Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension – Page 635

When you think about the headliners at a music festival, it’s unlikely that the first person to pop into your head would be Martine Rothblatt—the founder of Sirius XM, the one-time highest-paid female CEO in the world who made a robot clone of her wife, and the founder of the Terasem religion, which believes we’ll live forever by uploading our consciousness to the cloud. But Moogfest, a four-day citywide festival of music and technology in Durham, North Carolina, was not the average music festival. Unlike other festivals that make cursory overtures to technology, Moogfest dedicated as much time to explaining how technology influences creativity as to the creative output itself, even listing headline ‘technologists’ alongside its top-billed musical acts.

On the festival’s second day, Friday 20 May, Rothblatt took the stage to talk to a packed house at Durham’s Carolina Theater, in an atmosphere that felt far more like a TED talk than a music fest. Rothblatt, who is transgender, discussed the contentious North Carolina HB2 law, which bans transgender people from using public bathrooms of the gender they identify with; the idea that creativity would be better encouraged by free college tuition; and how she got to a point where she and her company, United Therapeutics, can actually think about 3D printing new body parts, and leaving our bodies behind—if we want. “You want to win more than you want to live,” she told the rapt crowd. “You yell ‘Geronimo’ as you jump crazily into monopolistic opposition.”

Quartz sat down with Rothblatt after her talk to chat more about her thoughts on AI, living forever, free education, and what happens to the soul once we’ve made digital copies of ourselves.

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Scientists have successfully created mice with significantly longer telomeres than normal, resulting in a drop in molecular ageing, without using genetic manipulation.

Telomeres, which are found at the end of all animals’ chromosomes, are thought to be vital to ending ageing, as their shortening as we age is a key factor in cellular ageing and the onset of age-related disease. However, when they are lengthened beyond normal levels in mice, they have the precise opposite effect, protecting against ageing and related diseases, and increasing lifespan.

The mice, which are chimeras carrying both regular and “hyper-long” telomeres, were created using a technique based on epigenic changes, where embryonic stem cells are expanded in vitro, prompting changes to telomeres.

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The cells with hyper-long telomeres in these mice appear to be perfectly functional. When the tissues were analysed at various moments (0, 1, 6 and 12 months of life), these cells maintained the additional length scale (they shortened over time but at a normal rhythm), accumulated less DNA damage and had a greater capacity to repair any damage. In addition, the animals presented a lower tumour incidence than normal mice.

These results show that pluripotent stem cells that carry hyper-long telomeres can give rise to organisms with telomeres that remain young at the molecular level for longer. According to the authors, this “proof of concept means that it is possible to generate adult tissue with longer telomeres in the absence of genetic modifications”.

The Telomeres and Telomerase Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in collaboration with the Centre’s Transgenic Mice Core Unit, has succeeded in creating mice in the laboratory with hyper-long telomeres and with reduced molecular ageing, avoiding the use of what to date has been the standard method: genetic manipulation. This new technique based on epigenetic changes that is described today in the pages of Nature Communications, avoids the manipulation of genes in order to delay molecular ageing. The study also underlines the importance of this new strategy in generating embryonic stem cells and iPS cells with long telomeres for use in regenerative medicine.

Telomeres (the protective structures located at the ends of chromosomes) are essential to the stability of our genetic material and to maintain the “youthful state” of our and of our bodies. However, get shorter as we age. Once they reach a critical length, cells enter a state of senescence or die. This is one of the molecular causes of cellular ageing and of the emergence of ageing-related diseases.

On the other hand, when telomeres are extra-long — as achieved for the first time by the CNIO group headed by Maria A. Blasco using the expression of the telomerase gene — they exert a protective role against ageing and ageing-related diseases, thus significantly extending the lives of the mice.

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Scientists have long used NAD+ as a powerful anti-aging tool. While trying to find a cure for aging, scientists increased the levels of NAD+ within the mitochondria. The mitochondria responded by increasing their performance and energy, which effectively neutralizes the effects of aging.

Lead researcher Johan Auwerx explained that “this work could have very important implications in the field of regenerative medicine,” adding that it may one day be possible to bypass surgery and repair the body with a dietary supplement.

Specifically, nicotinamide riboside “effectively delayed early- and late-stage disease progression, by robustly inducing mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle and brown adipose tissue, preventing mitochondrial ultrastructure abnormalities and [mitochondrial DNA] deletion formation.”

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Let’s formulate the task of life extension slightly differently. Something like this…How can we extend sex appeal?

Gyms and beauty salons are in charge of this question now. There is some success, but it’s mostly superficial. Plastic surgery only masks, but doesn’t delay the processes of aging.

Expanding sex appeal is a complex task. Its aspects include both beauty and the activity of the brain. To be sexually attractive we have to be smart and fun. One cannot solve the problem of dementia with makeup.

We have to be in an excellent physical shape to be sexually attractive, but also things should be running smoothly with our hormonal regulation.

The task of extending the period of sex appeal is extremely science-intensive. It is not only the Viagra, but a complex impact on the whole organism. It is obvious that molecular biology is responsible for sex in the modern world.

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Here’s an article on transhumanism in Oregon’s largest paper, The Oregonian: It highlights something I’m trying to create: the impact of a “longevity vote” in the elections to make a difference for the length of people’s lifespans.

Zoltan Istvan is ready to encourage his supporters to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in November — if one of the major-party candidates agrees to put him to work in the White House.

And they’d better take his offer seriously, because he figures he just might be able to tip the election whichever way he wants.

“If we’re getting down to the end, and it’s close, as expected, this could be appealing to a candidate,” Istvan told The Oregonian this week. He believes he could bring a candidate somewhere between 250,000 and a million votes.

If neither Clinton nor Trump takes him up on his proposed deal, he’ll keep those votes for himself. Istvan, a former journalist, is the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party, which he created in 2014.

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