Could knowing where your ancestors came from be the key to better cancer treatments? Maybe, but where would that key fit? How can we trace cancer’s ancestral roots to modern-day solutions? For Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Research Professor Alexander Krasnitz, the answers may lie deep within vast databases and hospital archives containing hundreds of thousands of tumor samples.
Krasnitz and CSHL Postdoctoral Fellow Pascal Belleau are working to reveal the genealogical connections between cancer and race or ethnicity. They’ve developed new software that accurately infers continental ancestry from tumor DNA and RNA. Their latest study is published in Cancer Research, and their work may help clinicians develop new strategies for early cancer detection and personalized treatments.
“Why do people of different races and ethnicities get sick at different rates with different types of cancer? They have different habits, living conditions, exposures—all kinds of social and environmental factors. But there may be a genetic component as well,” Krasnitz says.
The whole interview is good and informative but starts with Sinclair commenting that at the moment he thinks living to 150 is possible in our lifetimes but not immortality. But given that, I’m 51. If I’m going to live potentially another century the technology will get better and better in that century and I would fully expect to life spans to become what we want rather than what we have to accept.
In this Ask Me Anything session, David and Peter discuss the latest age-reversal breakthroughs, getting approval from the FDA, and the possibility of living forever.
David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents.
Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have To: https://a.co/d/85H3Mll.
This episode is brought to you by Levels: real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. https://levels.link/peter.
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The year 2022 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel. He’s known as the father of genetics, so scientists exhumed Mendel’s body and examined his DNA.
A Peninsula biotech startup cofounded by pioneering geneticist George Church — who already is working to engineer the woolly mammoth out of extinction — is trying to raise as much as $5 million in a crowdfunding effort to design healthier, longer-living pets.
AdoraPet Biosciences Inc. of San Mateo plans to apply the genome-engineering CRISPR technology at the egg stage of dogs and cats or insert CRISPR-modified DNA into eggs, to make nonallergenic pets that don’t shed and ultimately live longer, are free of genetic diseases caused by inbreeding and are resistant to cancer and other serious diseases.
Alpha Centauri, here we come.
However, while technology has indeed advanced a long way since the 1940s, it still seems like we are still a long way from having a fully functional von Neumann machine. That is unless you turn to biology. Even simple biological systems can perform absolutely mind-blowing feats of chemical synthesis. And there are few people in the world today who know that better than George Church. The geneticist from Harvard has been at the forefront of a revolution in the biological sciences over the last 30 years. Now, he’s published a new paper in Astrobiology musing about how biology could aid in creating a pico-scale system that could potentially explore other star systems at next to no cost.
“Pico-scale” in this context means weighing on the order of one pico-gram. Since the smallest operational satellite ever created so far weighed a mere 33 grams, scaling that down to 10–12 times that size might sound ambitious. But that’s precisely what biological systems could potentially do.
A typical bacteria weighs right around one pico-gram. And with sufficiently advanced genetic modification, bacteria can do anything from processing toxic waste to emitting light. Therefore, Dr. Church thinks they might make an excellent interstellar exploration tool.
Nobel winner Jennifer Doudna explains CRISPR, the gene-editing technology she pioneered.
Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her work on the revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. It has the potential to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and hereditary blindness and may even be used to treat cancer and HIV. But when it comes to editing humanity, where do we draw the line? How do we avoid falling into the same kind of dystopian nightmare outlined in Blade Runner? Doudna discussed the risks and benefits of CRISPR in an interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Also in this episode: a look at cloning our pets (speaking of going too far…).
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The researchers conducted a deep dive into the genetics of these tumours, both during the slow chronic phase and after the disease had transformed into the aggressive form. Researchers have identified an important transition point in the shift from chronic to aggressive blood cancer by conducting experiments in mice, providing a new intervention point for hampering the progress of the disease, according to a study.
A widely believed theory about the origins of Native Americans has been dealt a huge blow by a new genetic analysis of ancient teeth, implying the ancient inhabitants of what is now America were not who we thought they were.
The theory, largely based on archaeological evidence found at Native American sites, claims that the First Peoples came to the continent from Japan around 15,000 years ago. Stone tools and other stone artifacts used by Native Americans show similarities to those of the Jōmon people, a diverse hunter-gatherer people who lived in ancient Japan from around 14,000–300 BCE.
Based on this and analysis of their migration across the continent, it’s been suggested that Native Americans made their way across the northern rim of the Pacific Ocean, across the Bering Land Bridge – dry land that connected Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age – until they reached the northwest coast of North America.