Scanning the genomes of centenarians showed that four genes help them live longer. The discovery could boost the search for ways to protect against age-related diseases.
Category: life extension – Page 695
When Zoltan Istvan met John McAfee: Watch US presidential candidates discuss life and immortality
A video done with some humor–part of the Immortality Bus tour:
IBTimes UK captures the moment presidential candidates John McAfee and Zoltan Istvan met for the first time.
Our Aging World: The Striking Statistics About Diabetes
By 2034 the annual cost of diabetes in the US will be comparable to the market capitalization of Google.
Diabetes comes in two main forms, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a failure of the body to produce the hormone insulin that helps sugar molecules to be absorbed by your cells. This type of diabetes is commonly caused by an autoimmune reaction in which the body attacks the pancreas, the gland that produces insulin, and normally occurs during childhood. The second form is when the body becomes insensitive to insulin; the hormone is still there but the cells no longer respond to it. In the Dutch language this form used to be called ‘ouderdomsdiabetes’ meaning ‘diabetes of old age’. This description is no longer accurate as even teenagers have now been diagnosed with it.
Brain implants and robotic hearts: Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan’s technology predictions for 2025
This out from the journalist who was embedded with us on the #ImmortalityBus:
Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan gives IBTimes UK his top five predictions for the year 2025.
US elections 2016: John McAfee and Zoltan Istvan debate cybersecurity, immortality and sexbots
This tongue-in-cheek article highlights an interesting experience I had a few days ago on the Immortality Bus in North Carolina:
One wants to live forever, the other wants to push reset on the US Constitution. Both are running for president in 2016. As Republican and Democrat presidential candidates prepare for December’s debates, pioneering Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan and cybersecurity legend John McAfee met for the first time this week for their own debate, over several large drinks in a motel bar.
Istvan, who is currently touring the US aboard a coffin-shaped campaign bus, and McAfee both have technology at the core of their campaign policies, but in terms of specific policy this is where the similarities end.
“I can’t think of a more horrific concept than immortality,” McAfee told Istvan soon after meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. “It is anti-evolutionary. We need to die and die young preferably; dying is the most beautiful of all things. I’d get behind a platform where you kill everyone at 30. I would fight you tooth and nail to stop you making people live forever.”
The First Human Life Extension Trial
Last week the FDA announced that they have granted permission for the TAME trial. The Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial is the first human trial specifically looking at an anti-aging drug in humans.
Repurposing An Old Medicine
Metformin is an old drug, first approved in France in 1957, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). However extracts from the French liliac (Galega officinalis), the plant containing a precursor of metformin, has been used to treat frequent urination, a symptom of diabetes, since the Middle Ages. In 2012 in the US about 60 million prescriptions for metformin were written, making metformin the most used antidiabetic drug. Amazingly, every year about 37,000 metric tons of metformin are produced! Metformin is also a super-cheap drug, costing only cents per dose.
Worm research in life extension leads scientists to discover new metric to track aging
C. elegans roundworm (credit: The Goldstein Lab)
When researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California administered an antidepressant called mianserin to the Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm in 2007, they discovered the drug increased the lifespan of the “young adulthood” of roundworms by 30–40 per cent.
So, does that mean it will work in humans? Not necessarily. “There are millions of years of evolution between worms and humans,” says TSRI researcher Michael Petrascheck. “We may have done this in worms, but we don’t want people to get the impression they can take the drug we used in our study to extend their own teens or early twenties.”
Your Attitude About Aging May Impact How You Age
In a new study, people who believed negative stereotypes about old age had higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
Gene therapies to reverse human aging – Interview with entrepreneur Elizabeth Parrish
This article is based on my skype conversation with Elizabeth Parrish, founder and CEO of BioViva. BioViva is a biotech company in the Seattle area focused on developing gene therapies to mitigate the diseases of aging. Liz is currently experimenting these therapies on herself. Her research was recently covered in a MIT Technology Review article and she did an AMA on Reddit you may want to check out.