Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension – Page 358

If you are interested in superlongevity, I have a spectacular book for you: Lifespan — Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To, by David Sinclair PhD.

Sinclair has written a book about all the various ways in which humans can extend their lifespan and their healthspan.

One of the best aspects of this book is that Sinclair has a way of writing that is clear and insightful. It is so rare for me to read a book about scientific experiments in which it is easy to follow the methodology, but it is unique to also have an explanation of the application of the results that is crystal clear. Sinclair does both simply and easily.

Sinclair writes about all of the avenues that I’ve heard of for life extension. Metformin. NAD+. NMN. NR. Diet. Exercise. Resveratrol. Senolytics.

However, the most gripping aspect of this book is Sinclair’s Information Theory of Aging. Here is one excerpt from the book:

“…epigenetic noise causes the same kind of chaos. It is driven in large part by highly disruptive insults to the cell such as broken DNA…And this, according to the Information Theory of Aging is why we age. It’s why our hair grays. It’s why our skin wrinkles. It’s why our joints begin to ache. Moreover, it’s why each one of the hallmarks of aging occurs, from stem cell exhaustion and cellular senescence to mitochondrial dysfunction and rapid telomere shortening.”

Now, I have to admit that I know absolutely nothing about epigenetics. But if it could be this crucial to superlongevity, you better believe I’m going to start learning about epigenetics! And Sinclair does a good job of explaining how epigenetics is crucial in the aging process.

Continue reading “Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To” | >

In our current information society and digital media culture, the stories, images, voices and traces we leave behind, construct the narrative of who we are. Our identity has become synonymous with our online data. Digital media empowers us. However, its inescapable presence within our lives reveals potential for consequences beyond mortality. Our digital death is effusively about data. What if all your data was used to create a digital afterlife presence capable of generating communication in your style of speaking and thinking? For those of us actively participating within the digital realm this could soon be a reality flowing into mainstream society. The digital footprint we now obtain comes with concerns of privacy, power, remembering & forgetting. Constructing these affordances within a curation towards death, causes for more daunting concerns about our western societies and our roles within it. One must ask themselves, how do we construct our ways of remembering in this digital age, knowing our immortality could be reconstructed to live on forever?

Season 2, episode 1 of Black Mirror, ‘Be Right Back’ hauntingly confronts us with our worries about how to deal with the death of loved ones. The episode demonstrates a frontal onslaught on humanities fragility when it comes to dealing with death & the concepts of how we decide to remember. The episode showcases technology, able of creating artificial intelligence that sounds, talks and thinks like you would. Black Mirror, the dystopian Netflix series, offers up a future that is eerily close to ours. Its success comes mainly from showing us a sci-fi angle that borders reality. But much like the title suggests, the black mirrors we face each day, the screens and technology that rule our lives, cast back a reflection of us and our society that is not just ‘close’ but already here.

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Sometimes, being human involves tragedy: unexpected accidents can alter a person’s future, permanently changing how they need to approach their daily lives. Those with traumatic brain injuries suffer long-term mental and physical challenges, such as trouble with their working memory span, which can play a significant role in their education and longevity. However, if used properly, transhuman aids such as prosthetic limbs can provide solutions to human challenges.

Transhumanism, in a nutshell, is the idea that people can use technology to overcome biological limitations. Just as how we use rational means to improve our life experiences and the world around us, we can use such means to improve ourselves as organisms. It is simply a concept, not a tangible characterization of some futuristic cyborg.

There is reasonable fear that using such technologies would be tampering with nature. This is true. However, whether something is good or bad cannot be decided simply by asking whether or not it is natural. Plenty of natural things are horrible, such as diseases and parasites, where our moral interest is to intervene and improve these conditions. The question to ask is not whether the technology is natural, but rather, what are the various possible consequences that would arise from it, both desirable and undesirable, and the likelihood of each. People who are concerned that our species will stray too far away from what it means to be a ‘natural human’ forget how far we have already evolved as a species.

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A new study has demonstrated that increasing the expression of a single gene was enough to reverse age-related visual decline in the eyes of old mice.

Introducing ELOVL2

Elongation of Very Long Chain Fatty Acids Protein 2 (ELOVL2) is both a bit of a tongue twister and a known aging biomarker. The results of a new study from researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine suggest that the ELOVL2 gene plays a pivotal role in both the functional and anatomical aging of the retinas of mice and may also have relevance to human age-related eye conditions.

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Genomics and BioPharma Pioneer!! — On this ideaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) episode, I had the honor of being joined by Dr. William Haseltine — biologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome, now focusing on the issues of healthcare costs, dementia care, and aging — #Ideaxme #Genomics #RegenerativeMedicine #BillHaseltine #Dementia #Biotechnology #Harvard #JamesWatson #WalterGilbert #DavidBaltimore #MIT #CraigVenter #Health #Wellness #Regeneration #Longevity #Aging #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador, interviews Dr. William Haseltine, American biologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, known for his groundbreaking work on HIV/AIDS and the human genome.

Ira Pastor Comments:

On today’s show we have a thought leader who sits amongst a rare group of people who have been responsible for creating many aspects of the modern biopharma / genomics / regenerative medicine system as we know it today.

Continue reading “Genomics Pioneer: Travels World To Discover Which Countries’ Healthcare Money Goes Furthest and Why” | >

For the past 10 years, Yale Professors David Spiegel and Jason Crawford have been working on tools to enable the development of glucosepane-cleaving drugs. Kizoo Technology Capital investors say now is the time to advance this groundbreaking research toward the clinic and are leading funding of a new company, Revel Pharmaceuticals Inc., founded by Drs. David Spiegel, Jason Crawford, and Aaron Cravens.

Kizoo leads the seed financing round at Revel, with Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov participating. SENS Research Foundation provided funding to the YaleGlycoSENS group for several years.

The long-lived collagen proteins that give structure to our arteries, skin, and other tissues are continuously exposed to blood sugar and other highly reactive molecules necessary for life. Occasionally, these sugar molecules will bind to collagen and form toxic crosslinks that alter the physical properties of tissues and cause inflammation. As a result, tissues slowly stiffen with aging, leading to rising systolic blood pressure, skin aging, kidney damage, and increased risk of stroke and other damage to the brain.

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