Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2484

THE numbers are stark. Cancer claimed the lives of 8.8m people in 2015; only heart disease caused more deaths. Around 40% of Americans will be told they have cancer during their lifetimes. It is now a bigger killer of Africans than malaria. But the statistics do not begin to capture the fear inspired by cancer’s silent and implacable cellular mutiny. Only Alzheimer’s exerts a similar grip on the imagination.

Confronted with this sort of enemy, people understandably focus on the potential for scientific breakthroughs that will deliver a cure. Their hope is not misplaced. Cancer has become more and more survivable over recent decades owing to a host of advances, from genetic sequencing to targeted therapies. The five-year survival rate for leukemia in America has almost doubled, from 34% in the mid-1970s to 63% in 2006-12. America is home to about 15.5m cancer survivors, a number that will grow to 20m in the next ten years. Developing countries have made big gains, too: in parts of Central and South America, survival rates for prostate and breast cancer have jumped by as much as a fifth in only a decade.

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DNA nanorobot cargo carrier (artist’s impression) (credit: Ella Maru Studio)

Caltech scientists have developed a “cargo sorting” DNA nanorobot programmed to autonomously “walk” around a surface, pick up certain molecules, and drop them off in designated locations.

The research is described in a paper in the Friday, September 15, 2017 issue of Science.

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Open wide, because the robots have eyes on your dental work. South China Morning Post reports that a robo-dentist has autonomously implanted two new, 3D-printed teeth into a woman’s mouth.

The procedure, which appears to have made use of a robot arm from Universal Robotics, was developed by a team from the Fourth Military Medical University and Beihang University. The hardware first orients itself with the patient’s head, and is then programmed with the procedure it needs to undertake. It does a dry run to check that it’s got everything right, before the patient is given an anesthetic and the robot gets drilling. The team says that the robot works to tolerances of less than 0.3 millimeters, and can detect and compensate for movements of the person’s head.

Don’t fancy the idea? Well, bear in mind that it’s hoped the robot will be able to make up for a shortfall in the number of practicing dentists in China, which often leads to unqualified practitioners performing questionable procedures.

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Michio Kaku and Gregory Scott discuss different aspects of genetic engineering in the video below. According to Kaku and Scott, parents will soon have different genetic engineering choices to make about their children. In addition, recent discoveries by Yue Shao have yielded a new classification of parentless synthetic human embryos.

With Yue Shao’s discovery, genetic engineers might be learning to grow synthetic human embryos from anonymous stem cells donated from IVF clinics. How far this genetic engineering technology goes remains to be seen.

Michio Kaku and Gregory Scott speak about the ethical concerns of genetic engineering in the Michio Kaku video below beginning at the 29-minute mark. However, Yue Shao’s statements to MIT about the accidental discovery of how to engineer synthetic human embryos out of stem cells raises more ethical concerns.

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Stem cell research is one of my absolute favorite topics. This amazing field does not only reveal to us how our bodies function and develop, but also holds promising future applications that could help us treat severe diseases, which would not be treated otherwise. However, stem cell research can do more than just treat diseases. In this article, I will highlight the latest scientific breakthroughs to show you how we can turn a simple skin cell into a fully-grown genetically-engineered human being all thanks to the power of stem cells and genetic engineering.

Desperate times call for desperate measures

The field of stem cell research began in 1981 with the discovery of the embryonic stem cells by Martin Evans at Cardiff University, UK. In 1998, stem cells research became a hot topic in the mainstream media after scientists isolated human embryonic stem cells and grew them in the lab for the first time. Due to this breakthrough, stem cell research faced a lot of resistance from the general public. It raised questions about life, consciousness and human rights. At what point does one consider life to begin? If an embryo can develop into an individual, is it justifiable to destroy it or even use it for scientific research? This led the U.S. government to limit the federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells because these embryos were destroyed in the process.

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