Lifeboat Foundation

To whom it may concern,

Cryonics is a legitimate science-based endeavor that seeks to preserve human beings, especially the human brain, by the best technology available. Future technologies for resuscitation can be envisioned that involve molecular repair by nanomedicine, highly advanced computation, detailed control of cell growth, and tissue regeneration.

With a view toward these developments, there is a credible possibility that cryonics performed under the best conditions achievable today can preserve sufficient neurological information to permit eventual restoration of a person to full health.

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Nature invented software billions of years before we did. “The origin of life is really the origin of software,” says Gregory Chaitin. Life requires what software does (it’s foundationally algorithmic).

1. “DNA is multibillion-year-old software,” says Chaitin (inventor of mathematical metabiology). We’re surrounded by software, but couldn’t see it until we had suitable thinking tools.

2. Alan Turing described modern software in 1936, inspiring John Von Neumann to connect software to biology. Before DNA was understood, Von Neumann saw that self-reproducing automata needed software. We now know DNA stores information; it’s a biochemical version of Turning’s software tape, but more generally: All that lives must process information. Biology’s basic building blocks are processes that make decisions.

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Dr Michael Fossel comments on the recent Bioviva announcement of the first human gene therapy against aging.

The other day, a friend of mine, Liz Parrish, the CEO and founder of BioViva, made quite a splash when she injected herself with a viral vector containing genes for both telomerase and FST. Those in favor of what Liz did applaud her for her courage and her ability to move quickly and effectively in a landscape where red tape and regulatory concerns have – in the minds of some – impeded innovation and medical care. Those opposed to what Liz did have criticized her for moving too rapidly without sufficient concern for safety, ethics, or (from some critics) scientific rationale.

Many people have asked me to comment, both as an individual and as the founder of Telocyte. This occurs for two reasons. For one thing, I was the first person to ever advocate the use of telomerase as a clinical intervention, in discussions, in published journal articles, and in published books. My original JAMA articles (1997 and 1998), my first book on the topic (1996), and my textbook (2004) all clearly explained both the rational of and the implications for using telomerase as a therapeutic intervention to treat age-related disease. For another thing, Liz knew that our biotech firm, Telocyte, intends to do almost the same thing, but with a few crucial differences: we will only be using telomerase (hTERT) and we intend to pursue human trials that have FDA clearance, have full IRB agreement, and meet GMP (“Good Medical Production”) standards.

We cannot help but applaud Liz’s courage in using herself as a subject, a procedure with a long (and occasionally checkered) history in medical science. Using herself as the subject undercuts much of the ethical criticism that would be more pointed if she used other patients. Like many others, we also fully understand the urgent need for more effective therapeutic interventions: patients are not only suffering, but dying as we try to move ahead. In the case of Alzheimer’s disease, for example (our primary therapeutic target at Telocyte), there are NO currently effective therapies, a history of universal failure in human trials for experimental therapies, and an enormous population of patients who are currently losing their souls and their lives to this disease. A slow, measured approach to finding a cure is scarcely welcome in such a context.

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First Gene-Edited Dogs Reported in China.

An extra-muscular beagle has been created through genome engineering. Are we on our way to customizing the DNA of our pets?

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This short video (with some fun integrated graphics) is from an interview I did with El Pais (the largest newspaper in Spain). It highlights some of the emerging technologies and approaches which have the potential to shift health, medicine and biopharma from its intermittent and reactive physician-centric mode, to an era of more continuous data and a proactive approach, in which the individual is increasingly empowered and integrated into personalized wellness, diagnosis and therapy. The video is below and some associated thoughts follow:

Diagnostics- Era of the digital black bag: Ranging from an eye, ear and throat exam (from connected devices designed for the patient like CellScope, MedWand and Tyto) to cardiac exams enabled by low cost EKG’s (AliveCor and Kito), digital diagnostics is coming to the home. Some will even do automated interpretations (i.e. the EKG interpreted by the app and send to the cloud), where the diagnosis and management of disease will increasingly be enabled outside of the usual clinic, ER or hospital. Wearable patches that integrate multiple vital signs, such as those developed by Vital Connect and Proteus Digital Health will enable more complex disease management and monitoring with ICU level data (EKG, respiratory rate, temperature, position and more), outside of the clinical environment.

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The first attempt at using gene therapy to prevent regular aging allegedly happened last month in what could spell the beginning of a new era in do-it-yourself genetic modification.

CEO and founder of BioViva Sciences USA Inc, Liz Parrish, claims she underwent gene therapy at an undisclosed location in Latin America where she received two forms of treatment, including muscle mass enhancement and therapy to increase the length of the telomeres, the DNA caps which protect the chromosome from deterioration and are associated with longer life span.

Parrish announced in a Reddit AMA that she had gone through the therapy and if successful she plans to roll out a public offering in three to five years despite neither treatment being FDA approved. The results of the therapy are yet unknown and she says she feels no different so far but believes it will be months before any changes occur. If successful her body, in theory, should begin to de-age.

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Electrocorticography (ECoG) was pioneered in the early 1950s by Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper, neurosurgeons at the Montreal Neurological Institute. The two developed ECoG as part of their groundbreaking Montreal procedure, a surgical protocol used to treat patients with severe epilepsy. The cortical potentials recorded by ECoG were used to identify epileptogenic zones – regions of the cortex that generate epileptic seizures. These zones would then be surgically removed from the cortex during resectioning, thus destroying the brain tissue where epileptic seizures had originated. Penfield and Jasper also used electrical stimulation during ECoG recordings in patients undergoing epilepsy surgery under local anesthesia. This procedure was used to explore the functional anatomy of the brain, mapping speech areas and identifying the somatosensory and somatomotor cortex areas to be excluded from surgical removal. This week we learned that Google has filed a patent relating to this medical field titled “Microelectrode Array for an Electrocorticogram.”

Google’s patent FIG. 6 noted above shows an application of the microelectrode array 1 according to the invention when recording an electrocorticogram of a human being. The microelectrode array is wirelessly connected to an electronic control device 10, which comprises in particular an amplifier for the electrode signals and a data acquisition system. The microelectrode array, implanted e.g. below the patient’s scalp, has an energy receiving coil 60 and an antenna 61 for bidirectional data transfer between the microelectrode array 1 and the electronic control device. It is also possible for the energy receiving coil simultaneously to be used as an antenna, such that no separate antenna is required.

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Brendan I. Koerner at Wired, explores the ramifications of the authorities requesting DNA from ancestry sites:

Mitch Morrissey, Denver’s district attorney and one of the nation’s leading advocates for familial DNA searching, stresses that the technology is “an innovative approach to investigating challenging cases, particularly cold cases where the victims are women or children and traditional investigative tactics fail to yield a solid suspect.” Familial DNA searches have indeed helped nab people who might otherwise have evaded justice. In the most celebrated example, Los Angeles police arrested a man believed to be the Grim Sleeper serial killer after discovering that the crime scene DNA shared a significant number of genetic markers with that of a convicted felon—who turned out to be the man’s son.

But the well-publicized success stories obscure the fact that familial DNA searches can generate more noise than signal. “Anyone who knows the science understands that there’s a high rate of false positives,” says Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and the author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. The searches, after all, look for DNA profiles that are similar to the perpetrator’s but by no means identical, a scattershot approach that yields many fruitless leads, and for limited benefit. In the United Kingdom, a 2014 study found that just 17 percent of familial DNA searches “resulted in the identification of a relative of the true offender.”

Continue reading “Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA” »

In the last few years, the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) has been thrust into the mainstream. No longer just the domain of sci-fi fans, nerds or Google engineers, I hear people discussing AI at parties, coffee shops and even at the dinner table: My five-year-old daughter brought it up the other night over taco lasagna. When I asked her if anything interesting had happened in school, she replied that her teacher discussed smart robots.

The exploration of intelligence — be it human or artificial — is ultimately the domain of epistemology, the study of knowledge. Since the first musings of creating AI back in antiquity, epistemology seems to have led the debate on how to do it. The question I hear most in this field from the public is: How can humans develop another intelligent consciousness if we can’t even understand our own?

It’s a prudent question. The human brain, despite being only about 3 pounds in weight, is the least understood organ in the body. And with a billion neurons — with 100 trillion connections — it’s safe to say it’s going to be a long time before we end up figuring out the brain.

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