Lifeboat Foundation

Intestinal worms that can reduce inflammation. Could we GMO a probiotic worm to help reduce aging?

Intestinal worms have an incredibly bad reputation. The thought of them sneaking around inside our bodies and eating us from the inside is pretty unpleasant. But for decades, results coming out of lab after lab have shown that some kinds of helminths can be extremely beneficial to their host, and aren’t parasites at all.

Just 100 years ago, before toilets and running water were commonplace, everybody had regular exposure to intestinal worms. Thanks in part to modern plumbing, people in the industrialized world have now lost almost all of their worms, with the exception of occasional pinworms in some children.

Continue reading “Sounds Gross, But Intestinal Worms Can Actually Be Good For You” »

Large amounts of precious resources are being spent on encouraging weight loss and healthy living. While the intention of trying to reinforce healthy living is laudable, the evidence is that our resources are being wasted on minimal benefits.

Society considers obesity a big threat that needs to be overcome, but being thin is seen as a panacea

The diseases caused by biological aging carry on incessantly taking the lives of 100 000 people every day. While age 87 is the most common age of death for people in the western world, little progress has occurred during the past decades.

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A very interesting article about the state of funding for aging research and about Buck and ex Geron Mike West.

As I mentioned in last week’s letter, I traveled to San Francisco last Monday with my friend Patrick Cox, who writes our Transformational Technology Alert newsletter. We had dinner with Dr. Mike West of Biotime and then spent the next morning at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Pat and I decided we would jointly report on what we learned. He has already written his part, which was published last week. I am going to reproduce portions of that letter, which highlight the conversation with Brian Kennedy and his team at the Buck Institute, and then add my own thoughts about our conversation with Mike West the previous night.

(Note that I am excerpting Patrick’s paid letter, which includes comments on companies in his portfolio, rather than his free weekly Transformational Technologies Tech Digest service. We agreed that it was important to do so in this one case, given the huge significance of the research involved and the Buck Institute’s relationship to it.)

Continue reading “The ‘Age’ Age” »

This is our chance to make a real difference to how ageing research progresses and how people view ageing.

We need fifty people to make a real change in funding policy so we can work towards healthy longevity.

https://www.facebook.com/…/draft-zero-gsap-ageing-and-healt… (please make sure to complete the 6 first lines at least before sending to the email indicated there).

WHO GSAP draft, healthy longevity and biomedical aging research.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9dj1s3N4cE

Adam Alonzi has made another excellent film about the power of gene therapy.

Narrated and produced by Adam Alonzi. Music arranged by Leslee Frost. Sponsored by BioViva Sciences Inc.

Continue reading “BioViva Presents: Alzheimer’s Disease and Gene Therapy” »

Transhumanism featured in The Times of London, a major UK paper. Sorry, you do need a subscription, I think:

Zoltan Istvan is campaigning for the White House by promising voters everlasting life. He is the Transhumanist party’s presidential nominee and he is touring the US in a vehicle shaped like a coffin that he calls the immortality bus.

He believes that technology will eventually allow humans to live for ever. His message, he says, is connecting with the millennial generation who were born from the early 80s onwards. But he has little money and his bus, which is very old, keeps breaking down. “I know what the chances are,” he told me of his attempt to capture the Oval…

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Nice interview by The Longevity Reporter about BioViva Sciences Inc.

Liz Parrish isn’t your average CEO. A passionate advocate for change, her.
company BioViva is leading the fight for healthy longevity with pioneering.
gene therapies targeting Alzheimer’s, sarcopenia and even aging itself.
Parrish dreams big, but she’s a woman of action. She’s even demonstrated.
her commitment by testing cutting-edge therapies on herself. Could her.
efforts change how we think about aging? Is gene therapy the future or are.
we moving too fast? We caught up with the woman herself to find out more.

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After a 10 year study of 3000 people, researchers have made the surprising discovery that hearts age differently in men and women.

We need personalised medicine

We know people age differently, both inside and outside. This is down to a complex interplay of genetics and environment, which leads to significant variation in the aging process for all of us. What we didn’t expect was that such a striking difference would emerge between the genders. So what does this mean? Could there be more we’re missing?

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The much pursued fountain of youth can become a reality if humans agree to share their DNA information, according to Google Ventures’ CEO Bill Maris, who has warned that “we’re all going to die” earlier if we keep our genetic codes secret.

Maris, who aims to digitize DNA, stressed during a Wall Street Journal technology conference in California that our genomes “aren’t really secret,” urging those protective of their genetic information to loosen the reins a bit.

Noting that genetic material is constantly left lying around in public, Maris addressed those who remain nervous about the digitization of DNA. “What are you worried about?” he said on Tuesday, adding that a person could easily gather information by fishing a used cup out of the trash and taking it to a lab for analysis.

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