Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2639

Xconomy National —

Drugs that use molecular scissors to snip out or replace defective genes. Altered mosquitoes meant to sabotage entire disease-carrying populations. Both are potential uses of genome editing, which thanks to the CRISPR-Cas9 system has spread throughout the world’s biology labs and is now on the doorstep of the outside world. But with its first applications could also come unintended consequences for human health and the environment. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—a famed military R&D group—wants to finance safety measures for the new gene-editing age.

The idea for the funding program, called Safe Genes, is to get out ahead of problems that could bring the field to a screeching halt. “We should couple innovation with biosecurity,” DARPA program manager Renee Wegrzyn, said Tuesday at the SynBioBeta conference in South San Francisco. “We need new safety measures that don’t slow us down. You have brakes in your car so that you can go fast but can stop when you need to.”

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The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to scientists based in the US, France, and the Netherlands for breakthroughs in designing molecular machines that can carry out tasks— and even mimic a four-wheel-drive car — when given a jolt of energy.

Winners J. Fraser Stoddart, Jean-Pierre Sauvage, and Bernard L. Feringa discovered how to build tiny motors — 1,000 times thinner than a strand of hair.

The machinery includes rings on axles, spinning blades, and even unimaginably small creations consisting of only a few molecules that can lift themselves off a surface like tiny robots rising on tip-toe. Those molecular robots can pluck, grasp, and connect individual amino acids. The machines can also be used as a novel mechanism of drug delivery.

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In Brief.

  • New research concludes that human lifespan has already reached its peak of 125 years.
  • The research does not take into account synthetic biology and advancements in biotech that could extend lifespans further.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine assert that they have discovered the maximum lifespan of human beings, and it’s a range we may no longer be able to exceed. Dr. Jan Vijg, professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at Einstein, lead the research, which was published online today in the journal Nature.

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Scientific progress is being held back by established experts who lack ambition and vision.

The mainstream of aging research, at least in public, is characterized by a profound lack of ambition when it comes to treating aging as a medical condition. Researchers talk about slightly altering the trajectory of aging as though that is the absolute most that is possible, the summit of the mountain, and are in many cases ambivalent when it comes to advocating for even that minimal goal. It is this state of affairs that drove Aubrey de Grey and others into taking up advocacy and research, given that there are clear paths ahead to rejuvenation, not just a slight slowing of aging, but halting and reversing the causes of aging. Arguably embracing rejuvenation research programs would in addition cost less and take a much shorter span of time to produce results, since these programs are far more comprehensively mapped out than are efforts to produce drugs to alter the complex operations of metabolism so as to slightly slow the pace at which aging progresses. It is most frustrating to live in a world in which this possibility exists, yet is still a minority concern in the research community. This article is an example of the problem, in which an eminent researcher in the field takes a look at a few recently published books on aging research, and along the way reveals much about his own views on aging as an aspect of the human condition that needs little in the way of a solution. It is a terrible thing that people of this ilk are running the institutes and the funding bodies: this is a field crying out for disruption and revolution in the name of faster progress towards an end to aging.

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Continue reading “An Example of the Glaring Lack of Ambition in Aging Research” | >

Finally a better ROI than selling them to the tooth fairy!

HOUSTON — A lot of research has been done on the benefits of saving stem cells from a baby’s umbilical cord, but not all parents realize the same cells can be taken from a child’s tooth that falls out or from a wisdom tooth.

A couple of weeks ago, 19-year-old Sydney Addicks had her wisdom teeth removed and saved in case of an emergency.

“You can possibly lose your feet, your hands, your arms,” Addicks explained about complications from diabetes.

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Classifying aging as a disease, the debate is hotting up as ICD11 at WHO draws near.

What is considered to be normal and what is considered to be diseased is strongly influenced by historical context (Moody, ). Matters once considered to be diseases are no longer classified as such. For example, when black slaves ran away from plantations they were labeled to suffer from drapetomania and medical treatment was used to try to “cure” them (Reznek, ). Similarly, masturbation was seen as a disease and treated with treatments such as cutting away the clitoris or cauterizing it (Reznek, ). Finally, homosexuality was considered a disease as recently as 1974 (Reznek, ). In addition to the social and cultural influence on disease definition, new scientific and medical discoveries lead to the revision of what is a disease and what is not (Butler, ). For example, fever was once seen as a disease in its own right but the realization that different underlying causes would lead to the appearance of fever changed its status from disease to symptom (Reznek, ). Conversely, several currently recognized diseases, such as osteoporosis, isolated systolic hypertension, and senile Alzheimer’s disease, were in the past ascribed to normal aging (Izaks and Westendorp, ; Gems, ). Osteoporosis was only officially recognized as a disease in 1994 by the World Health Organization (WHO, ).

Disease is a complex phenomenon and a current definition must consider both a biological and social explanation. The medical definition of disease is any abnormality of bodily structure or function, other than those arising directly from physical injury; the latter, however, may open the way for disease (Marcovitch, ). The disorder has a specific cause and recognizable signs and symptoms, and can affect humans, other animals, and plants (Martin, ). The social aspect of disease is significant when trying to divide a line between a healthy and a pathological state. This is a highly context and value driven process and, considering the WHO definition of health as a “state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” it is not as simple as classifying disease as the opposite of health (WHO, ). “Someone starving to death is not taken to have a disease, but is still not considered healthy” (Reznek, ).

Continue reading “It is time to classify biological aging as a disease” | >

How society can profit from treating age-related diseases.

We’re now living longer than ever – only to suffer from diseases of old age. New therapies promise a new lease of life for the elderly – and big profits for investors, says Matthew Partridge.

Over the past century, average life expectancy in most countries has grown substantially. Vastly lower infant mortality, improved living standards, better public sanitation, and the discovery of cures or vaccines for many once-deadly diseases, have seen average life expectancy in most developed nations rise to around 80, compared with 50 in 1900. Developing nations have benefited too. Life expectancy in China, for example, was just 43 in 1960 – it’s 75 today. Indeed, according to the World Health Organisation, no individual nation outside Africa now has a life expectancy of below 60, and even Africa has seen huge gains since 2000, helped by improved anti-malarial measures and wider availability of HIV/Aids treatments.

However, the pace of progress is slowing. From 1900, it took less than 30 years for life expectancy in the US to rise from 50 to 60 years. It took another 40 years to rise to 70, and now, nearly 50 years later, it is still hovering at just below 80. The problem is that while we’ve largely beaten the diseases that used to kill people in childhood, early adulthood and even middle age, we’re having much less success in prolonging the life of the elderly. Here’s a stark illustration: in Britain in 1840, if you made it to 65, you could expect, on average, to die at age 76. In 2011, a 65-year-old could expect to die aged 83. In other words, today you have a far better chance of living to 65 than you did 170-odd years ago. But if you do, your remaining life expectancy won’t be much greater than that of your 19th-century peers.

Continue reading “How we can profit from winning the battle against ageing” | >

In Brief.

  • New 3D printed bones are ‘hyperelastic,’ making them more malleable during procedures.
  • 3D printers in hospitals could provide the hyperelastic bone ink, so surgeons could make implants in 24 hours.

Remarkable.

This best describes the new bone-mending technology developed at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois by Ramille Shah and her colleagues. They used ink made from a natural bone mineral called hydroxyapatite, mixed with PLGA, a mineral-binding polymer that makes the implants elastic.

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