Lifeboat Foundation

Steven Pinker claims that will speed up progress.

It looks like Self Driving cars may create a US organ shortage that finally acts as the Kick in the Ass to force stem cell generated organs on to the market. Enough of the ‘in the future’ we might have these Nonsesne.

Science, however, can offer better a better solution.

The waiting lists for donor organs are long — 120,000 people on a given day — and ever increasing. With fewer donor organs to go around, researchers are working on other ways to get people the parts they need. With help from 3D printing and other bioengineering technologies, we will eventually be able to grow our own organs and stop relying on donors.

Continue reading “Self-driving cars will create organ shortage — can science meet demand?” »

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, launched in September 2016 and run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, set out with the ambitious goal “to cure, prevent or manage all disease during our children’s lifetime”.

As part of the US$3 billion initiative, the organisation created an independent nonprofit Biohub, which on Wednesday said it committed US$50 million to 47 scientists, technologists, and engineers working at UCSF, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley.

The 47 investigators are working on a wide range of projects, but there was one central thesis the Biohub tried to keep in mind when picking from the 700 applicants.

Continue reading “The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative Is Giving $3 Billion to Cure, Manage, or Prevent ‘All Disease’” »

In Brief:

Regenerative dental fillings that allow teeth to heal themselves have been developed by researchers, potentially eliminating the need for root canals. The treatment earned a prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry after judges described it as a “new paradigm for dental treatments.”

No one in their right mind would ever look forward to a filling at the dentist. Why can’t our teeth fix themselves? Maybe they can. At long last, scientists from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University may have revolutionized the way we look at treating dental issues. Their regenerative dental fillings allow teeth to heal themselves—potentially eliminating the need for the high-pitched drilling inherent in root canals.

Continue reading “Stem Cell Fillings Allow Teeth to Heal Themselves” »

Finding out which microbes dealt it.

Engineers are using origami to design drugs, micro-robots, and future space missions.

Don’t miss “The Origami Revolution,” airing February 15, 2017 at 9 pm on PBS: http://to.pbs.org/2lp78cv

MIT spinout Manus Biosynthesis engineers microbes to produce rare and expensive ingredients for noncaloric beverages, perfumes, toothpastes, detergents, pesticides, and therapeutics. Spun out of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, Manus technologies could lead to new discoveries in drug development and product ingredients.

Let’s debate whether ageing is a disease *after* the diseases of old age are eliminated, shall we?

Whether or not ageing ought to be considered a disease is still matter of controversy, both among experts and laypeople. Particularly, the latter tend to turn up their noses at the thought of ageing being pathological and not ‘normal’, especially if they’re outside the life-extension/rejuvenation community. Clearly, they ignore the fact that ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ aren’t mutually exclusive at all. It’s perfectly normal to suffer from hear loss in old age; notwithstanding, it is out of the question that hear loss is a pathology and we have developed several ways to make up for it. It presently can’t be cured, because like all age-related diseases, it can only get worse as long as the age-related damage that causes it keeps accumulating.

In my humble opinion of quasi-layperson (I’m nowhere near being an expert, but I do think I know about ageing more than your average Joe), whether or not ageing is a disease is merely a matter of semantics, depending largely on what we want to label as ‘ageing’—not to mention how we define ‘disease’.

If we say that ‘ageing’ is the set of age-related pathologies that affect a given person, then ageing isn’t a disease any more than a box of crayons is itself a crayon. Nonetheless, if you have a box of crayons then you have a bunch of crayons; if you have ageing as we defined it, then you have a bunch of diseases, and the grand total of your ailments doesn’t change whether you consider ageing as a disease as well or not. Quite frankly, I’d pick the box of crayons over ageing any time.

Continue reading “Health before semantics” »