Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

Earlier this year, we launched a new webinar series where our monthly patrons, the Lifespan Heroes, are given the opportunity to join live discussion panels with the researchers who are working on solving aging.

Our April 8th, 2019 episode saw Dr. Mike Lustgarten, Dr. Amy Proal, and Dr. Cosmo Mielke join hosts Dr. Oliver Medvedik and Steve Hill for a discussion about the microbiome and how it relates to aging.

The webinar discusses gut flora and the pro-aging effects of immune system burden, the link between bacterial burden and inflammation, and exercise and nutrition. There was also plenty of discussion about the immediately available practical measures that can improve the gut microbiome and thus control weight and promote health.

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On July 11–12, we will be hosting our second annual Ending Age-Released Diseases conference. This conference focuses on the progress of aging research along with the business and investment side of rejuvenation biotechnology.

Aging research is on the cusp of some major breakthroughs in the battle against age-related diseases, and we invite you to join us for an action-packed event filled with exciting talks and discussion panels featuring some of the leaders of aging research and the biotech business.

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Lying within our muscles are stem cells, invisible engines that drive the tissue’s growth and repair. Understanding the signal(s) that direct muscle stem cells to spring into action could uncover new ways to promote muscle growth. However, these mechanisms are poorly understood.

Now, scientists from Sanford Burnham Prebys have uncovered a molecular signaling pathway involving Stat3 and Fam3a proteins that regulates how decide whether to self-renew or differentiate—an insight that could lead to muscle-boosting therapeutics for muscular dystrophies or age-related muscle decline. The study was published in Nature Communications.

“Muscle stem cells can ‘burn out’ trying to regenerate tissue during the or due to chronic muscle disease,” says Alessandra Sacco, Ph.D., senior author of the paper and associate professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys. “We believe we have found promising drug targets that direct to ‘make the right decision’ and stimulate muscle repair, potentially helping muscle tissue regeneration and maintaining tissue function in such as muscular dystrophy and aging.”

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On the degenerative disk disease and senescent cells from FightAging: “… It is just a pity that so few older people know this at the present time — the hundreds of millions worldwide who are suffering when perhaps they need not be…”

At this point, I suspect it will surprise no-one who follows the field to learn that the accumulation of senescent cells is a significant cause of degenerative disc disease. The evidence from a mouse study that is provided in the open access paper here doesn’t quite rise to establishing that claim, but it is compelling nonetheless. Given the role of cellular senescence in arthritis, a disease of localized chronic inflammation, it is logical to also expect a role in the degeneration of intervertebral discs, as this is also a condition of aging in which inflammation seems important.

Senescent cells, even while present in only comparatively small numbers, generate a potent mix of molecules that spurs chronic inflammation and is destructive of surrounding tissue structure. Fortunately early senolytic compounds, those shown to destroy a sizable fraction of senescent cells cells in animal studies, are cheap and readily available to anyone willing to try this self-experiment. It is just a pity that so few older people know this at the present time — the hundreds of millions worldwide who are suffering when perhaps they need not be.

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A new story on my latest article from #transhumanism critic Wesley J. Smith:

Oh my. Two of contemporary society’s most prominent anti-human utopian movements — radical environmentalism and materialistic transhumanism — appear on the verge of a bitter showdown.

When you think about it, that makes sense. Both movements see themselves as the future’s only hope. But their core purposes are incompatible. Radical environmentalists — “nature rights” activists, deep ecologists, Gaia theorists, and their fellow travelers that elevate nature above humanity — hijacked and refashioned traditional environmentalism into a mystical neo-earth religion that disdains homo Sapiens as a parasitical species afflicting the earth. These radicals hope to thwart our thriving off the land in order to “save the planet.” Indeed, I sometimes believe that if they could, they would forcibly revert our species to hunter/gatherers — without the hunting part.

In contrast, transhumanism denigrates both the natural world and normal human life as irredeemably limited, and worst of all, ending in death! They yearn to possess extraordinary capacities without having to work to attain them. Rather than pursue virtue, transhumanism expects to overcome human nature through applied technology. Indeed, movement prophets predict the coming of “Singularity” — a discreet moment in time when unstoppable cascading technology will enable transhumanists to “seize control of human evolution” and reengineer themselves into an immortal “post-human species.”

The intellectual peace between these competing social movements was recently breached by Zoltan Istvan, one of transhumanism’s most creative apologists, who ran for president in 2016 on a plank of defeating death and garnered scads of earned media by touring the country in a bus fashioned to look like a coffin. In an all-out frontal assault on the hallowed presumption of contemporary environmentalism, Istvan not only writes that “nature isn’t sacred” (can you hear the gasping?), but he committed an even worse anti-environmentalist sin by arguing that “we should replace it.”

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Yale is making waves. They have had great Research papers over the past 3 years. Some of which has proven my constant words now for two decades that we have a pandemic plague that attacks our individual Eukaryotic cells the day long causing What AEWR Has named the Senesonic plague the disease we have called aging. Respect r.p.berry & AEWR https://adamandevewordresearch.blogspot.com/

The researchers did not hail from House Greyjoy — “What is dead may never die” — but came largely from the Yale School of Medicine. They connected 32 pig brains to a system called Brain Ex. Brain Ex is an artificial perfusion system — that is, a system that takes over the functions normally regulated by the organ. Think a dialysis machine for the mind. The pigs had been killed four hours earlier at a U.S. Department of Agriculture slaughterhouse; their brains completely removed from the skulls.

Brain Ex pumped an experiment solution into the brain that essentially mimic blood flow. It brought oxygen and nutrients to the tissues, giving brain cells the resources to begin many normal functions. The cells began consuming and metabolizing sugars. The brains immune system kicked in. Neuron samples could carry an electrical signal. Some brain cells even responded to drugs.

The researchers have managed to keep some brains alive for up to 36 hours, and currently do not know if Brain Ex can have sustained the brains longer. “It is conceivable we are just preventing the inevitable, and the brain won’t be able to recover,” said Nenad Sestan, Yale neuroscientist and the lead researcher.

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