Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Bindeshwar Pathak, the great humanist and social reformer of contemporary India, joins our Sustainability Board. After Gandhi, Dr. Pathak is the man, more than any other in India, who has championed sanitation and upliftment of the untouchables as the mission of his life. For the last three decades he has been working relentlessly to keep the ecosystem clean and bring the marginalized sections of society in the mainstream.

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  Philippe Van Nedervelde joins the Lifeboat 500, becoming one of a few special individuals and organizations to make a meaningful, but affordable commitment of the price of a cup of coffee a day, in order to help us grow!

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  Watch our new Lifeboat Foundation Introduction Video!

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  Sarah Marr, cofounder of the SENS Foundation, joins our Policy Board. Sarah’s extensive background includes everything from a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics to spending several years as a business and IT consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).

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  Watch a Japanese simulation of what a large meteorite collision would look like.
  

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  Watch a magnificent space compilation on our Videos page.

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  We now have quotes by Lord Martin Rees on our Quotes page. Martin was our Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award 2004 winner and is a member of our Scientific Advisory Board.

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  Our Roger Brent has authored the special report With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Time for the Synthetic Biology Community to Acknowledge Three Responsibilities.

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  Donate the unused CPU cycles on your computer(s) to help scientists understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Current [email protected] projects include the search for cures of: Alzheimer’s Disease, Cancer, Coronavirus, Huntington’s Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, and Parkinson’s Disease. Your participation can help lead to a cure for these diseases, so donate computing cycles generously!
   
  Join our [email protected] team and change the world!

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  Read Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web by Nova Spivack.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.

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  Do you have free or inexpensive space available for an entertaining Lifeboat Foundation volunteer? If so, send a message to [email protected] with the subject “Lifeboat Foundation Space”.