Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension – Page 456

Humans don’t actually want to be immortal, we just want to be forever young

For a personal sense of wellness, we may still be better off thinking of aging as an inevitable process with certain positive aspects—like additional wisdom accumulated through experience—rather than a sickness we hope to eradicate. If the many startups working on extended youth and anti-aging endeavors actually manage to create a magic potion that keeps us forever young, then someday we may get the chance to think about what, if anything, humanity loses when it finally finds the fountain of youth.

Aging has come to be seen as a disease we should be preventing.

The Rejuvenation Market in Singapore

With its growing aging population, Singapore has a looming crisis, but could also be primed to become a major player in the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.

Singapore has one of the fastest-aging populations in the world. Senior citizens 65 years old or older are expected to make up almost half of Singapore’s population by 2050. Unfortunately, this swelling population is spending more time living with sickness, even though they live longer. While average lifespans have been extended, healthspans have not. [1] Singaporeans have an impressive average life expectancy of 84.8 years, but an average Singaporean born in 2017 is predicted to spend the last ten and a half years in sickness, compared to how a Singaporean born in 1999 is likely to spend only nine twilight years in deteriorating health.

This is becoming a massive concern for the Singaporean government because of the financial strain that this is imposing on Singapore’s budget. Having the world’s second-lowest birth rate coupled with a rapidly aging population means that the ratio of working adults to senior citizens is quickly shrinking. In 2007, there were 6.9 working adults for every senior citizen. By 2030, there will be 2.3 working adults per senior citizen.

In under a decade, Singapore’s healthcare budget more than doubled from S$4 billion in 2010 to S$10 billion in 2017. [2] Among the developed nations of the world, Singapore has a reputation for being one of the most fiscally conservative; there’s a socio-political stigma against the term “welfare state” in Singapore. Since its unprecedented independence in 1965, Singapore has had a general zeitgeist of “every man for himself,” as we are a nation with no natural resources. Our highly-educated workforce, along with our strategic geographical location, is the primary resource undergirding our knowledge-based economy.

21CM Cryopreservation Eval Page Foundation

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21st Century Medicine (21CM) is a cryobiology research company whose core mission is to develop a cryopreservation protocol sufficiently benign that whole, donated human organs could be vitrified (stored below −130 degrees Celsius without ice formation) and rewarmed when needed for transplantation –an incredibly ambitious goal that has so far eluded medical researchers. 21CM’s scientists are the original pioneers of whole organ vitrification and have been diligently working on the technique for decades. A significant milestone of their progress toward that goal is their demonstration work on rabbit kidneys. Two of their most relevant publications are “Cryopreservation of organs by vitrification: perspectives and recent advances” (Fahy, Wowk, Wu, Phan, Rasch, Chang & Zendejas 2004) and “Physical and biological aspects of renal vitrification” (Fahy, Wowk, Pagotan, Chang, Phan, Thomson & Phan 2009). These papers are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in just how difficult it is to cryopreserve large organs (and by extension whole animals) for long-term storage with the intent on later recovery of biological function. In short, it is incredibly difficult but progress is slowly being made.

The state-of-the-art whole organ vitrification techniques developed by 21CM are the basis of the human cryopreservation protocols used by some cryonics companies (e.g. Alcor). This is made clear in Alcor’s 2004 publication in the New York Academy of Sciences “The Arrest of Biological Time as a Bridge to Engineered Negligible Senescence” (Lemler, Harris, Platt & Huffman 2004).

21CM has been an official competitor in our Brain Preservation Prize competition since 2012. They actually have two separate preservation techniques competing for our prize: the “straight” cryopreservation\cryonics technique described on this page, and a radically new technique called “Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation” (ASC), described on a separate page,which they developed to overcome the “tissue shrinkage” issues described on this page and to optimize ultrastructure preservation at the expense of viability.

Anti-Aging Approaches

Sirtuins can be activated by a lack of amino acids or of sugar, or through an increase in NAD. — David Sinclair If you have not heard of #davidsinclair then it is time you have. he is at the forefront of anti aging research and one of my heroes. While we wait for the miracle pills there are alot of thing we can do to help us age better already. #biohacking #biohacker

Can a single molecule extend lifespan?

It’s Hard to Kill Blood Stem Cells—Now We Know Why

For most of their lives, our hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs)—which produce all of our blood and immune cells—are quiet and inactive. But they also are the toughest cells in the blood system, able to survive exposure to levels of radiation or viral infections that kill most other blood cells.

A new study from researchers in Columbia’s Stem Cell Initiative has discovered how HSCs cheat death, which could lead to new therapies for blood cancers and other diseases related to aging and improve stem cell transplantation.

Rejuvenation Roundup June 2019

There’s only a few days left before our second conference in New York City takes place, and June has brought a lot of exciting news, such as the results of UNITY’s senolytic human trial, as well as a number of episodes of LifeXtenShow, our new YouTube show that is now a little over a month old already. Let’s dig into the details!

LEAF News

Scientists Seek To Discover Why Some Minds Resist The Damage That Comes With Old Age

It’s called cognitive reserve, and it’s the phenomenon of the mind’s resistance to damage of the brain. It’s also the subject of not only an upcoming new data and biomedical sample resource, but also a related request for information (RFI) from the NIA and a first-of-its-kind workshop in September.

The push to study cognitive reserve in more depth across the scientific disciplines was born out of recommendations from the Cognitive Aging Summit III. Some 300 researchers attended the summit in Bethesda, Maryland in 2017. Coordinated by the NIA of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and supported by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation, the summit centered on age-related brain and cognitive changes, with a particular focus on issues related to cognitive resilience and reserve. According to the NIA, investigators from around the world delivered presentations and engaged in discussion “about some of the most important scientific questions relating to the biological, physiological, social and behavioral aspects of reserve and resilience in aging individuals. Attendees also discussed strategies to preserve and bolster cognitive function during aging.”