Lifeboat Foundation

Aubrey de Grey in this new interview with Vox.

We all grow old. We all die.

For Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, accepting these truths is, well, not good enough. He decided in his late twenties (he’s currently 54) that he “wanted to make a difference to humanity” and that battling age was the best way to do it. His life’s work is now a struggle against physics and biology, the twin collaborators in bodily decay.

Continue reading “Scientists are waging a war against human aging. But what happens next?” »

Israel’s oldest newspaper Haaretz (in #Hebrew) recently translated and published The New York Times Magazine feature story on my radical science and #transhumanism work in their own Sunday magazine. I can’t find the link in Hebrew yet, but here’s the fun 2-page spread of me atop my #ImmortalityBus. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/magazine/600-miles-in-a-c…tself.html

New research in multiple mouse types and human cell lines shows senolytics helps mitigate osteoarthritis.

The removal of senescent cells has shown further potential for the treatment of osteoarthritis in this recent publication where the researchers reduce the impact of post injury osteoarthritis by clearing senescent cells[1]. As we have discussed many times in our publications, senescent cells are a key player in the aging process, if you are new to the subject and want to know what senescent cells are here is a quick primer.

What are senescent cells?

Continue reading “Treating Osteoarthritis” »

Creating rejuvenation will probably be quite expensive, but that’s no reason to give up on it. We can pull it off.

The first thing to realise is that, when you wonder how much something will cost, you’re actually wondering how many resources and how many people doing how much work it will take to do that something. That’s all that really matters. The problem is that we have a sucky economic system such that even if we do have more than enough people and resources to do the job, the monetary cost of it could be so high that you can’t get the job done without creating financial problems left and right. This should be a hint that the problem, if it exists, lies in our crappy economic system, not in rejuvenation itself or whatever other thing we may create.

Apart from the obvious fact that other hysterically expensive endeavours (such as space missions) are pulled off despite their costs, we must take into account that desperate circumstances call for desperate measures. We don’t need to tear apart our economic system and replace it with another before we create rejuvenation, and neither would we if faced with another health crisis (such as a pandemic) or a planetary crisis, but we need to get the job done despite its costs and the consequences they may have. We can’t give up on rejuvenation on the grounds that it may be too expensive to create, just like we wouldn’t in the case of an existential risk. Can you imagine that? There’s a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and our only hope is a spectacularly expensive space mission to destroy it before it’s too late. Just who in their right mind would step up and say: ‘Nah, too expensive. Let’s not do it.

You’ve probably heard about billionaires’ Plan B for when the end of the world comes, much of it centering around property in New Zealand. It’s not exactly a bad plan as far as doomsday prepping goes; buy a nice bunker somewhere in Middle Earth and wait out the chaos in luxury on one of two fairly isolated islands. Now, you may have noticed that front and center for such planning is Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel of the pay-to-sue-Gawker-into-oblivion fame to the public at large, and ultra-libertarian venture capitalist with some crazy ideas about the future to the techies who know him. His backing of seasteading and support for Trump just because he got bored with Obama, are but a warmup to what he really has in mind for the future: immortality as a sentient super-AI.

No, you didn’t read that wrong, and no, this is not hyperbole. In fact, yours truly was once invited to an event where Thiel was a featured speaker after a rather public spat with the president of the Singularity Institute. I did not take up the offer because I had to be in class to learn how to build actual AI systems. And for full disclosure, I was invited to join an advisory board for a group of futurists called The Lifeboat Foundation, but like Groucho Marx, I didn’t want to be involved in a club that would accept someone like me as a member, much less as an advisor based on little more than me being a grad student at the time. So Thiel’s involvement with a group of futurists and an occasional computer scientist who thinks we’re on the verge of something a lot like the plot of Transcendence, is extremely well known in tech.

In fact, the belief that at some point, artificial intelligence and the march of technology will create a singularity that will alter humanity forever, has an alarming number of adherents in Silicon Valley. The face of the Singularity today, Ray Kurzweil, works at Google and runs Singularity University where it’s preached thanks to a multimillion commitment from his employer. And the fact that this belief is so popular in the world’s biggest tech hub isn’t all that surprising if we consider its followers. They’re told that their code and the technology they’re developing is changing the world, or they’re devoted followers of popular science news ready for the incredible future promised to us by the glossy magazines and sci-fi movies to arrive. To be told that by 2035 or 2045 we may become immortal through technology is appealing to say the least, and empowering for those who think they can help.

Continue reading “Why Silicon Valley Can’t ‘Disruptively’ Vote Its Way To Digital Immortality” »

The CellAge project hosted last year with Lifespan.io has now joined up with Michael Greve and Kizoo to develop this technology. Community support for the project has helped move the project foward and will hopefully speed up progress as a result.

April 2017, Edinburgh. CellAge Limited (“CellAge”) has raised a seed round backed by Michael Greve´s Kizoo Technology Capital and a group of angel investors.

CellAge, a privately held synthetic biology start-up aiming to develop tools and therapies for age-related diseases, has successfully completed a seed fundraising round. In this round Kizoo Technology Capital and a number of angel investors have joined the effort to develop synthetic promoters which will make senescent cells identification and removal safer and more efficient. To achieve this, CellAge is planning to analyze transcriptional profiles of a wide range of senescent cell types using proprietary algorithm and construct novel promoters from candidate regulatory elements identified in this screen. The joint expertise in senescence, synthetic biology and bioinformatics gives CellAge a unique angle on improving ways how gene therapies could be targeted to senescent cells.

AI vs aging the ultimate showdown is in the making.

There are several scientists that are now convinced upon the idea that while aging is a natural occurrence that happens in all creatures, it is, in fact, a disease that can be treated or cured. In that regards, there are some scientists out there looking to slow down the process of aging, while others are looking to stop it all together.

Continue reading “Could Artificial Intelligence Really Be Used to Attain Human Immortality?” »

A nice new write-up on my governor run: https://humanityplus.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/this-transhuma…alifornia/ #transhumanism

It’s a good time to be a transhumanist politician. As faith in the political establishment declines, new technologies, from gene editing to artificial intelligence, are transforming our lives faster than ever. The transhumanist author and politician Zoltan Istvan agrees. He thinks the time is ripe for pro-science and technology governance, and for leaders who will embrace the technologies that could fundamentally transform our conceptions of what it means to be human.

Istvan is a maverick who appears to thrive in an ‘outsider’ role. He self-published a sci-fi novel, The Transhumanist Wager, in 2013, which became a surprise bestseller on Amazon. In 2016, he made an unlikely run for US president as the leader of the Transhumanist Party. Now, he’s making a bid for Governor of California in the 2018 election under a Libertarian Party ticket.

Continue reading “This Transhumanist Politician Wants to be Governor of California” »

Fort Lauderdale, FL — Life Extension has partnered with Insilico Medicine to introduce Ageless Cell, the first supplement in its GEROPROTECT line to promote healthy aging by inhibiting cellular senescence.

Cellular senescence is a natural part of the aging process where cells no longer function optimally, affecting organ function, cellular metabolism, and inflammatory response. The accumulation of these senescent cells contributes to the process of aging. The Ageless Cell supplements inhibit the effects of cellular senescence by acting as geroprotectors, or interventions aimed to increase longevity and impede the onset of age-related diseases by targeting and inhibiting senescence-inducing pathways and inhibiting the development of senescent cells.

The partnership with Insilico Medicine allowed researchers to use deep learning algorithms to comb through hundreds of studies and thousands of data points — a process that could have taken decades — to identify four key anti-aging nutrients: N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine (NAC), myricetin, gamma-tocotrienol, and EGCG. These compounds target pathways that are known to contribute to or protect against the development of senescent cells.

Continue reading “Life Extension and Insilico Medicine Use AI to Develop Ageless Cell” »