Lifeboat Foundation

GenSight Biologics has recently released data showing the effectiveness of GS010, the company’s gene therapy for Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON), a mitochondrial disease that can lead to blindness. Like in previous studies, this therapy had a bilateral effect.

Gene Therapy

In LHON, the mitochondrial protein ND4 is poorly expressed through mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). GS010 is a gene therapy that causes this protein to be allotropically expressed in the nucleus, after which it is shuttled to the mitochondria through messenger RNA. This makes GS010 a partial treatment for mitochondrial dysfunction, which is one of the hallmarks of aging.

There is strong evidence from publicly available sources that a Russian company called KB Arsenal is working on a new type of military satellite equipped with a nuclear power source. Called Ekipazh, its mission may well be to perform electronic warfare from space.

KB Arsenal, based in St. Petersburg, is no newcomer to the development of nuclear-powered satellites. In the Soviet days it built satellites known as US-A (standing for “active controllable satellite”), which carried nuclear reactors to power radars used for ocean reconnaissance (in the West they were known as “radar ocean reconnaissance satellites” or RORSAT for short.) The satellites had been conceived in the early 1960s at the OKB-52 design bureau of Vladimir Chelomei before work on them was transferred to KB Arsenal at the end of that decade. The satellites’ three-kilowatt thermoelectric reactors, known as BES-5 or Buk, were built by the Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”) organization. The US-A satellites operated in low Earth orbits at an altitude of roughly 260 kilometers and, after finishing their mission, the reactors were boosted to storage orbits at an altitude of about 900 kilometers.

Just ten square miles of these plantations could produce enough crops and vegetables to feed a country of four million people.

Scientists are exploring how to edit genomes and even create brand new ones that never existed before, but how close are we to harnessing synthetic life?
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Scientists have made major strides when it comes to understanding the base code that underlies all living things—but what if we could program living cells like software?

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In the iconic frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), primate skeletons march across the page and, presumably, into the future: “Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.” Fresh evidence from anatomy and palaeontology had made humans’ place on the scala naturae scientifically irrefutable. We were unequivocally with the animals — albeit at the head of the line.

Biological advances have repeatedly changed who we think we are, writes Nathaniel Comfort, in the third essay of a series marking Nature’s anniversary on how the past 150 years have shaped science today. Biological advances have repeatedly changed who we think we are.

Or, quite possibly, is it more complex than either one of those scenarios?

An experiment that partially revived slaughterhouse pig brains raises questions about the precise end point of life.