Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,762

Genetically Engineering Yourself Sounds Like a Horrible Idea—But This Guy Is Doing It Anyway

“If something goes wrong, I can just chop off that part of the skin.” Josiah Zayner took a swig from his beer and squinted into the spotlight. He was already kind of drunk. He also hadn’t bothered to write a speech. Tattooed and heavily pierced with a shock of blue-gray hair, he shuffled around uneasily on stage. But 150-odd people had flown in from around the country to hear him speak—the mad pirate-king of biotech. “It all is coming from my heart,” he said, choking up a little. “Everything you’re going to hear today is me to the core.” Advertisement Zayner’s audiencesat in the fashionably…

Blocking Second Dont Eat Me Pathway to Kill Cancer Cells

Cancer can often evade the immune system by sending signals that fool it into thinking that the cancer cells are normal, healthy cells and that it should ignore them. Earlier this year, we reported on an approach to treating cancer in which the immune system can be taught to detect cancer by seeing past the cancer cell’s attempts to hide.

One of these attempts involves a signaling pathway that sends a “don’t Eat Me” signal to the immune system. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a second biological pathway that signals the immune system not to engulf and consume cancer cells.

Medical Device Development and The Case for Real World Evidence (RWE)

By Michael Kanis, National Sales Engineering Manager, Proven Process Medical Devices, and Jodi Hutchins, RAC, CQA

All Those in Favor of Using Real World Evidence, Say Aye!

Medical Devices are used in the real world every day, so shouldn’t they be tested in the real world? You would think so. But the FDA hasn’t necessarily been of that mindset — until now.

Choose your breakthrough of the year!

It’s that time of the year again … the Science news writers and editors are homing in on the “Breakthrough of the Year,” their choice of the most significant scientific discovery, development, or trend in 2017. That selection, along with nine runners-up, will be announced when the last issue of the year goes online on 21 December.

Now, you can get in on the action! Pick your favorite breakthrough from the list of candidates below by 3 December. Then check back the next day, when we will start a second round of voting with your four top picks. We will announce your winner—the People’s Choice—along with Science’s choice on 21 December.

From cancer advances to the cosmos, what’s your top choice?

The jury’s still out on whether universal basic income will save us from job-stealing robots

In this new Business Insider article, my ideas on peak labor and Universal Basic Income are pitted against MIT scientist Andrew McAfee. I’m excited to see my government shrinking Federal Land Dividend proposal getting out there. Story by journalist Dylan Love: http://www.businessinsider.com/will-universal-basic-income-s…?r=UK&IR=T #transhumanism #libertarian

Does free money change nothing or everything?

Universal basic income (UBI) is the hottest idea in social security since Franklin Roosevelt signed the New Deal in 1935, and it is fairly understood as free money given to citizens by their government. Though the idea traces its roots back to the 16th century as a “cure for theft,” UBI has gained new consideration and momentum these days, as high-profile techno-doomsayers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk point to it as an economic solution for big problems predicted to arrive soon.

The future is coming, Musk and his ilk warn, and it’s bringing increased automation and intelligent technologies with it that will eventually overtake the human capacity for work. All-capable robots will cause widespread human unemployment, goes the thinking, plaguing our income and livelihood for generations.

If the “robots are stealing jobs” on the level that the party line portends, then UBI presents itself as a compelling solution to this unusual, hypothetical problem. There’s already some real-world precedent for it: a UBI pilot program in Finland sees the government send a small amount of money to 2,000 unemployed Finns each month, and the initial results are quite positive.

Transhumanism And The Future Of Humanity: 7 Ways The World Will Change By 2030

Innovation Group looked at three fundamental pillars of humanity and how they will evolve over the coming 10–15 years: our bodies, our thought, and our behavior. After identifying the driving forces that will transform these fundamental pillars, we extracted key themes emerging from their convergence. Ultimately our goal was to determine the ways in which the changing nature of humanity and transhumanism would affect individuals, society, businesses, and government.

A few of the trends that emerged from this study include the following seven trends. We hope they will spark discussion and innovation at your organizations.

Companies today are strategizing about future investments and technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or growth around new business models. While many of these trends will make for solid investments for the next 5–10 years, fewer companies are considering the revolutionary convergence of disparate trends pulled from technology, behavioral and societal changes, and medical advances to understand how they will converge to transform society. This transformation will be messy, complex, and sometimes scary, but signals already point to a future of humanity that will blur our identities into “transhumanism.”

Prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin samples from patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Another case of idiot MD’s who think they know everything not wanting to test for CJD, and getting mad when something they dont know existed contaminating instruments and spreading diseases.

AI doctors soon please.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, can be transmitted via neurosurgical instruments or corneal or dura mater transplants contaminated by infectious prions. Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with surgeries that involve the skin, but whether the skin of sCJD patients contains prion infectivity is not known. Orrú et al. now report detectable prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin from sCJD patients, although at much lower levels compared to brain tissues from sCJD patients. These data suggest that there may be a potential for iatrogenic sCJD transmission through skin.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, is transmissible through iatrogenic routes due to abundant infectious prions [misfolded forms of the prion protein (PrPSc)] in the central nervous system (CNS). Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with non-CNS surgeries. We explored the potential prion seeding activity and infectivity of skin from sCJD patients. Autopsy or biopsy skin samples from 38 patients [21 sCJD, 2 variant CJD (vCJD), and 15 non-CJD] were analyzed by Western blotting and real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) for PrPSc. Skin samples from two patients were further examined for prion infectivity by bioassay using two lines of humanized transgenic mice. Western blotting revealed dermal PrPSc in one of five deceased sCJD patients and one of two vCJD patients.

CRISPR Can Now Hitch a Ride on Nanoparticles to Battle Disease

Yet CRISPR has a dirty secret: there’s really no perfect way to deliver the “molecular scissors” safely into cells. Most methods currently rely on viruses: the DNA that encodes the CRISPR machinery is spliced into a “viral vector” then injected into the troubled tissue.

That’s all well and good for diseases that affect blood and muscle. But for destinations buried deep within the body, delivery becomes a serious issue.

Yin’s workaround wasn’t ideal: he shot two milliliters of solution containing the CRISPR machinery into the mice’s veins using incredibly high pressure. The human equivalent? Your entire blood volume, injected in just five minutes.

Why Longer Lives Thanks to Science Will Probably Not Create Cultural Stagnation

You probably know the quote by Steve Jobs saying that death is life’s single best invention because it gets rid of the old and makes room for the new. This view is the core of another fairly common objection to rejuvenation, codename “cultural stagnation”.

Wouldn’t all those rejuvenated people, however physically young, be always old people “inside”, and drag everyone down with them into their anachronistic, surpassed ways of thinking, making it harder for fresh ideas to take hold, ultimately hindering social progress and our growth as a species? Maybe it’d be best not to take the risk, forget rejuvenation, and be content with old age as it is.

Well, try explaining to your grandfather that the reason he has to put up with heart disease is that we’re afraid people his age may all become troublemakers when you let them live too long.