Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical

In SELF/LESS, a dying old man (Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley) transfers his consciousness to the body of a healthy young man (Ryan Reynolds). If you’re into immortality, that’s pretty good product packaging, no?

But this thought-provoking psychological thriller also raises fundamental and felicitous ethical questions about extending life beyond its natural boundaries. Postulating the moral and ethical issues that surround mortality have long been defining characteristics of many notable stories within the sci-fi genre. In fact, the Mary Shelley’s age-old novel, Frankenstein, while having little to no direct plot overlaps [with SELF/LESS], it is considered by many to be among the first examples of the science fiction genre.

Screenwriters and brothers David and Alex Pastor show the timelessness of society’s fascination with immortality. However, their exploration reflects a rapidly growing deviation from the tale’s derivation as it lies within traditional science fiction. This shift can be defined, on the most basic level as the genre losing it’s implied fictitious base. Sure, while we have yet to clone dinosaurs, many core elements of beloved past sic-fi films are growing well within our reach, if not in our present and every-day lives. From Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) to the Matrix Sentinal’s (1999) of our past science fiction films help define our current reality to Will Smith’s bionic arm in I, Robot.

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I am so glad to see this finally. Researchers aim to turn our electrical impulses into a mainstay of medical treatment through bioelectronics, or electroceuticals. I have study the neurological sensory patterns for over a decade as side research to help myself understand sensory patterns of the brain as well as how the brain repairs cells, injuries, and other conditions as well as it’s involvement with cancer, etc. I do love this.

We finally may see a day when chemical/ artificial meds are no longer needed to treat many conditions.

Until now the pharmaceutical industry has been based on chemistry and biology. Patients are treated with drugs that work through biochemical interactions with the body’s molecular pathways. Now GlaxoSmithKline, the UK pharmaceutical company, is.

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Bad news if you use RoundUp.

Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.

An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.

The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently upgraded its assessment of glyphosate from “possibly” to “probably carcinogenic to humans”, though the level of risk is the same as the IARC’s findings on red meat.

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This could be very very tricky for a number of reasons: 1) how will this work with people who develop laryngitis or some other illness disrupting their speech? 2) what happens if a person uses a recorded voice or voice changer? 3) what happens when a person’s voice does change as they get older or have a medical procedure done that permanently alters the voice? I could list more; however, I believe that researcher will realize that there will be a need for two forms of biometrics when it comes to the voice.

Software firm Nuance believes that in the near future, there will be an expectation from customers to interact with technology in a more human-like manner.

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Needle-free Nanopatch technology developed at The University of Queensland has been used to successfully deliver an inactivated poliovirus vaccine.

Delivery of a polio vaccine with the Nanopatch was demonstrated by UQ’s Professor Mark Kendall and his research team at UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and vaccine technology company Vaxxas.

Professor Kendall said the Nanopatch had been used to administer an inactivated Type 2 poliovirus vaccine in a rat model.

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The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

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New genetic technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and synthetic biology are leading us to entirely new definitions of disease. Now “patients” include people who want children who lack some of their own genes, or have additional ones that they themselves lack. Also among the new patients are people who in the past were too old to have children as well some women who get sick from pregnancy and childbirth, or even the idea of them. Technological advances on the horizon may eventually offer treatment for such conditions.

In February 2015 the British Parliament approved production of “three-parent” children by transferring the nucleus of one woman’s egg into the nucleus-less (“enucleated”) egg of a second woman to avoid the propagation of certain rare “mitochondrial” diseases, Though there were acknowledged risks of the unprecedented procedure (including the possibility of producing novel birth defects), the argument that prevailed was that some mitochondrial diseases are so devastating that it should be tried in the narrowly defined group of prospective mothers carrying defective mitochondria.

Not long afterward, news articles began to appear discussing use of the technique for an entirely different purpose. The procedure’s inventor, the Oregon Health & Science University biologist Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, was now proposing to treat infertility in older women by transferring their egg nuclei into the enucleated eggs of younger women.

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