Lifeboat Foundation

The University of Cambridge’s Dr. William Bains provides a thorough overview of extracellular cross-links in this lecture. He explains that advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) can irreversibly link proteins together, and cross-linking AGEs appear to play an important role in aging. They are particularly problematic in the cardiovascular system, where cross-links cause our arteries to stiffen with age, raising blood pressure and making a patient more likely to suffer from a heart attack or stroke. Cross-links are also implicated in complications from diabetes. Dr. Bains explains the structure and nature of cross-links, where they accumulate in the body, and even what their surprising role is in cooking. He ends by discussing a major AGE-breaking drug that has been tested on humans and touches on potential future therapies.

Visit www.sens.org/videos to view the rest of our course lecture videos.

What if you could cheat death and live forever? To people in the radical life extension movement, immortality is a real possibility. Leah Green spends a long weekend at RAADfest, a meeting of scientists, activists and ordinary people who want to extend the human lifespan. So is reversing your age a real possibility? And what’s behind this wish to live forever?
This is the first episode in our Death Land series, with a new episode every Thursday at 12pm. Subscribe here so you don’t miss the next installment ► http://is.gd/subscribeguardian

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Understanding the economic implications of changing demographics is essential for investors, said Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist speaking at the Fiduciary Investors’ Symposium at Harvard University. De Grey, who is also the chief science officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based biomedical research charity, warned gathered delegates that they need to urgently position for people living much longer.

“The implications will change your outlook on the future. You need to understand and believe the actual logic of what is coming,” he said.

He noted that medical advancement has eliminated many of the problems that used to kill people when they were young. For example, better hygiene saves lives the world over. In contrast, health problems in later life are still killing many of us in an enduring ageing process. Simply defined, this sees our metabolism generate damage over the years that cause accumulative changes over time. We can only tolerate so much change; inevitably we go down hill until we die, he said. Today the majority of medical effort is concentrated on geriatric medicine and managing the consequences of this ageing process. Yet attacking the consequences of something that is accumulating is the wrong way to approach the problem.

Human-animal hybrids are set to be developed at the University of Tokyo after the Japanese government recently lifted a ban on the controversial stem-cell research.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi—director for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tokyo and team leader at Stanford’s Nakauchi Lab—is the first to receive approval for the questionable experiments which will attempt to grow human cells in rat and mouse embryos before being brought to term in a surrogate animal.

Despite many feeling that such studies are the equivalent of playing God, scientists say that the objective is far from sinister. It’s theorized that developing animals with organs constructed from human cells will create organs that can then be used for transplants in humans, cutting the long organ donation waitlists.

This episode will take you through Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s Seven Pillars of aging, the research that he’s currently doing, his opinion on biological age, AGEs and the different sources, and the impact of growth hormone on biological age.

Who is Dr. Aubrey de Grey?

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New research makes a molecular connection between the brain and aging — and shows that overactive neurons can shorten life span.

This sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the uploaded minds might be seen as superhuman, even though, as Minerva and Rorheim observe, “it’s not clear whether you would survive in any meaningful sense if you were copied several times over.” If you didn’t, something that used to be you might exist and be cognitively superior to the common run of humanity but the “you-ness” is gone.

The authors also warn, “We can be pretty certain, for instance, that rejuvenation would widen the gap between the rich and poor, and would eventually force us to make decisive calls about resource use, whether to limit the rate of growth of the population, and so forth.”

Such considerations as limiting the “rate of growth” of the population may relate to a controversy in 2012 involving a paper written by Dr. Minerva and Dr. Alberto Giubilini:

It has long been understood, and by cultures too various to list, that salamanders have something of the supernatural about them. Their name is thought to derive from an ancient Persian vocable meaning ‘fire within’, and for at least 2,000 years they were believed to be impervious to flames, or even capable of extinguishing them on contact. Aristotle recorded this exceptional characteristic, as did Leonardo da Vinci. The Talmud advises that smearing salamander blood on your skin will confer inflammability. Not so. But the intuition that salamanders possess fantastical powers is not unfounded.

Like earthbound immortals, salamanders regenerate. If you cut off a salamander’s tail, or its arm, or its leg, or portions of any of these, it will not form a stump or a scar but will instead replace the lost appendage with a perfect new one, an intricacy of muscle, nerve, bone and the rest. It will sprout like a sapling. Science has been chopping up salamanders for more than 200 years with the aim of simply understanding the mechanics of their marvels, but more recently with the additional aim of someday replicating those marvels in ourselves. Might salamanders be the great hope of regenerative medicine?

The salamander in which regeneration is most often studied is an odd and endearingly unattractive Mexican species known as the axolotl. In addition to its limbs and extremities, the axolotl is known to regrow its lower jaw, its retinae, ovaries, kidneys, heart, rudimentary lungs, spinal cord, and large chunks of its brain. It heals all sorts of wounds without scarring. The axolotl also integrates the body parts of its fellows as if they were its own, without the usual immune response, and this peculiar trait has facilitated some of the more grotesque disfigurements it’s endured in the name of science. In experiments after the Second World War, East German scientists grafted small axolotls crosswise through the backs of larger ones. The animals’ circulatory systems came to be linked, and the researchers hailed the conjoined mutants as triumphs of collectivism.

Thank you for watching this powerful interview with Dave Asprey!
Check out the show notes here: https://www.lewishowes.com/860

Dave Asprey is the creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee, host of the podcast Bulletproof Radio, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Bulletproof Diet.

Continue reading “Age Backwards, Biohack Your Life and Be Superhuman | Dave Asprey and Lewis Howes” »