Lifeboat Foundation

Judith Campisi as a speaker for the 2019 Undoing Aging Conference.

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Dr. Judith Campisi established a broad program to understand the relationship between aging and age-related disease.

Judith Campisi says: “Aging research has entered an era of unprecedented hope for interventions that can prevent, delay and, in some cases, reverse much of the functional decline that is a hallmark of aging. There is still a lot of research to be done! I am delighted to be among the speakers at Undoing Aging 2019, where I will discuss the opportunities and challenges of our recent research.”

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To paraphrase Churchill’s words following the Second Battle of El Alamein: Google’s announcement about their new venture to extend human life, Calico, is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

(MORE: Google vs. Death)

Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has been enslaved by the knowledge that no lifestyle choice, no medicine, no quirk of fate can enable anyone to live for more than a few decades without suffering progressive, inexorable decline in physical and mental function, leading inevitably to death. So soul-destroying has this knowledge been, for almost everyone, that we have constructed our entire society and world view around ways to put it out of our minds, mostly by convincing ourselves that the tragedy of aging is actually a good thing. And why not? After all, why be preoccupied about something one cannot affect?

Continue reading “Google’s Calico: the War on Aging Has Truly Begun” »

Six children have died as a result of adenovirus at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell, New Jersey. Twelve additional pediatric residents at the Center have been infected, according to a statement from the New Jersey Department of Health.

The Wanaque facility has been “instructed not to admit any new patients until the outbreak ends and they are in full compliance,” according to the health department. The timing of the infections and illnesses is not clear.

New Jersey Health Department said it’s “an ongoing outbreak investigation” and workers were at the facility Tuesday. A team at the facility on Sunday found minor handwashing deficiencies.

Continue reading “6 children dead, 12 ill in virus outbreak at New Jersey facility” »

Governments should use patents to shape the deployment of CRISPR–Cas9 as they have done for past technologies, argues Shobita Parthasarathy.

Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.

Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.

Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”

Continue reading “Biohackers Are Implanting Everything From Magnets to Sex Toys” »

A team of researchers led by Principal Investigator Dr. Jan Gruber from Yale-NUS College has discovered a combination of pharmaceutical drugs that not only increases healthy lifespan in the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), but also delays the rate of ageing in them, a finding that could someday mean longer, healthier lives for humans.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed international journal Developmental Cell on 8 October 2018, lays crucial groundwork for further research into designing drug combinations that produce the same effect in mammals.

“Many countries in the world, including Singapore, are facing problems related to ageing populations,” said Dr. Gruber, whose lab and research team made the discovery. “If we can find a way to extend healthy lifespan and delay ageing in people, we can counteract the detrimental effects of an ageing population, providing countries not only medical and economic benefits, but also a better quality of life for their people.”

Cancer is the poster child of age-related diseases, and a recent study sheds light on why the risk of cancer rises dramatically as we age.

Abstract

For many cancer types, incidence rises rapidly with age as an apparent power law, supporting the idea that cancer is caused by a gradual accumulation of genetic mutations. Similarly, the incidence of many infectious diseases strongly increases with age. Here, combining data from immunology and epidemiology, we show that many of these dramatic age-related increases in incidence can be modeled based on immune system decline, rather than mutation accumulation. In humans, the thymus atrophies from infancy, resulting in an exponential decline in T cell production with a half-life of ∼16 years, which we use as the basis for a minimal mathematical model of disease incidence. Our model outperforms the power law model with the same number of fitting parameters in describing cancer incidence data across a wide spectrum of different cancers, and provides excellent fits to infectious disease data.

Continue reading “Dr. Sam Palmer – Thymic Involution and Cancer Risk” »

http://www.veteranonthemove.com/pharmacist-turned-entreprene…or-ep-241/

Investigating a line of old, abandoned research led to Arigos’ innovation.