Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension – Page 486

Will we win the battle against cancer?

This article opened with some fearful figures about cancer and its effect on people worldwide. But there’s reason to hope.

While the total number of new cancer cases and deaths continues to increase, the rates of cancer diagnoses and deaths decline each year — as absolute figures don’t account for rises in life expectancy, population growth, or aging populations. We’ve made great strides in understanding the disease and its various genetic and environmental origins. And events like Breast Cancer Awareness Month continue to educate the populace about the preventative measures available to them.

Thanks to scientists like those at the University of Basel in Switzerland, we may have more reasons to be hopeful very soon.

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“The Mice Became Smarter”: New Treatment Restores Aging Brains

Scientists at Stanford University say they’ve devised antibodies that block a specific gene related to brain aging — and that it’s giving old mice the cognitive prowess of younger ones.

“The mice became smarter,” senior author Tony Wyss-Coray said in a statement. “Blocking [the gene] CD22 on their microglia restored their cognitive function to the level of younger mice. CD22 is a new target we think can be exploited for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.”

Can human mortality be hacked?

A fringe group of scientists and tech moguls think they’re closing in on the fountain of youth. Here’s everything you need to know:

What is biohacking? Silicon Valley is built on the idea that technology can optimize, or “hack,” any aspect of our lives — so why not the human life span? Until recently, anyone hawking pills or treatments that promised to restore youthfulness was considered a quack, yet a growing number of “transhumanists” are convinced that, in time, human beings can be transformed through bioengineering, and that aging will be curable just like any other malady.

In light of rapid gains in gene editing, nanotechnology, and robotics, some futurists expect this generation’s biohackers to double their life spans. Aubrey de Grey, a regenerative medicine researcher backed by tech mogul Peter Thiel, insists that someone alive today will live to be 1,000. “It’s extraordinary to me that it’s such an incendiary claim,” de Grey says. Korean physician and financier Joon Yun has offered two $500,000 prizes to anyone who can restore a test animal’s youthful heart rate and extend its lifespan by 50 percent. For humans, the mortality rate at age 20 is 0.001 percent, Yun figures, “so if you could maintain the homeostatic capacity of that age throughout your life, your average life span would be 1,000.”

An Interview with Yuri Deigin of Youthereum Genetics

At the Undoing Aging 2019 conference, we had the opportunity to interview Yuri Deigin, the CEO of Youthereum Genetics. His company is developing therapies that focus on OSKM, the Yamanaka factors known for turning cells back into a pluripotent state. By partially reprogramming cells using a single component of OSKM, Oct4, the company hopes to remove epigenetic aging from cells while still allowing them to retain their normal functions.

Do you think epigenetic alterations are a cause or a consequence of aging, and why?

Well, this question has so many different parts that need to be addressed. Of course, there are alterations that are consequences. Some of the epigenetics are consequences of aging, like epigenetic drift, with things that aren’t methylated in cells, as they divide throughout the lifetime, that methylation seems to get diluted away with subsequent divisions, but other parts of the genome, many of the epigenetic changes that happen that we can track throughout the aging of an organism are definitely not consequences of aging; they’re actually, from what I understand, causes of aging or causes in the change of metabolism and change of homeostasis, change how the organism behaves, essentially, that are driven by some high program in animal development, that basically silences some genes and activates other genes.

Quantum Immortality: Does Quantum Physics Imply You Are Immortal?

What other ramifications to follow? Your subjective quantum immortality coupled with soon-to-be discovered indefinite life extension at the civilizational level would spell out that YOU ARE ACTUALLY TO LIVE FOREVER! One can also see a viable resolution to the so-called ‘Mind-uploading’, or Star Trek ‘Teleporter dilemma’, questioning whether in those instances you create a copy of yourself but kill yourself in the process. By analogy to the previous deliberations, it follows that your consciousness has to “migrate” to your living self, thus making the case for successful consciousness transfer in both methods of disembodiments.

On this note, my friend, I’d like to conclude and profess that you are to live forever as an individuated evolving consciousness in this illusory Matrix-like universe where nothing is what it seems.

-by Alex Vikoulov, futurist, digital philosopher.

Mushrooms Are A Highly Evolved Extraterrestrial Species — Organic Internet [VIDEO]

It is a crazy thought, right?! To think that mushrooms could be alien life. But before you dismiss the idea, take a look at some of principles of the theory. The main concept was formulated by the ingenious psychonaut philosopher Terrence McKenna, and goes along following lines.

Like no other form of life on our planet, the spores of mushrooms are almost perfectly suited to space travel. They can survive high vacuum and insanely low temperatures; the casing of a spore is one of the most electron dense materials in nature, to the point where McKenna says it is almost akin to a metal; global currents are even able to form on the quasi-metallic surface of an airborne spore, which then acts as a repellent to the extreme radiation of space. It is a mind boggling thought that something could evolve to be so perfectly suited to explore the universe.

If a civilization is advanced enough, then chances are their concepts and understanding of reality would far outweigh ours. If they were advanced enough to be able to change their very genetic structure, then there would be a lot of merit in changing/evolving into a mushroom. Mushrooms are highly resilient, non-invasive, practically immortal, full of neurotransmitters, and able to weather space. It would be the perfect way to explore and colonize the galaxy. Plus once mushrooms establish themselves, they create an underground neural network of mycelium that highly resembles the neural networks of the human brain or the internet.

An Interview with Prof. Vittorio Sebastiano of Turn.Bio

We recently attended the Undoing Aging Conference in Berlin and had the opportunity to interview Professor Vittorio Sebastiano of Turn. Bio, a company developing partial cellular reprogramming techniques to reverse cellular aging.

As we age, our cells experience changes to their epigenetic markers, and this, in turn, changes gene expression, which is proposed to be a primary reason we age. Recently, there has been considerable interest in resetting these epigenetic markers to reverse cellular aging; induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) creation uses similar techniques.

However, unlike iPSCs, which are totally reprogrammed back to a developmental state and can become any other cell type in the body, the goal of partial cellular reprogramming is to reset the epigenetic aging markers in the cells without erasing cell identity. Researchers believe that exposing aged cells to reprogramming factors only for a very short time may be enough to reset cellular aging without causing the cells to forget their current roles.

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