Lifeboat Foundation

Given there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the futurology subreddit, we thought it was a great time to have a look at the progress the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA where you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Given that there is to be a Reddit AMA on December 7th with Dr. Aubrey de Grey in the Futurology subreddit, we think it’s a great time to have a look at the progress that the SENS Research Foundation has made in tackling the aging processes. What follows is a brief summary of some of the highlights of their research efforts as well as the details of the AMA, in which you can ask Aubrey anything you like about his work.

Today, there are many drugs and therapies that we take for granted. However, we should not forget that what is common and easily accessible today didn’t just magically appear out of thin air; rather, at some point, it used to be an unclear subject of study on which “more research was needed”, and even earlier, it was just a conjecture in some researcher’s head.

Continue reading “SENS: Progress in the Fight Against Age-related Diseases” »

Dr. Hébert will be in Berlin to provide an update on his fascinating work. The use of stem cells to repair the brain is relatively straightforward for Parkinson’s disease, in which cell depletion is localized to one small region, but in Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, the cell loss is widely distributed, whereas cells can only be injected into one spot. The solution that Dr. Hébert explores is to make those cells migrate before dividing and differentiating.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/dr-jean-hebert-to-speak-at-undoing-aging-2018

‘UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the “bad name” of gene drives in some circles. “Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from DARPA, a US military science agency,” one said.‘.

Cutting-edge gene editing tools such as Crispr-Cas9 work by using a synthetic ribonucleic acid (RNA) to cut into DNA strands and then insert, alter or remove targeted traits. These might, for example, distort the sex-ratio of mosquitoes to effectively wipe out malarial populations.

Some UN experts, though, worry about unintended consequences. One told the Guardian: “You may be able to remove viruses or the entire mosquito population, but that may also have downstream ecological effects on species that depend on them.”

Continue reading “US military agency invests $100m in genetic extinction technologies” »

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is the Chief Science Officer, founder of the SENS Research Foundation (SRF) and one of the original proponents of a damage repair-based approach to aging and age-related diseases. His work has inspired many others to think about aging differently and entertain the idea that, perhaps, we do not have to accept the suffering that age-related diseases cause.

Recently, Dr. de Grey published an article in MIT Technology Review; here, we explain why this is a real milestone of progress.

Aubrey de Grey has set himself a simple task. The 54-year-old cofounder of the SENS Research Foundation wants to end biological aging for good. So sure is he of his mission, he proclaims the first human being to live to the age of 1,000 has already been born. De Grey believes that, within the next 20 years or so, scientists will finally solve one of humanity’s greatest problems.

“The fact is, aging kills 110,000 people worldwide every fucking day,” de Grey said at a Virtual Futures event attended by Inverse in London on Wednesday, in a conversation with group director Luke Robert Mason. “It doesn’t just kill them. You have to take into account all the suffering that comes before.”

Through his foundation, de Grey is working to solve seven types of aging damage that he believes are the key to a breakthrough. These are tissue atrophy, cancerous cells, mitochondrial mutations, death -resistant cells, extracellular matrix stiffening, extracellular aggregates, and intracellular aggregates. It may sound like a complex salad of jargon, but de Grey claims that because science has an understanding of how to fix all these damages, aging can end for good.

Continue reading “Why This Aging Expert Thinks First 1,000-Year-Old Person is Already Alive” »

Other uses include biosensors and wound patches.

[scroll down to view the video.] The animation house of Kurzsegat provides us with an 8-minute video on how the microbiome influences our health and mood and even encourages us to eat junk food. Scientists have linked the human microbiome to a variety of health conditions such as cancer, autism, weight gain, Parkinson’s Disease and even our mental health.

Last week, Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in the Autumn Budget a £500m package of investment into tech initiatives, including the development of artificial intelligence.

Which must have had the Channel 4 executives ordering trebles all round, because with perfect timing they’ve designated this week the “Rise of the Robots season”, with a schedule that includes documentaries on the take-off of artificial intelligences (AIs) as consulting doctors, a David Tennant -narrated piece on the challenge of making robots as human as possible, and the one that’s had the tabloids hot under the collar, today’s The Sex Robots Are Coming – which needs little further explanation.

Doctor Who and the Invasion of the Sex-Bots aside, though, is it actually possible that the dream of science fiction writers going back a century or more is on the verge of reality? Are we really about to live in the long-promised future of robots and AIs?

Continue reading “The robots are coming – but will they really take all our jobs?” »