In a new study, people who believed negative stereotypes about old age had higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
Category: life extension – Page 636
This article is based on my skype conversation with Elizabeth Parrish, founder and CEO of BioViva. BioViva is a biotech company in the Seattle area focused on developing gene therapies to mitigate the diseases of aging. Liz is currently experimenting these therapies on herself. Her research was recently covered in a MIT Technology Review article and she did an AMA on Reddit you may want to check out.
An Immortality Bus campaign report today on CNET from South Carolina and transhumanism discussed. http://www.cnet.com/videos/the-cravecast-visits-the-future-w…an-istvan/ And here’s the original story: http://www.cnet.com/news/the-cravecast-welcomes-the-presiden…he-robots/
The Transhumanist Party candidate called in from the campaign trail and his “Immortality Bus” to help us look forward to 2016… and to 2050.
Glucosepane is one of the most significant mechanisms of aging and yet very few people are working on it!
As we age skin and blood vessels lose their elasticity. People care too much about the skin and too little about the blood vessels, but that is always the way of it. Appearance first and substance later, if at all. Yet you can live inside an aged skin; beyond the raised risk of skin cancer its damaged state arguably only makes life less pleasant, and the present state of medical science can ensure that the numerous age-related dermatological dysfunctions can be kept to a state of minor inconvenience. Loss of blood vessel elasticity, on the other hand, will steadily destroy your health and then kill you. Arterial stiffening causes remodeling of the cardiovascular system and hypertension. The biological systems that regulate blood pressure become dysfunctional as blood vessels depart from ideal youthful behavior, creating a downward spiral of increasing blood pressure and reactions to that increase. Small blood vessels fail under the strain in ever larger numbers, damaging surrounding tissue. In the brain this damage contributes to age-related cognitive decline by creating countless tiny, unnoticed strokes. Ultimately this process leads to dementia. More important parts of the cardiovascular system are likely to fail first, however, perhaps causing a stroke, or a heart attack, or the slower decline of congestive heart failure.
From what is known today, it is reasonable to propose that the two main culprits driving loss of tissue elasticity are sugary cross-links generated as a byproduct of the normal operation of cellular metabolism and growing numbers of senescent cells. Elasticity is a property of the extracellular matrix, an intricate structure of collagens and other proteins created by cells. Different arrangements of these molecules produce very different structures, ranging from load-bearing tissues such as bone and cartilage to elastic tissues such as skin and blood vessel walls. Disrupting the arrangement and interaction of molecules in the extracellular matrix also disrupts its properties. Persistent cross-links achieve this by linking proteins together and restricting their normal range of motion. Senescent cells, on the other hand, secrete a range of proteins capable of breaking down or remodeling portions of the surrounding extracellular matrix, and altering the behavior of nearby cells for the worse.
The most important cross-linking compound in humans is glucosepane. Our biochemistry cannot break down glucosepane cross-links, and as a result it accounts for more than 99% of cross-links in our tissues. This isn’t a big secret. Given this you might expect to find researchers working flat out in scores of laboratories to find a viable way to break it down. After all here we have one single target molecule, and any drug candidate capable of clearing even half of existing cross-links would provide a treatment that can both reverse skin aging and vascular aging to a much greater degree than any presently available therapy. The size of the resulting market is every human being, the potential for profit staggering. Yet search on PubMed, and this is all of relevance that you will see published on the topic in the past few years:
Can we end violence? Can we create greater emotional well being and intellectual equality for the greater well being of humanity? Will we be able to keep up with machines? How can we augment our intelligence? Could we cure mental illness? After advancements in aging the next major area of research from a standpoint of eliminating personal and global suffering would be upgrades in intelligence. Transhumanist values at their core want to eliminate suffering and existential risk to people’s lives. With well founded logic, these goals are not completely out of reach, it is possible but as usual, we will have to take the complex issue from many angles and from the standpoint of a systems engineer, but let’s look at some fun stuff before we get into the heavy stuff.
The Benefits of Intelligence Upgrades
So, what is the benefit for intelligence upgrades for every day people? We live in a time of exponential technology and vast amounts of face paced information, breakthroughs and invention. So, the most obvious answer to what is the benefit of intelligence upgrade is dealing with the massive amount of information one needs to keep up with daily to be on top of the game for work, for research or for business. Sometimes it can be our mere storage capacity that limits us in our abilities to interact with this information, at other times it is our processing speed, and most fundamentally the rate at which we can interact with new information. In 2012, a prosthetic chip was invented that uses electrodes to expand one’s memory storage. Now, with biotechnology predicted to move more quickly in 2016 and Google ready to back more companies in biotechnology, it may be possible to augment or program selective photographic memory. This is just an example of what one could imagine and begin working with, when combining electronics and gene editing. Many big breakthroughs in enhanced intelligence could be achieved in the future. The implications for business professionals, scientists, and the progress of technology would be astounding if upgrades like these were available. Personally, I can’t wait for the day when me and my personal A.I. through my Google Glass or some sort of eye wear or ear piece could read my brainwaves so I can type and do all my work through what would be a virtual form of telepathy. I could store everything I will need later instantly in the cloud and exactly where I want on my computer, there would be almost no delay because, well, how could there be? Time is everything.
Exciting news as another group proposes to explore telomerase therapy for the Cardio Vascular system. This no doubt follows on from DePhino et al work on the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis work which showed the effects of short telomeres on vascular aging (and other organs) and its direct link to Mitochondrial function and Stem cell Decline via the P53-telomerase-PCG-1 aging axis.
To most of the scientific community, “anti-aging” is a dirty word.
A medical field historically associated with charlatans and quacks, scientists have strictly restricted the quest for a “longevity pill” to basic research. The paradigm is simple and one-toned: working on model organisms by manipulating different genes and proteins, scientists slowly tease out the molecular mechanisms that lead to — and reverse — signs of aging, with no guarantee that they’ll work in humans.
But it’s been a fruitful search: multiple drug candidates, many already on the market for immune or psychiatric disorders, have consistently delayed age-associated diseases and stretched the lifespan of fruit flies, roundworms and mice. Yet human trials have been far beyond reach — without the FDA acknowledging “aging” as a legitimate target for drug development, researchers have had no way of pitching clinical trials to the regulatory agency.
A new article on visiting Alabama’s largest megachurch on the Immortality Bus and discussing transhumanism. Make sure to check out the 2-min YouTube video embedded in the story:
The pastor considered whether robots could be saved.
Cryogenics are an old science fiction dream, but today we still struggle to store large tissues without harming them. Now a breakthrough could lead to a safer, more reliable approach.
” This could be an important step toward the preservation of more complex tissues and structures”
Overcoming past challenges
Cryopreservation of biological material is commonplace, but there are remaining challenges. The initial problem with freezing any cell is crystallization, in which ice crystals form and rupture cells. This was overcome by using molecules like ethylene glycol, which essentially act like anti-freeze and prevent crystallization from happening. These are very effective, but they’re also often toxic; damaging or killing some cells in the process. This has made storage of larger tissues very challenging.