Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

UK billionaire investor believes rejuvenation biotechnology will be the next mega-industry.

Many of you may already know about billionaire entrepreneur Jim Mellon and his interest in rejuvenation biotechnology. But for those of you who do not, we would like to introduce you to him and his exciting work.

About Jim Mellon

Jim Mellon is an entrepreneur and investor with interests in several sectors. He also holds a Master’s degree from Oxford in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. From the mid 1980s he worked as a fund manager in Asia and later in the United States until founding his own company in 1991. Jim is the Co-Chairman of Regent Pacific Group Limited, Chairman of Manx Financial Group plc, Chairman of Plethora Solutions Holdings plc, and Chairman of Port Erin Biopharma Investments Limited. He is also a non-executive director of Charlemagne Capital Limited, Condor Gold plc; West African Minerals Corporation; Kuala Innovations Limited and 3Legs Resources plc; and is also a director of Portage Biotech Inc. Jim has been in the top 10% in the Sunday Times Rich List for several years.

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Vibration platforms, belts, and accessories have been touted on late-night infomercials for decades as a simple, convenient alternative to actual exercise, but do they really work?

According to a recent study looking at the effects of whole body vibration on mice, yes, they actually do, by mimicking the benefits of exercise on muscle and bone health, and the researchers think the technique could help treat human health conditions too.

“Our study is the first to show that whole body vibration may be just as effective as exercise at combating some of the negative consequences of obesity and diabetes,” says cellular biologist Meghan E. McGee-Lawrence from Augusta University.

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LEAF interviews Dr. Michael Lustgarten author of ‘Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease’.

As part of our series covering the various researchers working on aging, we finally caught up with Dr. Michael Lustgarten author of ‘Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease’ and we did this short interview which we hope may be of interest to you.

Hi Mike can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

My name is Michael Lustgarten, and I’m currently a scientist at the Tufts University Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging in Boston, MA. I have funding to examine the role of the gut microbiome and serum metabolome on lean mass and physical function in older adults.

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A write-up on about neural lace and the future economy: https://altleft.host/zoltan-istvan-the-economy-of-the-future-will-be-powered-by-neural-lace/ #transhumanism

Zoltan Istvan, a leading Transhuman, shows us that the economic system of Technocracy needs Transhuman citizens to make it work. This is not surprising because Transhumanism and Technocracy are two sides of the same coin. ⁃ TN Editor.

The battle for the “soul” of the global economy is underway. The next few decades will likely decide whether capitalism survives or is replaced with a techno-fuelled quasi-socialism where robots do most of the jobs while humans live off government support, likely a designated guaranteed or basic income.

Many experts believe wide-scale automation is inevitable. Even the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, recently announced it’s building an AI to replace its managers, many of whom are highly educated and previously thought invulnerable to automation. Robots, it seems, will manage everything. Or will they?

A next-generation technology, likely to arrive in five to 10 years, is being credited as the saviour of capitalism. Known today as neural prosthetics, or neural lace, it’s essentially tech that reads your brainwaves. This tech promises to connect our brains to the cloud and AI to link us with machines using thought alone.

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Death gives as much meaning to life as having your stomach ripped out gives meaning to having a stomach.

You’ve probably heard this sentence a bagillion times. It’s the kind of statement people assume to be deeply philosophical and meaningful by default. In my humble opinion, though, it’s a pile of sh—oh, well, you know what.

If death gives meaning to life, I suppose diseases give meaning to being healthy, and thus we should leave some diseases around so that people can appreciate not being sick, right? How often do you say yourself, ‘Hmm… I haven’t been sick in a while… I should get one of those nasty cancers, before I stop appreciating how it feels being healthy. Where’s my emergency plutonium bar?’ Personally, I don’t say that to myself very often. I mean, I can totally appreciate the feeling of not being kicked in the nuts even without ever being kicked in the nuts, really. And I can appreciate not having a certain disease even if I’m not aware the disease exists. I can totally enjoy life without dying, and I could still enjoy it even if it were impossible for me to die.

People reason by analogies. They know there are some concepts that would be more difficult to grasp without their opposite, and think the analogy can be extended to ANYTHING AT ALL. For example, if you’ve never been sad, you can’t be sure just how different it is from being happy. I’m not sure how you can get from this to ‘you need to be mortal to enjoy life’, especially when there are no real-life examples of immortal people incapable to enjoy life because of their immortality. Can you smell the pungent aroma of foxes disdaining grapes?

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There is an urgent need to develop better biomarkers and to use the in cost effective packages for accurate measurement of aging.

As human life expectancy has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries this has led to a steady increase in the population of older people. With that increase has come the rise of age-related diseases and disabilities. As a result it is becoming ever more important to develop preventative strategies to monitor and maintain health as well as therapies that directly address the various aging processes to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

One of the ways we can do this is by developing more effective ways to measure how someone is aging, this means developing high quality aging biomarkers. The challenge in creating such biomarkers has always been the fundamental question – what do we measure?

Chronological age is a poor indication of how someone might be aging and is not a good way to ascertain an individual’s risk factor for various age-related diseases. This is simply because everyone ages differently and at different rates. Whilst everyone ages due to the same processes the speed at which these different processes occur can vary between individuals.

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By Kim Thurler, Tufts University

(MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.) — Changing the natural electrical signaling that exists in cells outside the nervous system can improve resistance to life-threatening bacterial infections, according to new research from Tufts University biologists. The researchers found that administering drugs, including those already used in humans for other purposes, to make the cell interior more negatively charged strengthens tadpoles’ innate immune response to E. coli infection and injury. This reveals a novel aspect of the immune system – regulation by non-neural bioelectricity – and suggests a new approach for clinical applications in human medicine. The study is published online May 26, 2017, in npj Regenerative Medicine, a Nature Research journal.

“All cells, not just nerve cells, naturally generate and receive electrical signals. Being able to regulate such non-neural bioelectricity with the many ion channel and neurotransmitter drugs that are already human-approved gives us an amazing new toolkit to augment the immune system’s ability to resist infections,” said the paper’s corresponding author Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Levin is also an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

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