Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

Dismantling the idea that older generations should ‘step down’ for younger ones.

Humans are really pros at sugarcoating. If you say old people should step down for the sake of new generations, it sounds so noble and rightful, doesn’t it? What it actually means, though, is ‘We value old people less than new ones,’ and this doesn’t sound very noble or rightful. This is plain and brutal survival of the species.

Kids are (generally) cute and helpless. This is what triggers our instinct to protect them, even thought it is not the reason we do it. A species relying on reproduction to ensure its existence wouldn’t last long if it didn’t care for its children. Even if we had already developed comprehensive rejuvenation therapies, we would still be mortals; if we stopped reproducing altogether and forever, we would still risk extinction, although on a very long timescale. (In other words, we could still die one by one of other causes than ageing.) It’s the reason children are important (to us and other species): They’re potential means of reproduction. Additionally, they need special attention, because they’re not able to take care of themselves and are thus more at risk of dying before they can reproduce. That’s why most species on the planet make such a big deal out of protecting their offspring—species that don’t are less likely to stick around long enough to tell the tale.

Individuals who are no longer kids but still are fertile are still important for reproduction purposes, but require less attention from others and from society, because they can look after themselves. Individuals who can no longer reproduce, or who wouldn’t be able to take care of their offspring even if they could have any (mainly elderly adults), have zero importance in this sense, because they use up resources of society without contributing to the survival of society itself. They’ve (assumably) already contributed to the perpetuation of the species, and now that they no longer can, they’re just a burden. Thus, from the cynical point of view of the survival of the species, it makes zero sense to dedicate any resources to the care of the elderly. As a matter of fact, besides humans, there aren’t many examples of species whose younger members look after the elderly of the family.

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Everolimus heading for human clinical trials later this year to treat immune system decline.

The biotechnology company PureTech are moving towards human clinical trials with a new therapy that may slow down the aging process and combat age-related disease. The company has licensed two new drug candidates, derivatives of the drug Rapamycin, from pharmaceutical giant Novartis.

PureTech have recently announced a joint venture with Novartis called resTORbio and are moving to clinical trials of the new drugs later this year. The aim of the first test phase is to see if the new drug can rejuvenate the immune system of aged people a key reason why we lose the ability to resist diseases as we grow older.

Novartis already successfully completed two Phase IIa studies exploring the immune-enhancing potential of mTORC1 inhibitors in elderly patients. resTORbio plans to build on those findings and start a Phase IIb study with the two licensed candidates later this year. Excitingly the firm has also said that it plans to extend the program to other age-related disorders in the future.

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For people in that area, and it may be worth while to try reaching out to them for funding for anti aging stuff.

Why is RAND opening a Bay Area office?

The San Francisco Bay Area is really at the center of technology and transformation. That’s also been a focus at RAND since our very first report, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, in 1946, which foretold the creation of satellites more than a decade before Sputnik.

Today, our researchers are working on important questions related to autonomous vehicles, drones, cybersecurity, education technology, virtual medicine—the same questions driving Silicon Valley startups and billion-dollar Bay Area corporations. At the same time, we’re looking at issues surrounding social inequality, drug policy, water resource management, and transportation, all of which directly relate to the Bay Area.

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The first step in producing an artificial thymus which has potential for cancer age related immune decline.

UCLA researchers have created a new system to produce human T cells, the white blood cells that fight against disease-causing intruders in the body. The system could be utilized to engineer T cells to find and attack cancer cells, which means it could be an important step toward generating a readily available supply of T cells for treating many different types of cancer.

The preclinical study, published in the journal Nature Methods, was led by senior authors Dr. Gay Crooks, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and of pediatrics and co-director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA, and Amelie Montel-Hagen, an associate project scientist in Crooks’ lab.

The thymus sits in the front of the heart and plays a central role in the immune system. It uses to make T cells, which help the body fight infections and have the ability to eliminate cancer cells. However, as people age or become ill, the thymus isn’t as efficient at making T cells.

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Interview with George Church.

Harvard researcher Dr. George Church has developed an innovative gene editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 that could transform senescent cells. He predicts this technology may reverse aging in humans. Life Extension Foundation® assisted by providing Dr. Church with gene sequencing data from its super-centenarian project.

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Interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing in the investment quarter.

Mainstream interest in rejuvenation biotechnology is growing.

“Investment in the development of rejuvenation therapies represents an enormous opportunity for profit; these are products for which every adult human being much over the age of 30 is a potential customer at some price point. That is larger than near every existing industry, either within or outside the field of medicine, even given that customers will only purchase such a therapy once every few years, for clearance of metabolic waste, or even just once, for treatments like the SENS approach of allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes. Among the first successful companies in this space, some will grow to become among the largest in the world: I’d wager that the Ford or Microsoft of rejuvenation will be a lot larger than the actual Ford of automobiles or Microsoft of personal computing.”

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This is a fair enough article, though I believe I’m more Libertarian than it paints me. I think a lot of people forget or simply don’t know my book The Transhumanist Wager (how I started my futurist career back in 2009) is known by many as transhumanist libertarian manifesto. Also, ideas from my past political campaign do not always correspond to my current gubernatorial run:

Like many libertarians, I was initially excited when Zoltan Istvan announced his candidacy for Governor of California.

Istvan is the founder of the Transhumanist Party and author of “The Transhumanist Wager,” which is considered a manifesto on transhumanist philosophy. The basic premise of transhumanism is that the next step in human evolution will be to improve our bodies and expand our lifespan with radical technology, eventually leading towards immortality. While he still needs to obtain the nomination, having someone announce their intents this early gave me hope that maybe the party would have a shot at making an impact in the California mid-terms.

As I learned about his transhumanist ideas, I became increasingly hopeful that his views on radical science and medical technology would be able to appeal to the far-left base of California and introduce a wider range of people to libertarianism. However, after doing some research I’m not so sure Istvan is the best candidate to represent the Libertarian party.

On the surface, the former presidential candidate seems to align with the libertarian views of bodily autonomy (transhumanists call it morphological freedom) and the non-aggression principle, he even called himself a left-libertarian on the Rubin Report.

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