If we can reach our third and final stretch goal and expand the scope of the experiment massively. Could NMN be a true anti-aging drug?
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Category: life extension – Page 473
Choosing Health Early On
Posted in futurism, life extension
A thought experiment to see whether life extension might contribute to your happiness.
Today, we’re going to engage in a thought experiment. We’re going to imagine a world with some sort of antechamber to life in which you hang around as some sort of disembodied entity before you are born. (Some people actually believe in something like that, but we won’t go there; it’s just a thought experiment.)
The Choice to Be Born
Let’s suppose that, as a disembodied soul, you have a somewhat human outlook on things: you want to enjoy new experiences, avoid unpleasant circumstances, and so forth. Let us further suppose that you have a choice over being born or not and that someone comes along and tries to get you sold on the idea of being born. Neither of you can predict the future and know exactly how good or bad a life you would have, but you do know the gist of it—what stages you need to go through, what issues may manifest, etc.
http://www.undoing-aging.org/news/professor-richard-barker-t…nbrFm8JTxA
Richard is an internationally respected leader in healthcare and life sciences. He says: “I’m focused on accelerating precision medicine technologies to advance our healthy lifespan”.
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Yesterday, we announced the successful completion of the NAD+ Mouse Project after a great fundraiser, but it seems we are not done yet. The research team at Harvard has announced a new stretch goal for the last two days of the campaign.
A new $75,000 goal is to be the final step, and to support that, Dr. David Sinclair is offering to fund match the next $5000 in donations to the project to help it reach this final goal. So, for the next two days, all donations are worth double.
The final goal will be to add even more comprehensive testing, such as end-of-life pathology (frequency and specificity of neoplasms/tumors/cancer) and MRI diagnostics (body composition, lean-to-fat ratio). This would really allow the researchers to maximize the useful data they collect during the study and help assess any changes to cancer risk, why each animal died, and what age-related diseases were affected by the drug.
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The October Journal Club will be focusing on a new study in worms where a combination of compounds acted in synergy to almost double lifespan.
SUMMARY There is growing interest in pharmacological interventions directly targeting the aging process. Pharmacological interventions against aging should be efficacious when started in adults and, ideally, repurpose existing drugs. We show that dramatic lifespan extension can be achieved by targeting multiple, evolutionarily conserved aging pathways and mechanisms using drug combinations. Using this approach in C. elegans, we were able to slow aging and significantly extend healthy lifespan. To identify the mechanism of these drug synergies, we applied transcriptomics and lipidomics analysis. We found that drug interactions involved the TGF-b pathway and recruited genes related with IGF signaling. daf-2, daf-7, and sbp-1 interact upstream of changes in lipid metabolism, resulting in increased monounsaturated fatty acid content and this is required for healthy lifespan extension. These data suggest that combinations of drugs targeting distinct subsets of the aging gene regulatory network can be leveraged to cause synergistic lifespan benefits.
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Imagine a digital avatar of ourselves living on after we die. They could help comfort our loved ones, and they could also preserve expertise and experience. There’s some benefits, but it’s still questionable if this is comforting, or just creepy.
A digital afterlife may soon be within reach, but it might not be for your benefit.
The reams of data we’re creating could soon make it possible to create digital avatars that live on after we die, aimed at comforting our loved ones or sharing our experience with future generations.
That may seem like a disappointing downgrade from the vision promised by the more optimistic futurists, where we upload our consciousness to the cloud and live forever in machines. But it might be a realistic possibility in the not-too-distant future—and the first steps have already been taken.
