Lifeboat Foundation

Some of the tech world’s brightest luminaries hope to postpone the unpleasantness of death, or avoid it entirely. Calico, a secretive company founded by Google, is looking for ways to lengthen human lifespans. Billionaires Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos have all contributed huge sums for research into anti-aging treatments. Ray Kurzweil, one of the tech industry’s leading futurists, has described three scientific and technological “bridges” that might lead to radically longer life.

Devotees of many religions believe in a soul that lives forever. In transhumanism, techies have found their own version of eternal life — and it’s finding unlikely fans.

This paper explores Albert Camus’s notions of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus and draws correlations with the movement for indefinite life extension and the big picture of existence.

Calorie vacuums playing in the mud, isn’t that what we are when it comes down to it? We guess our way through much of life, trying not to spend too much time thinking about how trivial it all may or may not be so as to see about keeping the levels of despair down, waiting for our turn on the chopping block… We try to make sense of this life but in the end, can never fully convince ourselves that we have because we never fully do. That challenge is a mountain whose top hasn’t been seen yet.

People are drawn to understand what the most sensible things to do with life are, or as Albert Camus writes “the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions”. It’s a ballpark question. People thirst to make sense of their being, to understand what’s going on, for meaning, to track down and engage the most profound implication. Is thirst proof that water exists, as Gaston Bachelard says? Even rocks mean profound things, and we are self-aware supercomputers in a space filled with variables and has no known walls. It is very improbable that there is not a fundamentally profound implication within such circumstances.

How might we ever make sense of our existence? Masses of people are desperate with this “hope of another life one must ‘deserve’” and often take an irrational “leap”, as Camus says, to “some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.” Many rest on the hope that they’ll land a job they really love and can shine in someday but don’t put serious effort into figuring out what that would specifically be let alone work to make it happen.

Continue reading “Albert Camus and the Absurd — Life Extension and the Big Picture” »

Today, we want to highlight a recent, small-scale study looking at NAD+ and how it declines with age in the plasma.

The researchers looked at various NAD+ metabolites across age groups and found that the amounts of some of them, particularly NAD+ itself, are significantly smaller in older people than younger ones [1]. This is likely due to an age-related imbalance between the cellular machinery that consumes NAD+ and the machinery that produces it, and this imbalance leads to the lower levels observed. However, it remains unclear if the resulting decline of NAD+ is due to an increase in consumption or a decrease of production.

Other factors may also serve to reduce the amount of NAD+ in plasma, such as inflammatory signaling molecules and oxidative damage to the NAD+ molecules. The researchers also discuss the role of CD38, a major reason why NAD+ declines as we get older and how inhibiting it may be a potential way to boost NAD+.

Continue reading “Plasma NAD+ Levels Decline Significantly with Age” »

This is a fun new story to read, and highlights some interesting philosophical differences, especially as McAfee and I look at 2020 campaign possibilities: https://logosclubblog.com/2018/11/06/istvan-contra-mcafee/ #transhumanism

During 2016 presidential race, the majority of the US public were spellbound by the unlikely rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and their various competing visions for the United States of America. Considerably less institutionally-heeled but far more imaginative and, some argued, outlandish, candidates, dead-ringer for the Dos Equis Man John David McAfee of The Cyber Party and Zoltan Istvan Gyurko of The Transhumanist Party. McAfee, a successful tech entrepreneur who worked with NASA between 1968 and 1970, was the more well-known of the two politicians, principally through the popularity (or infamy, depending on who one asked) of McAfee Antivirus Software. McAfee (the person, not the software) has also received a good deal of airtime and media attention for a scandal which saw him accused of murder and fleeing from the corrupt, Sinaloa-controlled Belize after the errant businessman found out about a government-sponsored plot to kill him.

Zoltan Istvan, a former NatGeo journalist and the founder of the US Transhumanist Party, though less well known than McAfee, garnered significant attention due to both his extraordinary statements concerning technological advancement and a 2015 four month campaign, wherein he drove around the country in a brown, coffin-shaped bus (dubbed ‘The Immortality Bus’) to bring awareness to his goal of working to end death itself through radical life-extension procedures. The Immortality Bus tour ended December 14, 2015, with Mr. Istvan delivering the Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The Verge dubbed him, a “modern-day Ken Kesey” referencing the beat generation countercultural figure, well known for his novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The comparison was not entirely inaccurate as Istvan was also a novelist, having penned the highly contentious sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013.

The human body has always been an incredible machine, from the grand feats of strength and athleticism it can accomplish down to the fine details of each vein, nerve, and cell. But the way we think about the body has changed over time, as has our level of understanding of it.

In Nina Tandon’s view, there have been two different phases of knowledge here. “For so much of human history, medicine was about letting the body come to rest, because there was an assumed proportionality attributed to the body,” she said.

Then, around the turn of the last century, we started developing interchangeable parts (whether from donors, or made of plastic or metal), and thinking of our bodies a bit more like machines. “We’re each made out of 206 bones held together by 360 joints,” Tandon said. “But many of us are more than that. By the time we go through this lifetime, 70 percent of us will be living with parts of our body that we weren’t born with.”

Continue reading “Custom-Grown Bones, and Other Wild Advances in Regenerative Medicine” »

The International Society on Aging and Disease (ISOAD) recently held its third international conference in Nice, France, bringing together researchers – and longevity activists – from around the world. Journalist and supporter of anti-aging research Oliver Rowland attended the event and has made this great report packed with information gathered from interviews and talks at the event.

Professor Eric Gilson

After working in Lyon, Prof. Gilson founded the Ircan Institute for Research on Cancer and Aging in Nice in 2012. “It was perhaps the first institute that specifically aimed to couple the themes of aging and cancer in the same laboratory, even if the links between them had been known to some extent,” he said. “That was its originality.”

A new study by Calico found that our genes determine our lifespan much less than previously accepted and lifespan heritability is less than seven percent.

Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own. The research, from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry, was published in Genetics.

“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby. “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”

Continue reading “Family tree of 400 million people shows genetics has limited influence on longevity” »

As part of our strategy, we are constantly networking and seeking opportunities to engage new audiences about the topic of healthy life extension. Recently our President, Keith Comito appeared on the Young Turks Rebel HQ and spoke with Cenk Uygur, the host, and creator of the Young Turks.

The Young Turks is an American progressive political and social commentary channel that covers news and current affairs. Cenk Kadir Uygur is a Turkish-American businessman, columnist, journalist, activist, and political commentator.

The NAD+ Mouse Project has ended in a record-breaking amount raised for a research project so far on Lifespan.io. The campaign ended yesterday after having raised a total of $75,285 and smashing three stretch goals!.

An amazing 321 people backed the campaign and they will get to enjoy a range of great donor rewards and know that they have been a part of launching a great experiment. Thanks to their help the researchers will now be able to test if NMN has potential as an anti-aging drug.

We are both humbled and so very grateful for the generous support of the NAD mouse project. As the excitement and potential of the NAD longevity field continues to grow, we can’t wait to see what we learn and report to our supporters about what NMN can do. – Dr. David Sinclair

Continue reading “NAD+ Mouse Project a Record Breaker” »