Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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All of which would be nice and handy, but clearly, privacy and ethics are going to be a big issue for people — particularly when a company like Facebook is behind it. Few people in the past would ever have lived a life so thoroughly examined, catalogued and analyzed by a third party. The opportunities for tailored advertising will be total, and so will the opportunities for bad-faith actors to abuse this treasure trove of minute detail about your life.

But this tech is coming down the barrel. It’s still a few years off, according to the FRL team. But as far as it is concerned, the technology and the experience are proven. They work, they’ll be awesome, and now it’s a matter of working out how to build them into a foolproof product for the mass market. So, why is FRL telling us about it now? Well, this could be the greatest leap in human-machine interaction since the touchscreen, and frankly Facebook doesn’t want to be seen to be making decisions about this kind of thing behind closed doors.

“I want to address why we’re sharing this research,” said Sean Keller, FRL Director of Research. “Today, we want to open up an important discussion with the public about how to build these technologies responsibly. The reality is that we can’t anticipate or solve all the ethical issues associated with this technology on our own. What we can do is recognize when the technology has advanced beyond what people know is possible and make sure that the information is shared openly. We want to be transparent about what we’re working on, so people can tell us their concerns about this technology.””

Continue reading “Facebook’s upcoming AR wrist controllers will hijack your nerves” | >

Scientists in Denmark believe the psychedelic substance psilocybin might produce rapid and lasting antidepressant effects in part because it enhances neuroplasticity in the brain. Their new research, published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, has found evidence that psilocybin increases the number of neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus of pig brains.

Psilocybin — the active component in so-called “magic” mushrooms — has been shown to have profound and long-lasting effects on personality and mood. But the mechanisms behind these effects remain unclear. Researchers at Copenhagen University were interested in whether changes in neuroplasticity in brain regions associated with emotional processing could help explain psilocybin’s antidepressant effects.

“Both post-mortem human brain and in vivo studies in depressed individuals have shown a loss of synapses through the down-regulation of synaptic proteins and genes,” the authors of the study wrote. “Hence, upregulation of presynaptic proteins and an increase in synaptic density may be associated with the potential antidepressive effects of psychedelics.”

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A study of Japanese university students and recent graduates has revealed that writing on physical paper can lead to more brain activity when remembering the information an hour later. Researchers say that the complex, spatial and tactile information associated with writing by hand on physical paper is likely what leads to improved memory.

“Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall,” said Professor Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo and corresponding author of the research recently published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. The research was completed with collaborators from the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting.

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Australian researchers have created “model” human embryos from the skin cells of an adult’s arm, in a world-first scientific breakthrough that raises significant ethical questions.

The model embryos, created in a laboratory by researchers at Melbourne’s Monash University, do not use egg or sperm, but ordinary cells that are reprogrammed to replicate the first few days of human life.

When placed in a dish, the model embryos attach – much as embryos would in the uterus – and begin developing.

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The development of gene therapy, in particular gene editing using the CRISPR-Cas9 method, has prompted a lively discussion around the world about how deeply you can interfere with the human genome. The creators of this method have turned to the world community, including lawyers, to undertake a public discussion of the implications that it can create (The National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine, 2015). The most important problem to be resolved in the future, in my opinion, will be the issue of establishing very clear legal principles of liability for damages resulting from the editing of genes in human embryos and reproductive cells. However, before this happens, it is necessary to show the possible legal problems that may arise and that will certainly appear in future legislative work in the world. Questions must be asked to which world legal experts will need to seek answers. The goal of this paper is to show the possible legal problems and ask questions related to the liability for damages resulting from the editing of genes in human embryos and reproductive cells that will be answered in the future.

Private law considerations will be based on Polish law, although it should be pointed out that the conclusions derived from them appear to be of universal nature for different legal systems. Despite the fact that legal considerations will refer to the regulation of Polish law, the subject of the analysis will also be the differences in the legal qualification of reproductive cells and embryos in other European legislations. It seems that nowhere in the world are there special regulations regarding the liability for damage related to the genetic editing of reproductive cells or embryos. Therefore, there is a need to present new challenges for classic private law institutions, such as legal abilities, torts, or liability for damages. Due to the lack of uniform European regulations and different conflicts of rights the subject of analysis will not be wrongful life and wrongful birth actions, but only claims of prenatal damage to a child.

The first major legal problem facing the international community is, of course, the question of the legal acceptability of the editing of genes of human reproductive cells and embryos (van Dijke et al., 2018). In this regard, it should be pointed out that despite the initial demand to ban such editing, over time, increasingly more scientists have pointed to the fact that it is not possible to maintain such a moratorium (Doudna and Sternberg, 2017). Jiankui’s presentation at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing on November 272018, showed that the introduction of a moratorium on genetic modifications of embryos in Europe, the condemnation of such research by a group of 120 of the greatest geneticists, even the Chinese regulations (Zhang and Lie, 2018) will not limit its conduct (Cyranoski and Ledford, 2018). Globalization of the medical market means that if any procedures are allowed on other continents, they will also become available to Europeans (Lunshof, 2016).

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