. Neuroscientist and neuroengineer Randal Koene thinks it’s only going to be another 10 years before we replace parts of the brain with prosthetics.

From there, it’s just a matter of replacing each region systematically, to end up with someone whose brain is immortal and electronic. Could the last person to die have already been born?

Continue reading “Would You Like to Be Uploaded to a Computer When You Die?” »

A race to the finish.

https://www.singularityweblog.com/mic…

Dr. Michael Fossel is one of those few theoreticians who can see much of the big picture of aging. While some use mostly guesswork, and others hope to improve on that with logic, Fossel never shies away from the clear verdict that only data can give. Add his overwhelming compassion as a human being and you will understand why he is a clinician who really cares. You will also get a pretty good idea of what kind of a person Michael is – both personally and professionally. And those are just some of the reasons why enjoy having him back on my Singularity 1on1 podcast for an in-depth discussion of his latest book on the topic titled the Telomerase Revolution.

Continue reading “Michael Fossel on Aging and the Telomerase Revolution” »

Exercise is a good idea if you want to live long enough to see new technologies arrive that could change how we age.

A fair amount of interesting research on the topic of exercise and aging passes by every month. Most is not really worth commenting on here, other than to reinforce the point that there is a very, very large body of evidence to link regular exercise with improved long-term health and reduced mortality. Since I did note a few items worth reading recently, I thought I’d bundle them together for today’s post as just such a reminder. In human studies the evidence for exercise tends to be a matter of correlation more often than causation, but the corresponding animal studies, in which researchers can put individuals into groups by level of exercise and observe the results across the life span of a cohort, leave no doubt as to the benefits provided by regular exercise. The results over the long term remain better than anything a basically healthy individual can obtain from medical science today, say to say, though that statement won’t be true for many more years given the progress being made towards rejuvenation therapies. You can’t exercise your way to ensuring a life span of 100 years, it isn’t that large of an effect, but the benefits that can be realized are available, reliable, and free. It makes sense to take advantage of them.

The high level summary of the present research community consensus on the health benefits of exercise is that it, like many things in health and medicine, appears to have a U-shaped dose-response curve with the 80/20 point somewhere around about or a little above the standard recommendations for half an hour to an hour a day of moderate aerobic exercise. While elite athletes are shown to live a few years longer than the rest of us, it remains unclear as to whether that is due to the large amount of physical exercise or due to the fact that more robust people — who would live longer anyway — tend to have a better shot at succeeding in the world of professional athletics. At the other end of the dose-response curve, the growing use of accelerometers in studies has demonstrated that even modest levels of exercise, such as infrequent gardening or cleaning or walking, have noticeable correlations with health and mortality.

Continue reading “A Selection of Recent Research on Exercise and Aging” »

Scientists in the US claim to have discovered a natural compound found in avocado, broccoli and cucumber that has “remarkable anti-ageing effects in mice” — and could also work on humans.

The researchers, who have started clinical trials involving a small group of people, said older mice given the compound, called NMN, in their water saw an array of beneficial effects.

Their level of physical activity increased, bone density and muscles improved, the immune system and liver performed better, their eyesight improved and they even lost weight.

Continue reading “Scientists discover elixir of youth — for mice — and begin tests on humans” »