Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: genetics – Page 171

Altos Labs just redefined big in biotech. Where to start? The $3 billion in investor support? The C-suite staffed by storied leaders—Barron, Bishop, Klausner—identifiable by one name? Or the wildly ambitious plan to reverse disease for patients of any age? Altos is all that and more.

Early details of Altos leaked out last year when MIT Technology Review reported Jeff Bezos had invested to support development of technology that could “revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.” The official reveal fleshes out the vision and grounds the technology in the context of the nearer-term opportunities it presents to improve human health.

“It’s clear from work by Shinya Yamanaka, and many others since his initial discoveries, that cells have the ability to rejuvenate, resetting their epigenetic clocks and erasing damage from a myriad of stressors. These insights, combined with major advances in a number of transformative technologies, inspired Altos to reimagine medical treatments where reversing disease for patients of any age is possible,” Hal Barron, M.D., said in a statement.

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New research in the journal Nature Aging takes a page from the field of renewable energy and shows that genetically engineered mitochondria can convert light energy into chemical energy that cells can use, ultimately extending the life of the roundworm C. elegans. While the prospect of sunlight-charged cells in humans is more science fiction than science, the findings shed light on important mechanisms in the aging process.

“We know that is a consequence of aging,” said Andrew Wojtovich, Ph.D., associate professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine and Pharmacology & Physiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and senior author of the study.

“This study found that simply boosting metabolism using light-powered gave laboratory worms longer, healthier lives. These findings and new research tools will enable us to further study mitochondria and identify new ways to treat age-related diseases and age healthier.”

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Could knowing where your ancestors came from be the key to better cancer treatments? Maybe, but where would that key fit? How can we trace cancer’s ancestral roots to modern-day solutions? For Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Research Professor Alexander Krasnitz, the answers may lie deep within vast databases and hospital archives containing hundreds of thousands of tumor samples.

Krasnitz and CSHL Postdoctoral Fellow Pascal Belleau are working to reveal the genealogical connections between and race or ethnicity. They’ve developed new software that accurately infers continental from tumor DNA and RNA. Their latest study is published in Cancer Research, and their work may help clinicians develop new strategies for early cancer detection and personalized treatments.

“Why do people of different races and ethnicities get sick at different rates with different types of cancer? They have different habits, living conditions, exposures—all kinds of social and . But there may be a as well,” Krasnitz says.

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The whole interview is good and informative but starts with Sinclair commenting that at the moment he thinks living to 150 is possible in our lifetimes but not immortality. But given that, I’m 51. If I’m going to live potentially another century the technology will get better and better in that century and I would fully expect to life spans to become what we want rather than what we have to accept.

In this Ask Me Anything session, David and Peter discuss the latest age-reversal breakthroughs, getting approval from the FDA, and the possibility of living forever.
David Sinclair is a biologist and academic known for his expertise in aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a genetics professor and the Co-Director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He’s been included in Time100 as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and his research has been featured all over the media. Besides writing a New York Times Best Seller, David has co-founded several biotech companies, a science publication called Aging, and is an inventor of 35 patents.
Read David’s book, Lifespan: Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have To: https://a.co/d/85H3Mll.

This episode is brought to you by Levels: real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. https://levels.link/peter.

Continue reading “David Sinclair’s AMA: Age Reversal Breakthroughs, FDA Approval, and Living Forever” | >

A Peninsula biotech startup cofounded by pioneering geneticist George Church — who already is working to engineer the woolly mammoth out of extinction — is trying to raise as much as $5 million in a crowdfunding effort to design healthier, longer-living pets.

AdoraPet Biosciences Inc. of San Mateo plans to apply the genome-engineering CRISPR technology at the egg stage of dogs and cats or insert CRISPR-modified DNA into eggs, to make nonallergenic pets that don’t shed and ultimately live longer, are free of genetic diseases caused by inbreeding and are resistant to cancer and other serious diseases.

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Alpha Centauri, here we come.

However, while technology has indeed advanced a long way since the 1940s, it still seems like we are still a long way from having a fully functional von Neumann machine. That is unless you turn to biology. Even simple biological systems can perform absolutely mind-blowing feats of chemical synthesis. And there are few people in the world today who know that better than George Church. The geneticist from Harvard has been at the forefront of a revolution in the biological sciences over the last 30 years. Now, he’s published a new paper in Astrobiology musing about how biology could aid in creating a pico-scale system that could potentially explore other star systems at next to no cost.

“Pico-scale” in this context means weighing on the order of one pico-gram. Since the smallest operational satellite ever created so far weighed a mere 33 grams, scaling that down to 10–12 times that size might sound ambitious. But that’s precisely what biological systems could potentially do.

Continue reading “Trillions of tiny, self-replicating satellites could unlock interstellar travel” | >

Nobel winner Jennifer Doudna explains CRISPR, the gene-editing technology she pioneered.

Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her work on the revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. It has the potential to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and hereditary blindness and may even be used to treat cancer and HIV. But when it comes to editing humanity, where do we draw the line? How do we avoid falling into the same kind of dystopian nightmare outlined in Blade Runner? Doudna discussed the risks and benefits of CRISPR in an interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Also in this episode: a look at cloning our pets (speaking of going too far…).

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Continue reading “Applying CRISPR Tech to Edit the Code of Life | Dr. Jennifer Doudna | GZERO World with Ian Bremmer” | >