Life extension story in Financial Times:
People have long dreamt of extending the human lifespan from the biblical “three score years and 10” (70) to reach Methuselah’s 969 and beyond.
Demographic statistics show remarkable progress in fending off death, at least in the developed world. In reality, average life expectancy in biblical times was not 70 but about 35 years. In Britain this rose to about 50 in 1900, 76 in 1990 and 82 today.
Here are 18 predictions that finally came true in 2015, from an actual working hoverboard to cyborgised brains.
Might we one day have bionic body parts able to ward off disease and injury and even heal themselves? Today it’s still the stuff of sci-fi movies, but there are regular breakthroughs in the field of medical science that suggest that such a future might one day be possible – one example is a new nanoshell treatment from a team working at the University of Michigan in the US and reported in Gizmag.
Instead of using foreign cells or molecules to patch up and regrow damaged bone tissue, the new technique uses polymer nanoshells – microscopic capsules inside the body – to deliver microRNA molecules right to the site of an injury. Once the shells begin to break down, the microRNA molecules are released and instruct the surrounding cells to ‘switch on’ their natural bone-building and healing mechanisms. It’s a bit like a site manager arriving on the scene of a broken-down development and telling his construction workers to get busy with the rebuilding process.
There are a couple of key advantages to this new technique. One, the shell is designed to degrade slowly, leading to a gradual release of the microRNA molecules and thus ongoing restorative treatment that can last for a month or more. Second, the process uses the body’s own cells rather than introducing foreign healing agents – an approach that can sometimes cause cell rejection or even tumours associated with the injury.
One of the main causes of infertility in men is low sperm motility. That is to say, the sperm are present and alive, but they have the swimming prowess of a toddler that’s afraid to lose its water wings.
In short, they just aren’t fast enough to reach the egg.
It’s hard to fault them, I can’t get to the front door fast enough for the FedEx guy not to leave my package in the bushes these days.
Wow!!! Chewing gum wearable technology, Cyborg Chips, Ingestible sensors to let doctors know if you’re taking your meds, etc. 2016 is going to be interesting
The phrase “Brave New World” has become one of the most often used clichés in medical technology in recent years. Google the title of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian, and anticipatory, novel with the word medicine and 2,940,000 results appear.
But could there be better shorthand to describe some of the recent developments in medical, health and bio-tech? Consider these possibilities coming to fruition, or close to, in 2016:
1. Back from Extinction
Gene-editing startup Editas Medicine of Cambridge, Mass., filed to go public this month. The company’s founder, Harvard professor George Church, hopes to, among other things, revive the extinct woolly mammoth or create a facsimile. Investors include Google and Bill Gates.
This article does bring one interesting question up for the broader population to really ask themselves and that is at what point does an individual truly become a Cyborg v. not? And, how do we know for sure that some of us are not already there given the bionic implants, our daily interactions and addiction to technology. Definitely, something for each person to think about.
Roy Batty was born—sorry, “incepted”—Friday, Jan. 8, 2016. The Blade Runner replicant, played with aggressive melancholy by Rutger Hauer, went on to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate before delivering one of sci-fi’s most moving soliloquies on life, memory, and mortality. And then he was lost, like tears in the rain.
Quibble if you want: Batty was an android, a replicant—not a cyborg. But in Blade Runner he wasn’t one half of the man versus machine binary. He was the complication—the living, breathing proof that a mere assemblage of technology could be, in fact, more human than human. This refusal of a simple division—the belief that sometimes machines could show us humanity, even as humans could become like machines—was a hallmark of Philip K. Dick’s later work, and it’s distilled to its essence in Batty.
So he’s not a cyborg, but he does what the cyborg does: Make us question the boundaries we draw between man and machine. When we think of cyborgs, we often think, well, of Star Trek’s Borg, a pale, fleshy collective bonded to its Giger-esque machinery. Or Darth Vader, clad in black and, again, pale and disfigured. Or, more heroically and telegenically, Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, an armored hero with a machine for a heart.
Really nice. I may actually see the day that I can climb Everest or K2 at 100 yrs old with my cyborg body.
I like to joke that I’m technically 33 years old, but on the inside I’m 65. I’m less inclined to make that joke after spending 20 minutes or so inside Genworth’s “Aging Experience” exoskeleton. The R70i, which apparently is a barely coded reference to the fact that 70 percent of Americans will need some sort of long term care as they age, is a full body simulator that lets you experience what its like to lose your sight, hearing and even range of motion as the effects of aging creep in.
An Aging Suit: This Exoskeleton lets you know what it feels like to get older.
Interesting use of the latest tech being shown at the largest consumer electronics show in the world CES 2016.
Iyaz Akhtar donned a 40-pound suit complete with a helmet to find out what it’s like to live with the physical pain that comes with ageing.
Johnny Matheny is the first person to attach a mind-controlled prosthetic limb directly to his skeleton. After losing his arm to cancer in 2008, Johnny signed up for a number of experimental surgeries to prepare himself to use a DARPA-funded prosthetic prototype. The Modular Prosthetic Limb, developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, allows Johnny to regain almost complete range of motion through the Bluetooth-controlled arm. (Video by Drew Beebe, Brandon Lisy) (Source: Bloomberg)
And the Singularity rolls ever on. And on.
“Cytokine converter” AND-gate synthetic-biology prosthesis used to treat psoriasis in mice. Top left: skin before; right: skin after. (credit: Lina Schukur et al./Science Translational Medicine)
An advanced “molecular prosthetic” — a cell with synthetic gene circuits that can be implanted into an organism to take over metabolic functions that the organism cannot perform itself — has been developed by ETH Zurich scientists.
Previous gene circuits typically monitored only whether one disease-causing molecule (called a cytokine) was present in their environment and if so, produced a single therapeutic cytokine as a response. The new “cytokine converter” synthetic circuit functions like an AND gate: It can detect two different cytokines simultaneously, and if (and only if) both are present, produces two different cytokines that can treat a disease.
