Scientists say they’ve developed a new “quantum material” that could one day transfer information directly from human brains to a computer.
The research is in early stages, but it invokes ideas like uploading brains to the cloud or hooking people up to a computer to track deep health metrics — concepts that until now existed solely in science fiction.
At Undoing Aging 2019, we interviewed some of the best researchers who are involved in discovering therapies for the root causes of aging. Their research aims to ameliorate the damages of aging and may one day lead to a future without the diseases of aging.
We were glad to have the opportunity to conduct a joint interview with Dr. Kelsey Moody and Dr. Huda Suliman. They offered several keen insights on the future of Ichor Therapeutics and the nature of the rejuvenation biotechnology industry.
K: I’m Dr. Kelsey Moody. I’m the Chief Executive Officer of Ichor Therapeutics and its portfolio of companies. Ichor itself is a biopharmaceutical company that does drug discovery in the aging space, and we have a variety of portfolio companies, each of which is designed to target a different type of age-associated damage. Through these companies, we’re developing classes of different drugs to move into the clinic for conventional therapeutic applications as well as, hopefully, more anti-aging targeted therapies as well.
‘’Examining how deep disagreements arise will demonstrate the gravity of the issue. Why do we disagree with valid, knowable facts when we all live in the same world, we have roughly the same cognitive abilities and, in the Western world at least, most people have fairly easy access to roughly the same information?
What happens when you can’t agree on the facts?
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Bacteria in the human body are sharing genes with one another at a higher rate than is typically seen in nature, and some of those genes appear to be traveling — independent of their microbial hosts — from one part of the body to another, researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports.
The findings are the result of a molecular data-mining method initially conceptualized by Kyung Mo Kim, a senior research scientist at the Korea Polar Research Institute. University of Illinois crop sciences and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés developed the approach with his former student Arshan Nasir, of COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan, who is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
This computationally challenging method allowed them to identify instances of “horizontal gene transfer,” the direct transfer of genes between organisms outside of sexual or asexual reproduction.
Researchers may be closing in on a way to check athletes while they’re alive for signs of a degenerative brain disease that’s been linked to frequent head blows. Experimental scans found higher levels of an abnormal protein tied to the disease in a study of former National Football League players who were having mood and thinking problems.
It’s the first time a major study has tested these scans for detecting chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which is only diagnosed now after death, with brain autopsies.
Doctors are searching for a way to tell when players, veterans or others with concussions or other head injuries are at risk for permanent damage. It’s too soon to know if the scans will enable that — so far they only show that these athletes are different as a group; they can’t be used to say a particular player does or does not have CTE.
