Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2232

Longevity Investor Network member Sebastian Aguiar discusses the rejuvenation biotechnology industry and bridging the gap between research and development.

Sebastian Aguiar is a Venture Fellow at Apollo Ventures, an aging-focused venture capital fund and company builder that invests across Europe and the United States. He can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianaguiar/ and https://twitter.com/sebastian_gero.

What initially attracted you to aging as a general discipline?

Aging is already a solved problem… for cells. The germ line is immortal. Cancer cells are immortal as well. In fact, cellular immortality has been a solved problem for 3.5 billion years, since the dawn of life on Earth. It’s just that the soma – all the cells other than the reproductive cells – are disposable.

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Despite unbelievable advances in medical science in recent decades, breast cancer kills. Approximately 1 in 8 American women will develop breast cancer cells during the course of their lifetime.

Finding a cure is imperative, and as such, fervent research continues. At the European Breast Cancer Conference in Amsterdam, scientists presented a pair of drugs with an astounding claim: this treatment can eradicate some types of breast cancer in only 11 days, eliminating the need for chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy, whilst an amazing feat of medical-scientific engineering, is known for its uncomfortable and sometimes debilitating side effects. Women undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer treatment may lose their hair, suffer extreme fatigue, and even loss of cognitive function.

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Neural networks have been used to turn words that a human has heard into intelligible, recognizable speech. It could be a step toward technology that can one day decode people’s thoughts.

A challenge: Thanks to fMRI scanning, we’ve known for decades that when people speak, or hear others, it activates specific parts of their brain. However, it’s proved hugely challenging to translate thoughts into words. A team from Columbia University has developed a system that combines deep learning with a speech synthesizer to do just that.

The study: The team temporarily placed electrodes in the brains of five people scheduled to have brain surgery for epilepsy. (People who have this procedure often have implants fitted to learn more about their seizures.) The volunteers were asked to listen to recordings of sentences, and their brain activity was used to train deep-learning-based speech recognition software. Then they listened to 40 numbers being spoken. The AI tried to decode what they had heard on the basis of their brain activity—and then spoke the results out loud in a robotic voice. What the voice synthesizer produced was understandable as the right word 75% of the time, according to volunteers who listened to it. The results were published in Scientific Reports today (and you can listen to the recordings here.)

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Scientists have characterized the quantum behavior of buckminsterfullerene molecules, also known as buckyballs, with the hope of perhaps one day turning them into miniature quantum computers.

Buckyballs are the Nobel Prize-winning molecules that consist of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a closed, soccer ball-shape. Their peculiar structure bestows them with strange observable quantum properties, and has given them uses in solar panels and even medicine. But a team of scientists from JILA, a research institute run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, has made measurements in preparation for exploiting buckyballs’ quantum properties in even stranger ways.

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Too many people have forgotten what it’s like to live in a time where everyone got the measles. The vaccine was invented in 1963, and by 1968 cases in the U.S. had already dropped. By the ’70s it was downright rare to get measles as a child, when just a decade or so earlier it had been uncommon not to get it. By 2000, the U.S. declared the disease eliminated—rare cases always came from outside the country. But 2019 has begun with some of the worst outbreaks we’ve seen in recent years, and it’s crystal clear to researchers why the measles is coming back: we got lax about vaccines.

Thanks in part to a famous, fraudulent study claiming to link the MMR vaccine (that’s for measles, mumps, and rubella) to autism, parents across the country have been dissuaded from fully vaccinating their children. The measles virus infects nearly everyone it comes in contact with, so our main protection from it comes from herd immunity—you need upwards of 95 percent of a population to be vaccinated against it to avoid harboring pockets of the virus.

But in recent years, thanks to state laws that allow parents religious and/or philosophical belief exemptions, those rates have been dropping. It’s only by a few percentage points, but remember: we need to stay above 95 percent. The same thing is happening in Europe, where several countries have dipped below that mark or even lower, into the high 80’s. Even a few percentage points can make a difference—Europe saw one of its worst years for measles cases on record, with tens of thousands falling ill from a completely preventable disease.

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