Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1832

Coronavirus’s economic danger is exponentially greater than its health risks to the public. If the virus does directly affect your life, it is most likely to be through stopping you going to work, forcing your employer to make you redundant, or bankrupting your business.

The trillions of dollars wiped from financial markets this week will be just the beginning, if our governments do not step in. And if President Trump continues to stumble in his handling of the situation, it may well affect his chances of re-election. Joe Biden in particular has identified Covid-19 as a weakness for Trump, promising “steady, reassuring” leadership during America’s hour of need.

© Provided by The Independent Worldwide, Covid-19 has killed 4,389 with 31 US deaths as of today. But it will economically cripple millions, especially since the epidemic has formed a perfect storm with stock market crashes, an oil war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, and the spilling over of an actual war in Syria into another potential migrant crisis.

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Prolonged expression of the CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease and gRNA from viral vectors may cause off-target mutagenesis and immunogenicity. Thus, a transient delivery system is needed for therapeutic genome editing applications. Here, we develop an extracellular nanovesicle-based ribonucleoprotein delivery system named NanoMEDIC by utilizing two distinct homing mechanisms. Chemical induced dimerization recruits Cas9 protein into extracellular nanovesicles, and then a viral RNA packaging signal and two self-cleaving riboswitches tether and release sgRNA into nanovesicles. We demonstrate efficient genome editing in various hard-to-transfect cell types, including human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, neurons, and myoblasts. NanoMEDIC also achieves over 90% exon skipping efficiencies in skeletal muscle cells derived from Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patient iPS cells. Finally, single intramuscular injection of NanoMEDIC induces permanent genomic exon skipping in a luciferase reporter mouse and in mdx mice, indicating its utility for in vivo genome editing therapy of DMD and beyond.

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Two other international teams are planning Mars launches in July. NASA plans to deploy a rover named Perseverance, and the United Arab Emirates will send a probe called Hope. The European and Russian space agencies were planning to send a probe to Mars this year, but announced on Thursday that the launch will be delayed by two years so they can finish important tests, and partly because of the coronavirus pandemic.

China’s first journey to Mars is one of the most anticipated space missions of the year. But with parts of the country in some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the mission teams have had to find creative ways to continue their work.

Researchers involved in the mission remain tight-lipped about its key aspects, but several reports from Chinese state media say that the outbreak will not affect the July launch — the only window for another two years.

“The launch is so important politically that they will make it happen,” says Raymond Arvidson, a planetary geologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who has been involved with several US Mars missions.

Continue reading “How China is planning to go to Mars amid the coronavirus outbreak” | >

Scientists who study the biology of Aging agreed that we would someday be able to slow down the aging process substantially.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer at SENS Research Foundation and VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics believes that the critical biomedical technology required to eliminate aging derived debilitation and death is now within reach.

In his book “Ending Aging” he and his research assistant Michael Rae described the details of this biotechnology. They explained that the Aging of the human body, just like the Aging of manmade machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with manmade machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to the indefinite extension of the machines fully functional lifetime just as is routinely done with classic cars.

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Population Research Institute President Steven W. Mosher wrote at the New York Post on Saturday that China’s coronavirus epidemic could have been unleashed by researchers who sold laboratory animals to the notorious “wet markets” of Wuhan for extra cash.

Mosher is not the first skeptic of Beijing’s official coronavirus narrative to note the presence of an advanced microbiology lab near Wuhan, the city where the epidemic originated. Since the early days of the crisis, theories have suggested everything from the lab accidentally releasing the virus to speculation that the virus might have been deliberately designed as a biological weapon.

His theory cited as evidence the release of new guidelines from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology calling for “strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

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All restaurants, cafés, cinemas and clubs in France will close at midnight in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the French prime minister Édouard Philippe said in a press conference.

He said the virus is spreading faster even though limitations on mass gatherings were imposed.

“People are still going to cafes and restaurants which is something that I would normally enjoy because this is the French way of living but not during these times,” he said.

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Uh oh…

Denver and Aurora police will no longer send an officer to take reports on low-level incidents in an effort to protect their staff from the new coronavirus.

Both departments are encouraging people to report crimes online if they don’t require an immediate response and if no one is in danger. The departments can then follow up with a phone call without risking exposure of officers or the person making the complaint to the virus. Aurora police leadership said they would not send officers to a call unless there is still a crime in progress or its a serious offense.

The Denver Police Department started preparing for COVID-19 more than a month ago and has contingency plans should a bulk of their force become infected, Chief Paul Pazen said. The department will have to prioritize calls as they come in if their staffing is severely impacted, he said. Officers will no longer respond in-person to reports of crimes like vandalism and low-level theft.

Continue reading “Denver, Aurora police no longer sending officers to low-level crimes to minimize spread of coronavirus” | >