Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: cryonics – Page 29

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Bioquark, Inc., (http://www.bioquark.com) a company focused on the development of novel biologics for complex regeneration and disease reversion, and Revita Life Sciences, (http://revitalife.co.in) a biotechnology company focused on translational therapeutic applications of autologous stem cells, have announced that they have received IRB approval for a study focusing on a novel combinatorial approach to clinical intervention in the state of brain death in humans.

This first trial, within the portfolio of Bioquark’s Reanima Project (http://www.reanima.tech) is entitled “Non-randomized, Open-labeled, Interventional, Single Group, Proof of Concept Study With Multi-modality Approach in Cases of Brain Death Due to Traumatic Brain Injury Having Diffuse Axonal Injury” (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02742857?term=bioquark&rank=1), will enroll an initial 20 subjects, and be conducted at Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand India.

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“We are very excited about the approval of our protocol,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “With the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we are poised to delve into an area of scientific understanding previously inaccessible with existing technologies.”

Death is defined as the termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Brain death, the complete and irreversible loss of brain function (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) as defined in the 1968 report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, is the legal definition of human death in most countries around the world. Either directly through trauma, or indirectly through secondary disease indications, brain death is the final pathological state that over 60 million people globally transfer through each year.

While human beings lack substantial regenerative capabilities in the CNS, many non-human species, such as amphibians, planarians, and certain fish, can repair, regenerate and remodel substantial portions of their brain and brain stem even after critical life-threatening trauma.

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Additionally, recent studies on complex brain regeneration in these organisms, have highlighted unique findings in relation to the storage of memories following destruction of the entire brain, which may have wide ranging implications for our understanding of consciousness and the stability of memory persistence.

“Through our study, we will gain unique insights into the state of human brain death, which will have important connections to future therapeutic development for other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states, as well as a range of degenerative CNS conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Sergei Paylian, Founder, President, and Chief Science Officer of Bioquark Inc.

Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. However, once humans transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible”, they are technically no longer alive, despite the fact that human bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.

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“We look forward to working closely with Bioquark Inc. on this cutting edge clinical initiative,” said Dr. Himanshu Bansal, Managing Director of Revita Life Sciences.

About Bioquark, Inc.

Bioquark Inc. is focused on the development of natural biologic based products, services, and technologies, with the goal of curing a wide range of diseases, as well as effecting complex regeneration. Bioquark is developing both biological pharmaceutical candidates, as well as products for the global consumer health and wellness market segments.

About Revita Life Sciences

Revita Life Sciences is a biotechnology company focused on the development of stem cell therapies that target areas of significant unmet medical need. Revita is led by Dr. Himanshu Bansal MD, PhD. who has spent over two decades developing novel MRI based classifications of spinal cord injuries as well as comprehensive treatment protocols with autologous tissues including bone marrow stem cells, dural nerve grafts, nasal olfactory tissues, and omental transposition.

The growth of human and computer intelligence has triggered a barrage of dire predictions about the rise of super intelligence and the singularity. But some retain their skepticism, including Dr. Michael Shermer, a science historian and founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine.

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The reason so many rational people put forward hypotheses that are more hype than high tech, Shermer says, is that being smart and educated doesn’t protect anyone from believing in “weird things.” In fact, sometimes smart and educated people are better at rationalizing beliefs that they hold for not-so-rational reasons. The smarter and more educated you are, the better able you are to find evidence to support what you want to be true, suggests Shermer.

“This explains why Nobel Prize winners speak about areas they know nothing about with great confidence and are sure that they’re right. Just because they have this great confidence of being able to do that (is) a reminder that they’re more like lawyers than scientists in trying to marshal a case for their client,” Shermer said. “(Lawyers) just put together the evidence, as much as you can, in support of your client and get rid of the negative evidence. In science you’re not allowed to do that, you’re supposed to look at all the evidence, including the counter evidence to your theory.”

The root of many of these false hypotheses, Shermer believes, is based in religion. Using immortality as an example, Shermer said the desire to live forever has strong parallels to religious beliefs; however, while there are many making prophecies that technology will insure we’ll live forever, too many people in groups throughout history have made similar yet unfulfilled promises.

“What we’d like to be true is not necessarily what is true, so the burden of proof is on them to go ahead and make the case. Like the cryonics people…they make certain claims that this or that technology is going to revive people that are frozen later…I hope they do it, but you’ve got to prove otherwise. You have to show that you can actually do that.”

Even if we do find a way to live forever, Shermer notes the negatives may outweigh the positives. It’s not just living longer that we want to achieve, but living longer at a high quality of life. There’s not much benefit in living to age 150, he adds, if one is bedridden for 20 or 30 years.

Instead, Shermer compares the process to the evolution of the automobile. While the flying cars promised by 1950’s-era futurists haven’t come to pass, today’s automobile is exponentially smarter and safer than those made 50 or 60 years ago. While forward thinkers have had moments of lucid foresight, humans also have a history of making technology predictions that often don’t turn out to be realized. Often, as is the case with the automobile, we don’t notice differences in technological changes because the changes happen incrementally each year.

“That’s what’s really happening with health and longevity. We’re just creeping up the ladder slowly but surely. We’ve seen hip replacements, organ transplants, better nutrition, exercise, and getting a better feel for what it takes to be healthy,” Shermer says. “The idea that we’re gonna’ have one big giant discovery made that’s going to change everything? I think that’s less likely than just small incremental things. A Utopian (society) where everybody gets to live forever and they’re infinitely happy and prosperous and so on? I think it’s unrealistic to think along those lines.”

Looking at the future of technology, Shermer is equally reticent to buy in to the predictions of artificial intelligence taking over the world. “I think the concern about AI turning evil (and) this dystopian, science fiction perspective is again, not really grounded in reality. I’m an AI optimist, but I don’t think the AI pessimists have any good arguments,” Shermer said

While we know, for the most part, which types of governments work well, we don’t have any similar precedent for complex AI systems. Humans will remain in control and, before we start passing laws and restrictions to curb AI out of fear, Shermer believes we should keep improving our computers and artificial intelligence to make life better, evaluating and taking action as these systems continue to evolve.

If I am not mistaken she edited The Three Body Problem, she did not write it.

In what seems like a story ripped straight from the pages of an Isaac Asimov novel, a recently deceased Chinese woman named Du Hong just had her brain cryogenically frozen in hopes that, in the future, the technology to bring her back to life will be created. No joke. Hong, a science fiction author herself, paid upwards of $120k to have her brain sent from China to Scottsdale, Arizona to undergo a freezing procedure at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Her idea is that while modern tech doesn’t allow for the reanimation of her brain today, inevitable advancements in cryonics will one day bring her back to life.

Before passing away last May from pancreatic cancer, the 61-year-old Du decided she wanted to allow her brain to be the subject of experiments after her death. Though it took some time before the team at Alcor actually conducted the procedure, doctors in Beijing prepped Du’s brain after her official time of death on May 30. Despite the Alcor Life Extension Foundation agreeing to freeze Du’s brain, the organization made it clear that it wouldn’t be the one to actually attempt to bring Du back to life in the future.

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I have spent the last 30 years in various aspects of the biopharmaceutical industry, which for the most part has been a very rewarding experience.

However, during this time period, having been immersed many different components of therapeutic development and commercialization, one thing has always bothered me: a wide array of promising research never makes it off the bench to see the translational light of day, and gets lost in the historical scientific archives.

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I always believed that scientific progress happened in a very linear narrative, with each new discovery supporting the next, resulting ultimately in an eventual stairway of scientific enlightenment.

What the reality turned out to be was much more of a fragmented, research “evolutionary tree”, with dozens of potential pathways, only very few branches of which ever resulted in scientific maturity, and not always the most fruitful ones by any means.

The premature extinction of these promising discovery pathways were the result of a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, funding priorities, competing industrial interests, “out of vogue” concepts, lack of intellectual properties, non-existent regulatory models, conflicted legislative initiatives, and even religious implications.

In 2016, as in previous years, we continue to see these “valleys of death” swallow up pathways of scientific possibility, with few popular segments attracting the majority of attention and support.

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The preponderance of resources focused on the somatic mutation model of carcinogenesis, despite an endless range of research highlighting that the disease is extremely heterogenic and rarely ever follows such a clonal model, is one example that continues to be inappropriately manifested in the oncology system, decades into the “war on cancer”.

On a similar plane, the jettisoning of most studies of the biophysical aspects of human genetics, despite the gross incompleteness offered by the central dogma to explain higher biological form and function, is another example that has become all too pervasive in the research community.

And then there are the areas of human consciousness, memory, and information processing / storage, where in many ways we are still operating in the dark ages, with materialists and dualists battling it out for centuries.

One topic that I have written quite a bit about is that of death, specifically that of the death of the human brain — http://www.singularityweblog.com/is-death-reversible/

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While I am a staunch supporter and advocate of the life-extension / anti-aging movement, I am equally vocal about our need to develop technologies, products, and services that can actually reverse our ultimate transition between the living and dead states, a transition that occurs annually for 60 million humans around the globe.

Death, however, is unfortunately seen by many as a natural, biological progression for human beings, and in many circles, deemed an unnecessary area of scientific research and exploration.

I beg to differ.

Far too often, death arrives too early and too unexpectedly for many of us and our loved ones. And the best modern medicine has to offer today is “Sorry. There is nothing else we can do.”

But what if there was?

There are a variety of species across the natural world that are capable of regenerating and repairing themselves from forms of severe CNS damage that bring them to the transitional grey zone between life and death. Along the evolutionary timeline however, this ability gradually disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago and does not manifest in higher species.

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Now, in the 21st century, with the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we may finally be poised to take back these capabilities for humans.

Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. But once we transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible” (per the 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School definition), we are technically no longer alive.

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To add insult to injury, a human can be declared dead, even while our bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.

Several prominent cases in the media over the past few years have further served to highlight the current situation, as well as the substantial anatomical and functional differences between the state known as brain death, and other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states.

It is now time to take the necessary steps to provide new possibilities of hope, in order to counter the pain, sorrow, and grief that is all too pervasive in the world when we experience a loved one’s unexpected or untimely death, due to lesions which might be potentially reversible with the application of promising neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation technologies and therapies.

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It is time to undertake the required research, based on 2016 technological knowledge, in order to bring about such transformational change.

My name is Ira S. Pastor and I am the CEO of the biotechnology company Bioquark Inc.

Welcome to the unveiling of the Reanima project.

Reanima Video

A rabbit’s brain has been successfully returned from long-term cryogenic storage, marking the first time a whole mammalian brain has been recovered in near-perfect condition.

It marks a significant breakthrough in the field of cryonics and boosts the prospect of one day bringing frozen human brains back to life.

Researchers from 21st Century Medicine (21CM) used a new technique called Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation that filled the vascular system of the rabbit brain with chemicals that would allow it to be cooled to −211 degrees Fahrenheit (−135 degrees Celsius). When it was thawed, the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures remained intact.

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Researchers from 21st Century Medicine have developed a new technique to allow long term storage of a near-perfect mammalian brain. It’s a breakthrough that could have serious implications for cryonics, and the futuristic prospect of bringing the frozen dead back to life.

By using a chemical compound to turn a rabbit’s brain into a near glass-like state, and then cooling it to −211 degrees Fahrenheit (−135 degrees Celsius), a research team from California-based 21st Century Medicine (21CM) showed that it’s possible to enable near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain. The achievement has earned not just accolades from the scientific community, but a prestigious award as well; the 21CM researchers are today being awarded the $26,735 Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize, which is run by the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF).

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The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) announced that the Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize has officially been won. The spectacular result achieved by 21st Century Medicine researchers provides the first demonstration that near-perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain is achievable.

A team from 21st Century Medicine, spearheaded by recent MIT graduate Robert McIntyre, has discovered a way to preserve the delicate neural circuits of an intact rabbit brain for very long-term storage using a combination of chemical fixation and cryogenic cooling. Proof of this accomplishment, and the full “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” (ASC) protocol, was recently published in the journal Cryobiology and has been independently verified by the BPF through extensive electron microscopic examination conducted by the two official judges of the prize: BPF President Ken Hayworth and Princeton neuroscience professor Sebastian Seung, author of “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.”

“Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire brain,” said Hayworth. “Simply amazing given that I held in my hand this very same brain when it was frozen solid… This is not your father’s cryonics.”

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The legal death of Marvin Minsky was publicly reported on Monday, January 25, 2016. There has been speculation on the part of numerous individuals and publications that he may have been cryopreserved by Alcor. This notice is Alcor’s formal response to inquiries on this issue.

In a public ceremony at the Extro-3 conference in 1997, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler presented Prof. Minsky with a bracelet given to all new Alcor members. This bracelet provides emergency contact information and basic instructions. Minsky has spoken publicy many times about his advocacy of overcoming aging and the inevitability of death and about cryonics (human cryopreservation) as a last resort. He was also among the 67 signatories of the Scientists Open Letter on Cryonics and a member of Alcor’s Scientific Advisory Board. This much is public knowledge. None of this necessarily means that Prof. Minsky had cryopreservation arrangements at the time of legal death. Alcor neither confirms nor denies whether Prof. Minsky had such arrangements.

Alcor’s official response may puzzle some readers, so we would like to point out the privacy options that have been and currently are available to our members. When a member signs up for cryopreservation by Alcor, they have four options:

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Cryogenics are an old science fiction dream, but today we still struggle to store large tissues without harming them. Now a breakthrough could lead to a safer, more reliable approach.

” This could be an important step toward the preservation of more complex tissues and structures”

Overcoming past challenges

Cryopreservation of biological material is commonplace, but there are remaining challenges. The initial problem with freezing any cell is crystallization, in which ice crystals form and rupture cells. This was overcome by using molecules like ethylene glycol, which essentially act like anti-freeze and prevent crystallization from happening. These are very effective, but they’re also often toxic; damaging or killing some cells in the process. This has made storage of larger tissues very challenging.

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