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Talking about E5.


Rats are also useful for aging research and for cooking ratatouille. But in all seriousness, take a look at this recent headline article — “We have the oldest living female Sprague Dawley rat,” said Dr Harold Katcher, a former biology professor at the University of Maryland, now chief scientific officer at Yuvan Research, a California-based startup.

So, Rejuvenation & rats. That’s what we’re talking about today, and how this rat has apparently become the longest living rat for its species following concentrated plasma injections from young blood plasma, and what this could mean for human therapeutics, along my perspectives. But, before we get there we must go back, back to the late 1950s and early 1960…to a time when The Sheekey Science Show did not exist, but when researchers, such as Clive McKay did, and these researchers were conducting a procedure called heterochronic parabiosis.

In 1923, an editorial cartoonist named H.T. Webster drew a humorous cartoon for the New York World newspaper depicting a fictional 2023 machine that would generate ideas and draw them as cartoons automatically. It presaged recent advancements in AI image synthesis, one century later, that actually can create artwork automatically.

Interestingly, this separation of labor feels similar to our neural networks of today. In the actual 2023, the “idea dynamo” would likely be a large language model like GPT-3 (albeit imperfectly), and the “cartoon dynamo” is most similar to an image-synthesis model like Stable Diffusion.