Lifeboat Foundation

CropBox is a shipping container farm system featuring the latest technology in precision farming.

Nearly every day, new discoveries are pushing the genetics revolution ever-forward. It’s hard to imagine it’s been only a century and a half since Gregor Mendl experimented with his peas, six decades since Watson and Crick identified the double helix, fourteen years since the completion of the human genome project, and five years since scientists began using CRISPR-cas9 for precision gene editing. Today, these tools are being used in ways that will transform agriculture, animal breeding, healthcare, and ultimately human evolution.

Common practices like in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation embryo selection make human genetic enhancement possible today. But as we learn more and more about what the genome does, we will be able to make increasingly more informed decisions about which embryos to implant in IVF in the near term and how to manipulate pre-implanted embryos in the longer-term. In our world of exponential scientific advancement, the genetic future will arrive far faster than most people currently understand or are prepared for.

Continue reading “Building a Positive Genetic Future for All” »

Circa 2017

Hunting for meat was a critical step in all animal and human evolution. A key brain-trophic element in meat is vitamin B₃ / nicotinamide. The supply of meat and nicotinamide steadily increased from the Cambrian origin of animal predators ratcheting ever larger brains. This culminated in the 3-million-year evolution of Homo sapiens and our overall demographic success. We view human evolution, recent history, and agricultural and demographic transitions in the light of meat and nicotinamide intake. A biochemical and immunological switch is highlighted that affects fertility in the ‘de novo’ tryptophan-to-kynurenine-nicotinamide ‘immune tolerance’ pathway. Longevity relates to nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide consumer pathways. High meat intake correlates with moderate fertility, high intelligence, good health, and longevity with consequent population stability, whereas low meat/high cereal intake (short of starvation) correlates with high fertility, disease, and population booms and busts. Too high a meat intake and fertility falls below replacement levels. Reducing variances in meat consumption might help stabilise population growth and improve human capital.

Keywords: Meat, nicotinamide, evolution, NAD(H), vitamin B₃, Malthus, fertility, immunological tolerance, longevity.

Continue reading “Meat and Nicotinamide: A Causal Role in Human Evolution, History, and Demographics” »

How is a pharmaceutical giant using a food & snack manufacturing process to speed up the making of medicine?

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made a surprising discovery that could help explain our risk for developing chronic diseases or cancers as we get older, and how our food decomposes over time.

What’s more, their findings, which were reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), point to an unexpected link between the ozone chemistry in our atmosphere and our cells’ hardwired ability to ward off disease.

“The beauty of nature is that it often decides to use similar chemistries throughout a system, but we never thought that we would find a common link between atmospheric chemistry, and the chemistry of our bodies and food,” said Kevin Wilson, the deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division who led the study. “Our study is the first to explore another chemical pathway that might affect how well the cells in our bodies — and even our food — can respond to oxidative stress, such as pollution, over time.”

The company’s protein powder, “Solein,” is similar in form and taste to wheat flour.

That bees are downright awesome is not up for debate. After all, they pollinate about a third of all the crops that we consume and help to support ecosystems worldwide. Yet the bees are in trouble, with a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD) causing an alarming drop in numbers. Fortunately, a solution may be on the horizon in the form of genetically modified bacteria.

One thing that is a topic of great debate is the cause of CCD. Some studies point the finger at a particular class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, although many within the scientific community agree that multiple factors are probably at play.

What we do know is that CCD first became an issue once the Varroa mite became widespread, largely thanks to a global trade in European honeybees that brought them into contact with Asian parasites. At first, it was assumed that the mites were simply killing bees by sucking on their blood, although it later transpired that they also carried the lethal deformed wing virus (DWV), transmitting it into the bloodstream of the bees they feasted on.

Life on Earth is dependent on photosynthesizing plants and algae for food, yet land plants did not evolve until about 450 million years ago, Tang said. “The new fossil suggests that green seaweeds were important players in the ocean long before their descendants, land plants, took control,” he said.

These fossils came from an ancient ocean, but there is still a debate about where green algae originated. “Not everyone agrees with us; some scientists think that green plants started in rivers and lakes, and then conquered the ocean and land later,” Xiao said in a statement.

Moreover, green algae isn’t the oldest algae on record. “There is strong fossil evidence that red algae existed over a billion years ago, and we know the red and green algae diverged from a common ancestor,” Gibson told Live Science in an email. “So, although this doesn’t fundamentally change the way I’ll think about the evolution of life, the discovery of this green algal fossil helps fill an important gap and strengthens an emerging timeline for the evolution of early, complex life.”

The Neolithic revolution, and the corresponding transition to agricultural and pastoralist lifestyles, represents one of the greatest cultural shifts in human history, and it has long been hypothesized that this might have also provided the opportunity for the emergence of human-adapted diseases. A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution led by Felix M. Key, Alexander Herbig, and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History studied human remains excavated across Western Eurasia and reconstructed eight ancient Salmonella enterica genomes—all part of a related group within the much larger diversity of modern S. enterica. These results illuminate what was likely a serious health concern in the past and reveal how this bacterial pathogen evolved over a period of 6,500 years.

Searching for ancient pathogens

Most pathogens do not cause any lasting impact on the skeleton, which can make identifying affected archaeological remains difficult for scientists. In order to identify past diseases and reconstruct their histories, researchers have turned to genetic techniques. Using a newly developed bacterial screening pipeline called HOPS, Key and colleagues were able to overcome many of the challenges of finding ancient pathogens in metagenomics data.