Lifeboat Foundation

Prof Jennifer Doudna, one the pioneers of Crispr-Cas9 gene editing, explains how this revolutionary discovery enables precise changes to our DNA, which can be used to correct mutations that cause genetic diseases and eradicate them from a germ line. Doudna raises the key issues of debate around gene editing and suggests what will have the most immediate impact.

You might think we’re not in Texas anymore but in some strange episode of Black Mirror, the Netflix series, says Nikos Acuna who is moderating this SXSW panel on transhumanism.

In fact you’d be forgiven if you did as there is talk about cryo-preserving the body after being declared dead, in the hopes you can be resurrected when the science is here to safely defrost your body and cure you of your ailments. There is also talk on mind uploading, and replacing parts of our brains with neural prosthetics. This all sounds like science-fiction but these days the stuff of science fiction has become fact.

Transhumanist technologies are about overcoming the limitations of human biology and Dr Max More and Dr Randal Koene are at the forefront of these technologies.

Continue reading “SXSW: These two futurists want to freeze your body after death and replace your brain” »

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses.

More than 1,000 people have been infected with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo since August 2018, according to the World Health Organization. The hemorrhagic fever, which is concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, has killed 629 people as of Sunday. That makes it the second worst Ebola outbreak on record, after the one that began in West Africa in 2014, which infected more than 26,000 and killed an estimated 11,300 people over the course of two years.

Here’s what you need to know:

Ebola is actually a group of viruses that appear to be spread by bats to humans and other primates such as apes and chimpanzees. It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, poop, vomit, urine, breast milk, and semen. It can enter a person’s body through cuts in the skin, or through mucous membranes—tissues that line the eyes, nose, mouth, urethra, and vagina. At first, Ebola may seem like the common flu. Symptoms include exhaustion, aches and pains, vision problems, and stomach pain. But in most patients, Ebola quickly escalates to a full-blown hemorrhagic fever, which leads to bleeding, organ failure, and in many cases, death.

Continue reading “We’re in the middle of the second-deadliest Ebola outbreak ever” »

Bio-PDO — Susterra propanediol produced by DuPont Tate & Lyle Bio Products — are among the many smart applications of corn, and constitute the building blocks of a number of environmentally friendly materials, increasingly used in the footwear manufacture.

We are all familiar with sweetcorn or corn on the cob and many of us enjoy eating it boiled and coated in butter. Americans in particular are especially fond of it although less than 1% of all the corn grown annually in the USA is for human consumption. The remaining 99% is industrial corn or maize which is used for animal feed and for processing into a variety of other products. Among these is Bio-PDO or, to give it its commercial name, Susterra propanediol produced by DuPont Tate & Lyle Bio Products, which is used as a basis for a number of environmentally friendly materials, increasingly used in footwear manufacture.

The variety of corn involved is known as yellow dent and has a high starch content. After harvesting and drying, it is transported to Tate & Lyle’s wet mill at Loudon, Tennessee. Using a wet milling process, the corn is separated into its four basic components: starch, germ, fibre and protein. The nutrient rich components are used for animal feed while glucose is derived from the remaining starch fraction and is the raw material used for making 1.3- propanediol. The process starts off with a culture of a special microorganism in a small flask with the glucose. As it grows, it is transferred to a seed fermenter, followed by a ten-story high production fermenter. Fermentation takes place under exact temperature conditions and involves a patented process where the microorganism functions as a biocatalyst, converting glucose into biobased 1.3-propaneidol.

Continue reading “Plant-based footwear from DuPont Tate & Lyle’s Bio-PDO” »

Spiders, mushrooms and algae may help build the next Hilfiger, Levi and Chanel.

Organisms are the great designers of our planet, producing materials in distinct patterns to serve a specific function. Bees produce hexagonal honeycombs to store honey, spiders weave symmetrical webs to capture prey, and nautiluses form a logarithmic spiral shell to protect their insides. Synthetic biologists, ever inspired by nature, are leveraging these unique abilities, harnessing nature’s potential to revolutionize apparel by guiding structural assemblies at the molecular level.

Here are three examples of innovative companies — in Tokyo, New York, and Berkeley — that are letting nature show the way to better, more sustainable materials in a quest to alter the fashion and apparel industries forever.

Continue reading “Biotechnology meets fashion and sports performance: Trends in the apparel industry” »

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0375-9

The hippocampus is one of the most affected areas in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Moreover, this structure hosts one of the most unique phenomena of the adult mammalian brain, namely, the addition of new neurons throughout life. This process, called adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN), confers an unparalleled degree of plasticity to the entire hippocampal circuitry^3,4. Nonetheless, direct evidence of AHN in humans has remained elusive. Thus, determining whether new neurons are continuously incorporated into the human dentate gyrus (DG) during physiological and pathological aging is a crucial question with outstanding therapeutic potential. By combining human brain samples obtained under tightly controlled conditions and state-of-the-art tissue processing methods, we identified thousands of immature neurons in the DG of neurologically healthy human subjects up to the ninth decade of life. These neurons exhibited variable degrees of maturation along differentiation stages of AHN. In sharp contrast, the number and maturation of these neurons progressively declined as AD advanced. These results demonstrate the persistence of AHN during both physiological and pathological aging in humans and provide evidence for impaired neurogenesis as a potentially relevant mechanism underlying memory deficits in AD that might be amenable to novel therapeutic strategies.

Using a modified version of CRISPR, a team of geneticists has successfully triggered 13,200 genetic changes to a single human cell. That’s a new record, by a long shot. This sweeping new editing process could eventually be used to strip DNA of useless or dangerous genetic information—or create entirely new kinds of life.

New research uploaded to the preprint bioRxiv server describes the achievement, in which a Harvard University team led by George Church edited the living crap out of a single human cell to the tune of 13,200 total modifications. Incredibly, the cell survived. The previous record for bulk edits made to a single cell was set in 2017, when Church and his colleagues knocked out 62 copies of a retrovirus found in pig genomes. The new achievement is thus “three orders of magnitude greater” than the previous standard, the authors wrote in their paper.

A new review discusses how neutrophils release toxic substances into the body under inflammatory conditions, detailing one of the ways in which chronic inflammation causes long-term damage.

Casting a deadly NET

As we age, we suffer from the ever-increasing chronic inflammation known as inflammaging. This persistent, smoldering background of low-grade inflammation harms wound healing and promotes multiple age-related diseases. Senescent cells, a weakened immune system, and chronic infections are all proposed to contribute to inflammaging.

Continue reading “Chronic Inflammation Leads to Toxic NET Buildup” »