Pain is something that the vast majority of us just have to deal with, and sometimes on a daily basis. Not being able to feel pain is almost unimaginable, but that’s the life one woman in Scotland has been living for 66 years. She doesn’t feel cuts, burns, and even surgery doesn’t register with her, and she’s lived her entire life thinking that was perfectly normal.
Her case, which was published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, only caught the attention of doctors after she recovered from orthopedic hand surgery with no reported pain. As with all patients, she was given a suite of pain-numbing meds while the operation was carried out, but even after the drugs wore off she reported absolutely no pain whatsoever. That’s when doctors realized something was amiss.
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Neal vanderee officiator at the church of perpetual life.
The pursuit of immortality, regeneration & longevity.
Gabriel Rothblatt will join us with his presentation: “What is Terasem? The pursuit of Joyful Immortality.”
Anand Patel will give a presentation on
Arthritis is usually painful. So is the surgery to fix it, at least in the immediate aftermath. So when a 66-year old woman at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, Scotland, told doctors that her severely arthritic hand felt fine both before and after her operation, they were suspicious. The joint of her thumb was so severely deteriorated that she could hardly use it—how could that not hurt?
So they sent her to see teams specializing in pain genetics at University College London and the University of Oxford. Those researchers took DNA samples from both her and some of her family members and uncovered her secret: a tiny mutation in a newly-discovered gene. They recently published their results in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.
This minuscule deletion is inside something called a pseudogene, which is a partial copy of a fully functioning gene inserted elsewhere in the genome. Pseudogenes don’t always have a function—sometimes they’re just junk DNA—but some of them have residual functionality leftover from the original gene’s purpose.
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.
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.