Lifeboat Foundation

Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach.

You’ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It’s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it’s a pile of sh—oh, well, you know what.

If death gives meaning to life, I suppose diseases give meaning to being healthy, and thus we should leave some diseases around so that people can appreciate not being sick, right? How often do you say yourself, ‘Hmm… I haven’t been sick in a while… I should get one of those nasty cancers, before I stop appreciating how it feels being healthy. Where’s my emergency plutonium bar?’ Personally, I don’t say that to myself very often. I mean, I can totally appreciate the feeling of not being kicked in the nuts even without ever being kicked in the nuts, really. And I can appreciate not having a certain disease even if I’m not aware the disease exists. I can totally enjoy life without dying, and I could still enjoy it even if it were impossible for me to die.

People reason by analogies. They know there are some concepts that would be more difficult to grasp without their opposite, and think the analogy can be extended to ANYTHING AT ALL. For example, if you’ve never been sad, you can’t be sure just how different it is from being happy. I’m not sure how you can get from this to ‘you need to be mortal to enjoy life’, especially when there are no real-life examples of immortal people incapable to enjoy life because of their immortality. Can you smell the pungent aroma of foxes disdaining grapes?

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Our Journal Club goes live at 13:00 EST/18:00 UK. Come and watch the live stream on our page where we discuss the latest research. Todays topic is the recent reversal of Epigenetic changes in a living animal via partial cellular programming.

Journal Club live stream to our Facebook page May 30th 13:00 EST/18:00 UK. Join us here live to listen to LEAF and Ocean level Patrons discuss epigenetics and how it relates to aging. It will also be available later to view on Youtube.

This the first of our Monthly Journal Club events hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik and guests where we discuss the latest research papers. Journal Club is part of a host of new activities and content this year and is a result of the support we have recieved from the Heroes Campaign currently running on Lifespan.io. If you would like to see more content like this consider becoming a Patron today on the link below:

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There is an urgent need to develop better biomarkers and to use the in cost effective packages for accurate measurement of aging.

As human life expectancy has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries this has led to a steady increase in the population of older people. With that increase has come the rise of age-related diseases and disabilities. As a result it is becoming ever more important to develop preventative strategies to monitor and maintain health as well as therapies that directly address the various aging processes to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

One of the ways we can do this is by developing more effective ways to measure how someone is aging, this means developing high quality aging biomarkers. The challenge in creating such biomarkers has always been the fundamental question – what do we measure?

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We’re shockingly close to reversing many causes of aging.

David Agus explains how this could help us cure cancer — it’s about quality of life, not quantity.

Tech world innovator and serial entrepreneur, Naveen Jain, has just launched VIOME, a product that has the potential to forever change the way we look after our health. Riding on the growing awareness in the West that gut health is the foundation for all health, VIOME is a tech product with an artificial intelligence component used towards the in-depth analysis of the gut and metabolic flexibility.

What does that mean? It means that you will know exactly what’s going on in the gut, monitor it quarterly via a simple in-home test, and then employ the recommendations VIOME provides to reach your optimal healthiest living to—ultimately—live a better, longer life free of chronic illness.

But, wait. There’s more.

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Jamie Bartlett’s new book Radicals features #transhumanism in his opening chapter. He’s on a book tour and discusses his time on the Immortality Bus for about 10 minutes in this video below:

Society is badly served by the limited set of ideas which occupy our cultural mainstream. To cope with the increasing pace of change, we need big new ideas. Where might these ideas come from?

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Future generations are on course to become enveloped in the biggest pension crisis in history, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), unless policymakers from the world’s leading economies take urgent action.

The Geneva-based organization predicted the challenges of an ageing population could result in the world’s largest economies being forced to tackle a pension time-bomb.

Analysis from WEF showed six countries with the biggest pensions, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Netherlands, Japan and Australia, as well as the two most densely populated countries in the world – China and India – would face a retirement savings gap in excess of $400 trillion in 2050, up from around $70 trillion in 2015.

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The book is titled “Finding the Fountain of Youth,” and my chapter is titled: “Religious Faith Supresses the Natural Evolution that Human Technology Promises.” It’s great to see this stuff being taught in schools, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Fountain-Youth-Controversy-Ex…atfound-20

A novel way to target proteins in cells could lead to undruggable diseases being treatable.

Researchers at the university of Dundee have shown that it is possible to target and destroy specific proteins within cells using a new directed protein missile system. This is very interesting as it raises the possibility of targeting aberrant proteins present in diseases that currently have no drug that affects them.

This opens the door to treating a range of diseases as well as potentially being useful in directly targeting proteins involved in the aging process. Before we take a look at the research let’s recap on why proteins are important, what they do and how they relate to aging and diseases.

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