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Archive for the ‘life extension’ category: Page 596

Apr 25, 2016

The Importance of Hope

Posted by in categories: biological, health, homo sapiens, life extension

I learn useful life lessons from each patient I meet. Some are positive messages, reminding me of the importance of maintaining balance between family, work, and leisure activities, but more frequently I witness examples of the remarkable resilience of the human spirit when facing the reality and risks of a major surgical procedure and a diagnosis of cancer. Rarely, patients and their family members utter remorseful or simply sad remarks when they are faced with a grim prognosis and the emotions associated with an onrushing date with mortality. These comments invariably involve an inventory of regrets in life, including, “I should have spent more time with my kids,” “I wish I had told my father (or mother, brother, sister, child, or some other person) that I loved them before they died,” and “I have spent my entire life working, I never took time for anything else.” I wince when I hear these openly expressed remonstrations, I recognize that I am hearing painful and heartfelt truths. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded that I do not one day want to look back at my life with a long list of regrets, should have dones, and what ifs.

I was blessed to meet a great teacher in the guise of a patient early in my academic career. He came to my clinic in my first year after completing a Fellowship in Surgical Oncology, my first year as an Assistant Professor of Surgery. My patient was a 69 year-old Baptist Minister from a small town in Mississippi. He was referred to me by his medical oncologist who called me and said, “I don’t think there is anything you can do for him, but he needs to hear that from you because he doesn’t believe me.” This tall, imposing man had colon cancer that had metastasized (spread) to his liver. The malignant tumor in his colon was removed the year before I met him, and he had received chemotherapy to treat several large tumors found in his liver. The chemotherapy had not worked and the tumors grew. At the point I met him, the medical oncologist told him he would live no more than 6 months, and because he was an avid fisherman when not preaching or helping others in his community , the doctor suggested that he go out and enjoy his remaining time by getting in as much fishing as possible. I learned two invaluable lessons from this patient and his family. First, never deny or dismiss hope from a patient or their family, even when from a medical perspective the situation seems hopeless and the patient is incurable. Second, quoting the minister directly, “Some doctors think of themselves as gods with a small ‘g’, but not one of you is God”.

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Apr 21, 2016

First gene therapy successful against human aging

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

American woman gets biologically younger after gene therapies.

Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of Bioviva USA Inc. has become the first human being to be successfully rejuvenated by gene therapy, after her own company’s experimental therapies reversed 20 years of normal telomere shortening.

Telomere score is calculated according to telomere length of white blood cells (T-lymphocytes). This result is based on the average T-lymphocyte telomere length compared to the American population at the same age range. The higher the telomere score, the “younger” the cells.

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Apr 21, 2016

Reinvent Yourself: The Playboy Interview with Ray Kurzweil

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, education, electronics, engineering, life extension, media & arts, neuroscience, Ray Kurzweil, singularity

Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

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Apr 20, 2016

Bioquark Inc. and Revita Life Sciences Receive IRB Approval for First-In-Human Brain Death Study

Posted by in categories: aging, bioengineering, biological, biotech/medical, cryonics, disruptive technology, futurism, health, life extension, neuroscience

Bioquark, Inc., (http://www.bioquark.com) a company focused on the development of novel biologics for complex regeneration and disease reversion, and Revita Life Sciences, (http://revitalife.co.in) a biotechnology company focused on translational therapeutic applications of autologous stem cells, have announced that they have received IRB approval for a study focusing on a novel combinatorial approach to clinical intervention in the state of brain death in humans.

This first trial, within the portfolio of Bioquark’s Reanima Project (http://www.reanima.tech) is entitled “Non-randomized, Open-labeled, Interventional, Single Group, Proof of Concept Study With Multi-modality Approach in Cases of Brain Death Due to Traumatic Brain Injury Having Diffuse Axonal Injury” (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02742857?term=bioquark&rank=1), will enroll an initial 20 subjects, and be conducted at Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand India.

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Apr 14, 2016

Stem Cell Technique Could Regenerate Any Human Tissue Damaged

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Taking their cue from salamander regeneration, a team led by the University of New South Wales says that a stem cell therapy capable of regenerating any human tissue damaged by injury, disease, or aging could be available within a few years, thanks to an innovative new technique.

While stem cells have worked wonders in medicinal research, showing signs of curing everything from spinal cord injuries to blindness, they’ve always had their shortcomings. But one study is promising a new “game changing” technique for stem cells.

Taking their cue from salamander regeneration, new research led by the University of New South Wales says that a stem cell therapy capable of regenerating any human tissue damaged by injury, disease, or aging could be available within a few years, through an innovative new technique.

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Apr 12, 2016

Flow Induced Crystallization of Collagen: A Potentially Critical Mechanism in Early Tissue Formation

Posted by in category: life extension

Awesome; could be a new track for reverse aging.

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Apr 11, 2016

DARPA wants ‘shape-shifting’ vaccines that evolve with viruses

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension, particle physics

DARPA taking on the designer viruses and resistant fighting viruses that we hate. Who knows; they may finally find the fountain of youth in the process.


Vaccines are great, but they’re no match for most viruses in play at any given time. This is due largely in part to the ever-changing nature of viruses and the expense and difficulty in developing new vaccines to target them. DARPA wants that reality to change, citing the numerous concerning viruses, past and present, that affect humanity. Under the “INTERCEPT” program, DARPA seeks “shape-shifting” vaccines that adapt to kill off viruses as they evolve.

One of the biggest virus scares at the moment is the zika virus, but ebola was just recently a big issue and other viruses, including influenza and dengue, are a continuous problem. Once someone is infected, the virus is able to “mutate and morph as they reproduce inside their hosts,” says DARPA, making any vaccines quickly obsolete. If the agency’s new INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program proves successful, though, things will change in a big way.

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Apr 11, 2016

Why Pessimistic Predictions For Future of AI May be More Hype than High Tech

Posted by in categories: complex systems, cryonics, existential risks, futurism, life extension, robotics/AI, singularity

The growth of human and computer intelligence has triggered a barrage of dire predictions about the rise of super intelligence and the singularity. But some retain their skepticism, including Dr. Michael Shermer, a science historian and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

quote-i-m-a-skeptic-not-because-i-do-not-want-to-believe-but-because-i-want-to-know-michael-shermer-71-29-72

The reason so many rational people put forward hypotheses that are more hype than high tech, Shermer says, is that being smart and educated doesn’t protect anyone from believing in “weird things.” In fact, sometimes smart and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for not-so-rational reasons. The smarter and more educated you are, the better able you are to find evidence to support what you want to be true, suggests Shermer.

“This explains why Nobel Prize winners speak about areas they know nothing about with great confidence and are sure that they’re right. Just because they have this great confidence of being able to do that (is) a reminder that they’re more like lawyers than scientists in trying to marshal a case for their client,” Shermer said. “(Lawyers) just put together the evidence, as much as you can, in support of your client and get rid of the negative evidence. In science you’re not allowed to do that, you’re supposed to look at all the evidence, including the counter evidence to your theory.”

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Apr 8, 2016

Trends in Nanomedicine — Technology Benchmarking & Innovator Analysis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, life extension, nanotechnology

Nanomedicine has been something that many in tech expected to be a critical part of the healthcare landscape for over a decade. I am glad to see how quickly the technology is being adopted as part of bio-medical research and treatments for various diseases, etc.


NEW YORK, April 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Nano-based science paving the precision medicine era.

The continued development of new treatments associated with the demographic trends and public health considerations is remarkable. Nanotechnology has been identified as one most relevant key enabling technologies of the last ten years, significantly impacting on many different biomedical developments in a broad spectrum of applications therapeutics, diagnostics, theranostics, medical imaging, regenerative medicine, life sciences research and biosciences, among many others. In fact, nanomedicine is present in all therapeutic areas, exhibiting a perceptible and extensive impact in the treatment and diagnosis of some most concerned diseases.

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Apr 8, 2016

‘Groundbreaking’ Stem Cell Treatment Could Regrow Limbs, Repair Bones

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

In the pages of comic books and on the silver screen, superheroes like Wolverine and Deadpool have a “healing factor” that allows their bodies to regenerate and recover from injuries or illness at an amazing rate – but certainly nothing like that is possible in real life, right?

Amazingly, a team of scientists led by John Pimanda, a hematologist and associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, published a study in Monday’s edition of the journal PNAS reporting that they had successfully reprogrammed bone and fat cells into induced multipotent stem cells (iMS) – the first step to making such a repair system a reality.

As they explained in a statement, stem cell therapies using iMS cells could theoretically repair a fractured bone or fix injured spinal discs, using a technique similar to how salamanders are able to regenerate lost limbs. These treatments could radically alter the field of regenerative medicine, and perhaps most surprisingly, the authors believe they could be available in just a few years. The technique, which has been successfully tested in mice, “is a significant advance on many of the current unproven stem cell therapies, which have shown little or no objective evidence they contribute directly to new tissue formation,” Pimanda said.

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