Lifeboat Foundation

Liviu Babitz is not content waiting around for evolution to improve upon his human form. Like other transhumanists, Babitz believes that science and technology can take a person’s intelligence, physical performance and psychological state to the next level, all in less than the span of a single lifetime.

To that end, he helped develop North Sense, a small silicone gadget that detects magnetic north. This is not a GPS device, nor a tracker. It’s not even connected to the Internet nor any other network. This is a new sensory organ designed to be pierced to a person’s body and vibrate each time the wearer faces magnetic north.

The idea is that over time, the brain will assimilate the vibration into the everyday human experience, enhancing it. That will open a person up to a world that exists beyond his or her own current capabilities.

Continue reading “Body-Pierced Gadget Turns You Into a Human Compass” »

A new way to treat brain cancer with our own immune cells.

Injecting genetically modified immune cells directly into the brain and spinal fluid has had remarkable effects on a deadly brain cancer

Glioblastoma is a particularly virulent form of brain cancer. Around 20,000 people in the United States are diagnosed each year and the disease typically has poor survival rates. In a new case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, a man has undergone experimental CAR-T therapy to treat the condition. CAR-T therapy is a branch of immunotherapy, the field taking cancer treatment by storm, and involves infusing genetically modified T cells back into a patient to target cancer cells.

Continue reading “A Direct Infusion Of Immune Cells Could Fight Cancer” »

Over millions of years retroviruses have been incorporated into our human DNA, where they today make up almost 10 per cent of the total genome. A research group at Lund University in Sweden has now discovered a mechanism through which these retroviruses may have an impact on gene expression. This means that they may have played a significant role in the development of the human brain as well as in various neurological diseases.

Retroviruses are a special group of viruses including some which are dangerous, such as HIV, while others are believed to be harmless. The viruses studied by Johan Jakobsson and his colleagues in Lund are called endogenous retroviruses (ERV) as they have existed in the human genome for millions of years. They can be found in a part of DNA that was previously considered unimportant, so called junk-DNA — a notion that researchers have now started to reconsider.

“The genes that control the production of various proteins in the body represent a smaller proportion of our DNA than endogenous retroviruses. They account for approximately 2 per cent, while retroviruses account for 8–10 per cent of the total genome. If it turns out that they are able to influence the production of proteins, this will provide us with a huge new source of information about the human brain,” says Johan Jakobsson.

Continue reading “Salmonella Could Be Used To Fight Brain Tumors” »

Over millions of years retroviruses have been incorporated into our human DNA, where they today make up almost 10 per cent of the total genome. A research group at Lund University in Sweden has now discovered a mechanism through which these retroviruses may have an impact on gene expression. This means that they may have played a significant role in the development of the human brain as well as in various neurological diseases.

Retroviruses are a special group of viruses including some which are dangerous, such as HIV, while others are believed to be harmless. The viruses studied by Johan Jakobsson and his colleagues in Lund are called endogenous retroviruses (ERV) as they have existed in the human genome for millions of years. They can be found in a part of DNA that was previously considered unimportant, so called junk-DNA — a notion that researchers have now started to reconsider.

“The genes that control the production of various proteins in the body represent a smaller proportion of our DNA than endogenous retroviruses. They account for approximately 2 per cent, while retroviruses account for 8–10 per cent of the total genome. If it turns out that they are able to influence the production of proteins, this will provide us with a huge new source of information about the human brain,” says Johan Jakobsson.

Motor neurons are vital cells that facilitate muscle contraction and also affect sensation. In diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy, motor cells are plagued with mutations that cause degrees of paralysis and pain in patients. In a study detailed in Cell Stem Cell, scientists developed a mechanism to directly reprogram stem cells into motor neurons.

Cell reprogramming is a novel exploration in medical studies that could treat numerous diseases by growing the body’s own stem cells into healthy cells. The mechanism of reprogramming, however, has just begun to be understood.

The researchers elucidated a new pathway for cell reprogramming by analyzing gene transcription in mice. As established by previous studies, reprogramming is brought about by a series of transcriptions, AKA, how the genes control the expression of other genes.

Continue reading “Reprogramming Stem Cells Could Soon Lead Us to a World Without Paralysis” »

This is the first time you’ll actually want a case of food poisoning.

The microglia are central to aging in the brain and science is already finding ways to reverse it like introducing young microglia to the brain to remove plaques associated with Alzheimers. Brain aging is not a one way process!

The difference between an old brain and a young brain isn’t so much the number of neurons but the presence and function of supporting cells called glia. In Cell Reports on January 10, researchers who examined postmortem brain samples from 480 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 106 found that the state of someone’s glia is so consistent through the years that it can be used to predict someone’s age. The work lays the foundation to better understand glia’s role in late-in-life brain disease.

“We extensively characterized aging-altered gene expression changes across 10 human brain regions and found that, in fact, glial cells experience bigger changes than neurons,” says Jernej Ule, a neurobiologist at the Francis Crick Institute and the University College London, who led the study with departmental colleague Rickie Patani (@PataniLab) and first author Lilach Soreq. “There’s quite a bit of regional information that will be of interest to different people—for example some will notice a very unique pattern of astrocyte-specific changes in the substantia nigra—and we provide a lot of data that still needs to be analyzed.”

Continue reading “Glia, not neurons, are most affected by brain aging” »

Playing God is a common objection to developing technologies to increase human lifespan and yet it is never used in relation to current therapies already available.

Here I’ll point out another of the articles going up at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, this time on the topic of the naturalistic fallacy where it occurs in opposition to healthy life extension. Our community would like to build medical therapies that address the causes of aging, thereby ending age-related disease and greatly extending healthy human life spans. It has always surprised me to find that most people, at least initially, object to this goal. It seems perfectly and straightforwardly obvious to me that aging to death, suffering considerably along the way, is just as much a problem to be overcome as any other medical condition that causes pain and mortality. Yet opposition exists, and that opposition is one of the greatest challenges faced when raising funding and pushing forward with research and development of rejuvenation therapies.

When it comes to treating aging as a medical condition the naturalistic fallacy is voiced in this way: aging is natural, what is natural is good, and therefore we shouldn’t tamper with aging. If you look around at your houses, your computers, your modern medicine, and consider that such an objection is perhaps just a little late to the game, and hard to hold in a self-consistent manner, then you’re probably not alone. Notably, the same objection is rarely brought up when it comes to treating specific age-related diseases, or in the matter of therapies that already exist. People who are uncomfortable about radical changes to the course of aging and who speak out against the extension of human life are nonetheless almost all in favor of cancer research, treatments for heart disease, and an end to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet age-related diseases and aging are the same thing, the same forms of damage and dysfunction, only differing by degree and by the names they are given.

Continue reading “Addressing Naturalistic Objections to Extending Healthy Human Life Spans” »

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new computational model of a neural circuit in the brain, which could shed light on the biological role of inhibitory neurons — neurons that keep other neurons from firing.

The model describes a neural circuit consisting of an array of input neurons and an equivalent number of output neurons. The circuit performs what neuroscientists call a “winner-take-all” operation, in which signals from multiple input neurons induce a signal in just one output neuron.

Using the tools of theoretical computer science, the researchers prove that, within the context of their model, a certain configuration of inhibitory neurons provides the most efficient means of enacting a winner-take-all operation. Because the model makes empirical predictions about the behavior of inhibitory neurons in the brain, it offers a good example of the way in which computational analysis could aid neuroscience.