Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension – Page 431

At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Dr. Judith Campisi established a broad program to understand the relationship between aging and age-related disease.

Judith Campisi says: “Aging research has entered an era of unprecedented hope for interventions that can prevent, delay and, in some cases, reverse much of the functional decline that is a hallmark of aging. There is still a lot of research to be done! I am delighted to be among the speakers at Undoing Aging 2019, where I will discuss the opportunities and challenges of our recent research.”

“Judy has been a towering figure in the field of senescent cells for decades; among other things she pioneered the idea that senescent cells could be actively toxic to their environment and the discovery that cell senescence has a beneficial physiological role in wound healing. She was also one of the first senior gerontologists to appreciate the merits of the SENS approach when I first proposed it in 2000, and her support for it and us ever since has been of incalculable benefit in helping it achieve the mainstream status it enjoys today.” says Aubrey de Grey.

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In addition, a small number of posters will be selected for oral presentation.

Poster topics should lie within the scope of the conference: Research contributing to the eventual postponement of age-related decline in health, with an emphasis on measures that repair damage rather than slowing its creation. Poster submissions are due on January 31, 2019.

To submit your poster go to:

https://www.undoing-aging.org/abstracts.html

Continue reading “Program: The 2019 Undoing Aging Conference will again include poster sessions” | >

Looking forward to today’s program!

UA 2019: fb.com/events/2044104465916196/

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You might think we’re not in Texas anymore but in some strange episode of Black Mirror, the Netflix series, says Nikos Acuna who is moderating this SXSW panel on transhumanism.

In fact you’d be forgiven if you did as there is talk about cryo-preserving the body after being declared dead, in the hopes you can be resurrected when the science is here to safely defrost your body and cure you of your ailments. There is also talk on mind uploading, and replacing parts of our brains with neural prosthetics. This all sounds like science-fiction but these days the stuff of science fiction has become fact.

Transhumanist technologies are about overcoming the limitations of human biology and Dr Max More and Dr Randal Koene are at the forefront of these technologies.

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BY HANK PELLISSIER

Hank Pellissier

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party features this proposal by our member Hank Pellissier for a new website called Paradise2040, which will focus on the abolition of involuntary suffering and incremental ways of getting there within the next 21 years. This is an endeavor supported by Article IV of the Transhumanist Bill of Rights, Version 3.0. It is also a current within transhumanist thinking that, as Mr. Pellissier points out, could bring additional support to the movement. Different transhumanists will have different views as to what the most important aims of transhumanism should be. As an organization that embraces pluralism and diversity of thought, the U.S. Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party would encourage any of our members who agree with the direction Mr. Pellissier proposes to collaborate with him on the creation of the Paradise2040 website.

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party / Transhuman Party, March 25, 2019

A survey I conducted in 2010 of 818 transhumanists identified “brain enhancement” as the #1 priority, with “maximizing” health and life extension as #2 and #3. The top three “values” of the U.S. Transhumanist Party (the Core Ideals) are #1) Life Extension, #2) “a cultural, societal, and political atmosphere informed and animated by reason, science, and secular values”, and #3) “to reduce and eliminate existential risks.”

Continue reading “3 Reasons Why “Ending Suffering” Should Be the #1 Transhumanist Priority – Article” | >

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0375-9

The hippocampus is one of the most affected areas in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Moreover, this structure hosts one of the most unique phenomena of the adult mammalian brain, namely, the addition of new neurons throughout life. This process, called adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN), confers an unparalleled degree of plasticity to the entire hippocampal circuitry3,4. Nonetheless, direct evidence of AHN in humans has remained elusive. Thus, determining whether new neurons are continuously incorporated into the human dentate gyrus (DG) during physiological and pathological aging is a crucial question with outstanding therapeutic potential. By combining human brain samples obtained under tightly controlled conditions and state-of-the-art tissue processing methods, we identified thousands of immature neurons in the DG of neurologically healthy human subjects up to the ninth decade of life. These neurons exhibited variable degrees of maturation along differentiation stages of AHN. In sharp contrast, the number and maturation of these neurons progressively declined as AD advanced. These results demonstrate the persistence of AHN during both physiological and pathological aging in humans and provide evidence for impaired neurogenesis as a potentially relevant mechanism underlying memory deficits in AD that might be amenable to novel therapeutic strategies.

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A new review discusses how neutrophils release toxic substances into the body under inflammatory conditions, detailing one of the ways in which chronic inflammation causes long-term damage.

Casting a deadly NET

As we age, we suffer from the ever-increasing chronic inflammation known as inflammaging. This persistent, smoldering background of low-grade inflammation harms wound healing and promotes multiple age-related diseases. Senescent cells, a weakened immune system, and chronic infections are all proposed to contribute to inflammaging.

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The presence of senescent cells has been implicated in a wide range of age-related diseases and even conditions such as T1 diabetes. Today, we want to draw your attention to a new publication that explores the relationship between senescent cells and intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD).

It was already known that senescent cells increase during the progression of IDD, but it was not known if they were a driver or a consequence of IDD.

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The findings, published on February 18, 2019 in the journal Nature Medicine, highlight a novel CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing therapy that can suppress the accelerated aging observed in mice with Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that also afflicts humans. This treatment provides important insight into the molecular pathways involved in accelerated aging, as well as how to reduce toxic proteins via gene therapy.

“Aging is a complex process in which cells start to lose their functionality, so it is critical for us to find effective ways to study the molecular drivers of aging,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and senior author of the paper. “Progeria is an ideal aging model because it allows us to devise an intervention, refine it and test it again quickly.”

With an early onset and fast progression, progeria is one of the most severe forms of a group of degenerative disorders caused by a mutation in the LMNA gene. Both mice and humans with progeria show many signs of aging, including DNA damage, cardiac dysfunction and dramatically shortened life span. The LMNA gene normally produces two similar proteins inside a cell: lamin A and lamin C. Progeria shifts the production of lamin A to progerin. Progerin is a shortened, toxic form of lamin A that accumulates with age and is exacerbated in those with progeria.

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