Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: genetics – Page 528

Death is a disease.

Diseases can and will be cured.

Do the math. wink

Disease GWAS show substantial genetic overlap with longevity. Shown are results for coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The y axis is the observed P values for longevity, and the x axis is the expected P values under the null hypothesis that the disease is independent of longevity. The cyan, blue and purple lines show the P values for longevity of the top 100, 250, and 500 disease SNPs from independent genetic loci, respectively. Red lines show the background distribution of longevity P values for all independent genetic loci tested in both the longevity and disease GWAS. The grey horizontal line corresponds to the threshold for nominal significance (P = 0.05) for longevity. Significance of enrichment was determined with the hypergeometric test. (credit: Kristen Fortney et al./PLOS Genetics)

Continue reading “New genes associated with extreme longevity identified” | >

A machine prototype called Farma can let you manufacture your daily prescription of drugs right in your own home. Designed by MIT Media Lab graduate Will Patrick, the concept tech features a green cylinder and uses blue-green algae that’s genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical drugs.

In the future, you might be able to skip the pharmacy and, instead, make your treatments along with your morning breakfast.

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Color-coded heatmap of gradient of expression of the M1 gene network, spanning fetal development to late adulthood and expressed in distinct cortical regions (listed on right, such as primary somatosensory cortex, S1C). Most of the genes in this network express in cortical regions (indicated by red), except for the V1C (primary visual cortex), STR (striatum), CBC (cerebellar cortex), and MD (mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus) brain areas. (credit: Michael R. Johnson et al./Nature Neuroscience)

Scientists from Imperial College London have identified two clusters (“gene networks”) of genes that are linked to human intelligence. Called M1 and M3, these gene networks appear to influence cognitive function, which includes memory, attention, processing speed and reasoning.

Importantly, the scientists have discovered that these two networks are likely to be under the control of master regulator switches. The researcher want to identify those switches and see if they can manipulate them, and ultimately find out if this knowledge of gene networks could allow for boosting cognitive function.

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Optogenetic laser light stimulation of the thalamus (credit: Jia Liu et al./eLife)

By flashing high-frequency (40 to 100 pulses per second) optogenetic lasers at the brain’s thalamus, scientists were able to wake up sleeping rats and cause widespread brain activity. In contrast, flashing the laser at 10 pulses per second suppressed the activity of the brain’s sensory cortex and caused rats to enter a seizure-like state of unconsciousness.

“We hope to use this knowledge to develop better treatments for brain injuries and other neurological disorders,” said Jin Hyung Lee, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, neurosurgery, and bioengineering at Stanford University, and a senior author of the study, published in the open-access journal eLIFE.

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US army’s report visualises augmented soldiers & killer robots.

The US Army’s recent report “Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050” describes a number of future war scenarios that raise vexing ethical dilemmas. Among the many tactical developments envisioned by the authors, a group of experts brought together by the US Army Research laboratory, three stand out as both plausible and fraught with moral challenges: augmented humans, directed-energy weapons, and autonomous killer robots. The first two technologies affect humans directly, and therefore present both military and medical ethical challenges. The third development, robots, would replace humans, and thus poses hard questions about implementing the law of war without any attending sense of justice.

Augmented humans. Drugs, brain-machine interfaces, neural prostheses, and genetic engineering are all technologies that may be used in the next few decades to enhance the fighting capability of soldiers, keep them alert, help them survive longer on less food, alleviate pain, and sharpen and strengthen their cognitive and physical capabilities. All raise serious ethical and bioethical difficulties.

Drugs and prosthetics are medical interventions. Their purpose is to save lives, alleviate suffering, or improve quality of life. When used for enhancement, however, they are no longer therapeutic. Soldiers designated for enhancement would not be sick. Rather, commanders would seek to improve a soldier’s war-fighting capabilities while reducing risk to life and limb. This raises several related questions.

Continue reading “Ethics on the near-future battlefield” | >

I’ve been increasingly interested in translated science fiction novels, and one of the best ones that I picked up this year was Taiyo Fujii’s debut Gene Mapper.

Gene Mapper takes place in a future where augmented reality and genetic engineering is commonplace. When a freelance gene mapper named Hayashida finds that a project that he had worked on is collapsing, he believes that it’s being sabotaged. Determined to fix it, he travels to Vietnam where he finds that there’s more behind the problem than he initially thought.

You can read a tie-in story over on Lightspeed Magazine, ‘Violation of the TrueNet Security Act’.

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Tufts biologists induced one species of flatworm —- G. dorotocephala, top left — to grow heads and brains characteristic of other species of flatworm, top row, without altering genomic sequence. Examples of the outcomes can be seen in the bottom row of the image. (credit: Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University.)

Tufts University biologists have electrically modified flatworms to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm — without altering their genomic sequence. This suggests bioelectrical networks as a new kind of epigenetics (information existing outside of a genomic sequence) to determine large-scale anatomy.

Besides the overall shape of the head, the changes included the shape of the brain and the distribution of the worm’s adult stem cells.

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