New transhumanism and biohacking story out by one of Asia’s most influential newspapers: South China Morning Post:
From brain supplements to chip implants to nootropics, humans are using technology, medicine and extreme diets to improve their brainpower, health and longevity.
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.
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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Come see Liz Parrish, CEO & Founder of BioViva, a bio-tech company that is developing treatments to slow the aging process in humans. The event starts Thursd…
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.
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.
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.
A method and apparatus for ameliorating the aging process and the effects of aging and maintaining the integrity of health is provided. The method includes subjecting biological systems to alternating and steady magnetic fields having flux densities ranging from 10-6 gauss to 10-20 gauss and frequencies from 0 Hertz to 1014 Hertz. The calculation is made with reference to the equation mc2 =Bvlq, where m=mass; c=speed of light; B=magnetic flux density; v=inertial velocity of the mass contained in l; l=length of the conductive body; q=unity. The process begins by targeting the larger targets first and then diminishing the field magnitude slowly and incrementally according to the targets. The frequency when AC is indicated is calculated with the cyclotron resonance formula, fc =qB/(2πm). The apparatus includes a specially constructed pool or tub for generating the specific magnetic flux necessary for treatment. Orientation of the patient with reference to North, South, East and West is varied. The earth’s position in relation to the sun is taken into account. The patient may be in an upright, prone or swimming position depending on the specific treatment scheme.
Circa 2011 essentially cancer could help with evolution as it can challenge the immune system to be more strong. Essentially a symbiotic relationship to evolve with it and grow stronger with it then like it can be used as a good thing to make sure that evolution has stronger genetic code.
Evolutionary theories are critical for understanding cancer development at the level of species as well as at the level of cells and tissues, and for developing effective therapies. Animals have evolved potent tumor suppressive mechanisms to prevent cancer development. These mechanisms were initially necessary for the evolution of multi-cellular organisms, and became even more important as animals evolved large bodies and long lives. Indeed, the development and architecture of our tissues were evolutionarily constrained by the need to limit cancer. Cancer development within an individual is also an evolutionary process, which in many respects mirrors species evolution. Species evolve by mutation and selection acting on individuals in a population; tumors evolve by mutation and selection acting on cells in a tissue. The processes of mutation and selection are integral to the evolution of cancer at every step of multistage carcinogenesis, from tumor genesis to metastasis. Factors associated with cancer development, such as aging and carcinogens, have been shown to promote cancer evolution by impacting both mutation and selection processes. While there are therapies that can decimate a cancer cell population, unfortunately, cancers can also evolve resistance to these therapies, leading to the resurgence of treatment-refractory disease. Understanding cancer from an evolutionary perspective can allow us to appreciate better why cancers predominantly occur in the elderly, and why other conditions, from radiation exposure to smoking, are associated with increased cancers. Importantly, the application of evolutionary theory to cancer should engender new treatment strategies that could better control this dreaded disease.
We expect that the public generally views evolutionary biology as a science about the past, with stodgy old professors examining dusty fossils in poorly lit museum basements. Evolution must certainly be a field well-separated from modern medicine and biomedical research, right? If the public makes a connection between evolution and medicine, it is typically in the example of bacteria acquiring antibiotic resistance. But what does evolution have to do with afflictions like heart disease, obesity, and cancer? As it turns out, these diseases are intricately tied to our evolutionary histories, and understanding evolution is essential for preventing, managing and treating these diseases (1, 2). This review will focus on cancer: how evolutionary theories can be used to understand cancer development at the level of species as well as at the level of cells and tissues. We will also discuss the implications and benefits of an evolutionary perspective towards cancer prevention and therapies.
For almost all animals, old age is associated with a general decline in tissue structure and function. This decline is thought to reflect the lack of selective pressure to maintain tissues beyond an age when the animal would be likely to contribute genetically to future generations (3−5). Similarly, there is little selective pressure to limit cancer in old animals who are substantially beyond their reproductive years. For example, while mice can live 2–4 years in the lab, and tend to develop cancer in their second and third years, it is rare to find a mouse greater than 1 year old in the wild. Most wild mice will be dead from other causes, such as cold, hunger, disease or predators, well before the age when cancer would be a likely cause of their demise. Thus, evolution has favored a “breed early, breed often” strategy for mice.