We have known since the 19th century that young blood has surprising curative and rejuvenation abilities. It’s quite strange, but it happens to be true. In recent years, scientific efforts to understand what it is about young blood that causes rejuvenation have ramped up.
We now know that young and old mice with surgically connected circulatory systems will experience altered aging: the young mouse will prematurely grow old, and the old mouse will, in many cases, miraculously grow young. This is known as heterochronic parabiosis, and it is a large source of the legitimate excitement about the potential of young plasma to lead to human rejuvenation [1].
The challenge, of course, is how to achieve these benefits in more acceptable and less disturbing ways.
The cause of cancer is written into the DNA of tumours, scientists have discovered, in a breakthrough which could finally show how much disease is attributable to factors like air pollution or pesticides.
Until now the roots of many cancers have proved elusive, with doctors unable to tease out the impact of a myriad of carcinogenic causes which people encounter everyday.
Even with lung cancer, it is not known just how much can be attributed to smoking and how much could be linked to other factors, such as living by a busy road, or inhaling pollutants at work.
Israeli researchers have printed a 3D heart using a patient’s own cells, something they say could be used to patch diseased hearts — and possibly, full transplants.
The heart the Tel Aviv University team printed in about three hours is too small for humans — about 2.5 centimeters, or the size of a rabbit’s heart. But it’s the first to be printed with all blood vessels, ventricles and chambers, using an ink made from the patient’s own biological materials.
Researchers have invented a new type of cancer immunotherapy by injecting tumours with a series of stimulants. The experimental therapy attracts the body’s own immune system’s attention, so it can come and destroy the cancerous masses.
The radical new approach has already shown promise in patients with an advanced form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that resists conventional treatments, and is currently being tested on a variety of stubborn cancers.
The result can be described as turning the tumours into “cancer vaccine factories”, because attracting the body’s immune cells to the cancer site is a method known as in situ vaccination.
Allison Duettmann challenges Aubrey De Grey with the top objections against longevity to be debunked and debated before opening up the floor to the public.
Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D.
SENS chief science officer and co-founder.
Dr. de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who researched the idea for and founded SENS Research Foundation. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.
To prep, why not watch Aubrey’s TED Talk on ending aging that received over 3 mio views to date.
Allison Duettmann
Check out the science of biohacking, where biologists go into a patient’s genetic code and reprogram their immune system to recognize and fight cancer cells.
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The human body is made up of about 30 trillion cells that carry a code which has been duplicated over and over for billions of years — with varying degrees of accuracy. So what happens when the system breaks down and the machinery turns on itself, leading to cancer? Greg Foot dives into the science of how biologists are biohacking the human body to try to fix the seemingly unfixable.
Lesson by Greg Foot, directed by Pierangelo Pirak.
Produced for ted-ed by NIHR university college london hospitals biomedical research centre.
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