Lifeboat Foundation

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon.

On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. The topics were thorny—from the ethics of self-experimenting biohackers to the feasibility of pan-global governance structures. And more than once you could feel the air rush right out of the room. But that was kind of the point. CrisprCon is designed to make people uncomfortable.

“I’m going to talk about the monkey in the room,” said Antonio Cosme, an urban farmer and community organizer in Detroit who appeared on a panel at the second annual conference devoted to Crispr’s big ethical questions to talk about equitable access to gene editing technologies. He referred to the results of an audience poll that had appeared moments before in a word cloud behind him, with one bigger than all the others: “eugenics.”

Continue reading “Crispr Fans Fight for Egalitarian Access to Gene Editing” »

https://player.fm/series/healthy-relationship-talk-radio/cel…1-2018

8 Amazing CRISPR gene editing projects that could change life as we know it.

Since it burst onto the scene a decade ago, CRISPR-Cas9 has shaken the field of genetics to its core. Offering a new genomic editing tool that’s faster, cheaper and more accurate than previous approaches, it opens up an astonishing breadth of possible applications.

Continue reading “8 Amazing CRISPR projects that could change life as we know it” »

The human eye is a remarkably sophisticated organ and like the lens to a camera, it’s the cornea that focuses the flood of photons into a perceptible image. But for an estimated 15 million people around the world, eye disease and trauma make surgery the only path to clear vision.

In the next few years, artificial corneas may become more accessible thanks to new research out of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. There, researchers mixed stem cells from the cornea of a healthy donor with collagen and algae molecules to create a bio-ink, which they 3D-printed into an artificial cornea. The research is currently just a proof-of-concept but lays the groundwork for future techniques to create low-cost, easy-to-produce bionic eyes.

Continue reading “World’s first 3D-printed cornea made from algae and human stem cells” »

Long story in The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/…/biohacking-transhumanism-aa… #transhumanism #biohacking

On the morning of 29 April, staff at the Soulex spa in Washington DC discovered the lifeless body of one of its clients lying face down in a sensory deprivation tank. The body was that of 28-year-old Aaron Traywick, who less than three months earlier had injected himself live on stage at an event in Austin, Texas, with an untested gene therapy that he claimed could cure herpes.

Continue reading “Live forever or die trying: Meet the biohackers who fear their work could get them killed” »

Esearchers have devised a new way to get a sneak peek into what’s going on deep in your digestive system, creating a swallowable sensor that, with the help of engineered bacteria and a tiny electrical circuit, can detect the presence of molecules that might be signs of disease and then beam the results to a smartphone app.

The device, which scientists validated in pigs, remains a prototype and needs to be refined before it could be used in people. But the researchers, who reported their work Thursday in the journal Science, combined innovations in synthetic biology and microelectronics to create a modular platform that could be adapted to identify a wide range of molecules.

Erik Gatenholm is Co-Founder and CEO here at CELLINK. In 2017, he founded CELLINK to revolutionize the way that we conduct medical research worldwide. He led a workshop at the C2 Montreal conference called “Need a tissue, Bioprinting is the next Medical Revolution”

At C2 Montreal – There was a presentation on bioprinting and Cellink technology. Then there was an activity where people in groups looked at a sample of bioprinted tissue and people worked on exercises of what people thought was possible or preposterous in the future.

Continue reading “Bioprinting is the next medical revolution — C2 Montreal” »

https://enterprise-now.biz/podcast/blog/ep-96-mother-nature-…ira-pastor

Recently, roughly 200 eminent scientists assembled in Boston. Their agenda? Creating “superhero” human cells impervious to all viral attacks and possibly other killers—radiation, freezing, aging, or even cancer.

The trick isn’t super-soldier serum. Instead, the team is relying on tools from synthetic biology to read the cell’s genetic blueprint and rewrite large chunks of the genome to unlock these superpowers.

“There is very strong reason to believe that we can produce cells that would be completely resistant to all known viruses,” said Dr. Jef Boeke, a geneticist at New York University and a co-leader of the project. “It should also be possible to engineer other traits, including resistance to prions and cancer.”

Continue reading “Scientists Kick Off Synthetic Biology Project to Make Virus-Resistant Super Cells” »