A remarkable scheme to alter the pest’s DNA could change the disease-carrying species for the better — or wipe them off the Earth.
The idea is simple. First, they take an arm from a dead rat and put it through a process of decellularization using detergents. This leaves behind a white scaffold. The scaffold is key because no artificial reconstructions come close to replicating the intricacies of a natural one.
Curing aging has 4 stages: mild aging deceleration, dramatic aging deceleration, achieving negligible senescence and rejuvenation. Today we can definitively claim that the task of mild aging deceleration is theoretically solved.
We know the drugs and interventions that slow down aging in mammals. The only thing that we don’t know is dosages, regimes and drug combinations. Defining all of that is the goal of pre-clinical and clinical studies. They can be started immediately. It is also a good idea to do clinical studies of various diets aimed at improving human longevity.
Dramatic aging deceleration will be achieved using gene therapy. Breakthrough studies of lifespan extension in old model animals happened in this area quite recently. We know the genes and delivery methods, now we need a set of powerful experiments aimed at radical life extension. The subject of the intervention will not only be the human genome, but the genomes of the human microbiota.
“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that 26 of the nation’s top biomedical researchers will become HHMI investigators and will receive the flexible support necessary to move their research in creative new directions. The initiative represents an investment in basic biomedical research of $153 million over the next five years.”
David Cyranosk & Sara Reardon - Nature.com
In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted — rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month2, 3 about the ethical implications of such work. Read more
By Antonio Regalado — MIT Technology Review
If anyone had devised a way to create a genetically engineered baby, I figured George Church would know about it.
At his labyrinthine laboratory on the Harvard Medical School campus, you can find researchers giving E. Coli a novel genetic code never seen in nature. Around another bend, others are carrying out a plan to use DNA engineering to resurrect the woolly mammoth. His lab, Church likes to say, is the center of a new technological genesis—one in which man rebuilds creation to suit himself.
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Posted By Regan Penaluna — Nautilus
When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as a kind of code telling bodies how to form. We speak about genes similarly to how we speak about language, as symbolic and imbued with meaning. There is “gene-editing,” and there are “translation tables” for decoding sequences of nucleic acid. When DNA replicates, it is said to “transcribe” itself. We speak about a message—such as, build a tiger! or construct a female!—being communicated between microscopic materials. But this view of DNA has come with a price, argue some thinkers. It is philosophically misguided, they say, and has even led to scientific blunders. Scratch the surface of this idea, and below you’ll find a key contradiction.
Since the earliest days of molecular biology, scientists describe genetic material to be unlike all other biological material, because it supposedly carries something that more workaday molecules don’t: information. In a 1958 paper, Crick presented his ideas on the importance of proteins for inheritance, and said that they were composed of energy, matter, and information. Watson called DNA the “repository” of information.
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Helen Knight | MIT News correspondent
The sequencing of the human genome laid the foundation for the study of genetic variation and its links to a wide range of diseases. But the genome itself is only part of the story, as genes can be switched on and off by a range of chemical modifications, known as “epigenetic marks.”
Now, a decade after the human genome was sequenced, the National Institutes of Health’s Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium has created a similar map of the human epigenome.
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Quoted: “Legendary cyberculture icon (and iconoclast) R.U. Sirius and Jay Cornell have written a delicious funcyclopedia of the Singularity, transhumanism, and radical futurism, just published on January 1.” And: “The book, “Transcendence – The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity,” is a collection of alphabetically-ordered short chapters about artificial intelligence, cognitive science, genomics, information technology, nanotechnology, neuroscience, space exploration, synthetic biology, robotics, and virtual worlds. Entries range from Cloning and Cyborg Feminism to Designer Babies and Memory-Editing Drugs.” And: “If you are young and don’t remember the 1980s you should know that, before Wired magazine, the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 edited by R.U. Sirius covered dangerous hacking, new media and cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs, with an anarchic and subversive slant. As it often happens the more sedate Wired, a watered-down later version of Mondo 2000, was much more successful and went mainstream.”
Read the article here >https://hacked.com/irreverent-singularity-funcyclopedia-mondo-2000s-r-u-sirius/
