Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The program, called Somatic Cell Genome Editing, will be investing $190 million. (2018)

Last year, I wrote about a team of Chinese scientists having received ethical approval to perform a clinical trial of gene-editing. The goal was to test whether gene-editing may be a potential cure for cancer. The technology used for the trial is called CRISPR/Cas9, not exactly a household name. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Cas9 stands for CRISPR associated protein 9, an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme. If you read all these words a few times, it can make your head hurt. The topic is complex, but I hope in this post to make it more understandable.

After reading about CRISPR more than a few times, I think I finally get the concept. I may not have this 100% right, but following is what I believe it is about. To imagine what gene-editing is, consider editing of a video. The software shows you each frame of the video. You select a frame you want to edit and display the frame in video editing software. You make the changes to look the way you want the frame to look, and then insert the frame back into the video. For example, the original video may have contained an unneeded “um” or “ah” or “eh” which added no value to the video.

Continue reading “Gene-editing Gets Major Funding” | >

Death means an end, but one recent research challenges the idea and fuels the possibility of reviving the brain. And it has plunged the scientific community into an ethical debate.

Physical movements, thoughts, and actions are traits that define how we know the difference between what’s alive and what’s lifeless i.e. death. But beyond that, we hardly understand what death means. We’ve known that death is an eventuality and irreversible. But recent research done back in April 2019 changed all that. Consequently, science is making us rethink the definition of death and the sheer fact that it is permanent.

A neuroscientist Christof Koch recently pondered over death in an article in the Scientific American. Koch wrote, “Death, this looming presence just over the horizon, is quite ill-defined from both a scientific as well as a medical point of view.”

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Carol has been suffering from back pain for 30 years.

Her MRI revealed disc degeneration, facet arthritis and nerve involvement.

Like most patients with chronic back pain she had seen multiple doctors including a spine surgeon. Carol had various treatments like opioids, physical therapy, chiropractic manipulations, epidural injecions even ablation of the arthritis nerves in our clinic. Unfortunately they were not successful.

Carol finally decided to have stem cell therapy. This was a one time procedure. After taking her OWN bone marrow stem cell from the back of her hip, we centrifuged and concentrated them.

Continue reading “Carol’s 30 years of back pain gone after stem cell therapy — Stemcures” | >

A human trial of NMN has recently concluded, and the results are not impressive at all; however, this is perfectly fine because that was not the purpose of the study, and, despite the lackluster results, the study was a success!

This might sound strange, but perhaps the words of the study authors may make it a bit clearer why this is absolutely no cause for alarm.

We, therefore, conducted a clinical trial to investigate the safety of single NMN administration in 10 healthy men.

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It’s been interesting to see the fans’ reactions regarding Marvel Studios’ next big cosmic adventure film, The Eternals. While some are excited, it seems like there are a good amount that don’t really care about it.

Personally, I’m stoked! I love the lore of The Eternals and The Celestials! Jack Kirby did some incredibly radical stuff with these characters and the story and I’m super pumped to see how Marvel and director Chloe Zhao bring his vision to life.

During a recent interview with THR, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige talked about the film and explained that it’s a big, expensive, and necessary risk for them:

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Adding energy to any material, such as by heating it, almost always makes its structure less orderly. Ice, for example, with its crystalline structure, melts to become liquid water, with no order at all.

But in new experiments by physicists at MIT and elsewhere, the opposite happens: When a pattern called a charge density wave in a certain material is hit with a fast laser pulse, a whole new charge density wave is created—a highly ordered state, instead of the expected disorder. The surprising finding could help to reveal unseen properties in materials of all kinds.

The discovery is being reported today in the journal Nature Physics, in a paper by MIT professors Nuh Gedik and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, postdoc Anshul Kogar, graduate student Alfred Zong, and 17 others at MIT, Harvard University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, and Argonne National Laboratory.

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NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space.

The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency’s orbital observatory NICER.

All in all, it serves as a potent reminder: space is an extremely dangerous, extremely metal place.

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Scientists have created a new cowpox-style virus in a bid to cure cancer.

The treatment, called CF33, can kill every type of cancer in a petrie dish and has shrunk tumours in mice, The Daily Telegraph reported.

US cancer expert Professor Yuman Fong is engineering the treatment, which is being developed by Australia biotech company Imugene.

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