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We celebrate her birthday and life but what fun is there to living so long when aging takes its toll? Science is aiming to do better, find out how here!


Today, February 21, is the birthday of Jeanne Louise Calment – the oldest verified human being ever, who managed to live an amazing 122 years and 164 days!

Jeanne was an independent and positive person, and she managed to live all alone until aged 110. After a fire in her apartment she moved into a nursing home, but even there she was still able to take care of herself. However, shortly before her 115th birthday she fell down a stairway and never fully recovered her ability to walk.

Surprisingly, when Jeanne was 118 years old, cognitive tests revealed she scored within the normal range, without signs of dementia. However, by that time she was physically frail and required a wheelchair.

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Our society has never aged more rapidly – one of the most visible symptoms of the changing demographics is the exponential increase in the incidence of age-related diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular diseases and osteoarthritis. Not only does aging have a negative effect on the quality of life among the elderly but it also causes a significant financial strain on both private and public sectors. As the proportion of older people is increasing so is health care spending. According to a WHO analysis, the annual number of new cancer cases is projected to rise to 17 million by 2020, and reach 27 million by 2030. Similar trends are clearly visible in other age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease. Few effective treatments addressing these challenges are currently available and most of them focus on a single disease rather than adopting a more holistic approach to aging.

Recently a new approach which has the potential of significantly alleviating these problems has been validated by a number of in vivo and in vitro studies. It has been demonstrated that senescent cells (cells which have ceased to replicate due to stress or replicative capacity exhaustion) are linked to many age-related diseases. Furthermore, removing senescent cells from mice has been recently shown to drastically increase mouse healthspan (a period of life free of serious diseases).

Here at CellAge we are working hard to help translate these findings into humans!

CellAge, together with a leading synthetic biology partner, Synpromics, is going to develop synthetic promoters which are specific to senescent cells (SeneSENSE), as promoters that are currently being used to track senescent cells are simply not good enough to be used in therapies. The most prominently used p16 gene promoter has a number of limitations, for example. As our primary mission is to expand the interface between synthetic biology and aging research as well as drive translational research forward, we will offer senescence reporter assay to academics for free. We predict that in the very near future this assay will be also used as a quality control step in the cell therapy manufacturing process to make cell therapies safer!

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Here’s my take on why the overpopulation objection to rejuvenation is morally unacceptable.


In this article, I’ll try to show that the overpopulation objection against rejuvenation is morally deplorable. For this purpose, whether or not the world is overpopulated or might be such in the future doesn’t matter. I’ll deal with facts and data in the two other articles dedicated to this objection; for now, all I want is getting to the conclusion that not developing rejuvenation for the sake of avoiding overpopulation is morally unacceptable (especially when considering the obvious and ethically more sound alternative), and thus overpopulation doesn’t constitute a valid objection to rejuvenation.

I’ll start with an example. Imagine there’s a family of two parents and three children. They’re not doing too well financially, and they live packed in a tiny apartment with no chances of moving somewhere larger. Clearly they cannot afford having more children, but they would really like having more anyway. What should they do?

The only reasonable answer is that they should not have any more children until they can afford having them. Throwing away the old ones for the sake of some other child to be even conceived yet would be nothing short of sheer madness.

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Church mentioned human trials in 2 years a few months ago. this is the first I have seen him say that in 10 years the reversal of aging will be a reality. That’ll make me 55. Hurry.


While discussing creating a hybrid elephant — wooly mammoth using CRISPR genome editing, Harvard’s George Church predicted that reversal of aging will be a reality within ten years.

Nextbigfuture suspects that this could mean clearly reversing aging in mice cells as a proof in principle in ten years. But evidence suggests Church does mean full and significant aging reversal in humans within ten years. In March of 2016 Church said, aging should be thought of as a program that might be reversed, noting, “If we could take one of my skin cells and turn it into an embryo-like cell and turn it back into a skin cell it has reset almost all of the developmental indications of age. We have 65 gene therapies that are being test in mice and larger animals. If they go well we will go straight into human trials. That could be as little as two years…

In June 2016, Church indicated that first phase I aging reversal human trials could be in a year or two.

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For those interested in life extension and bionic / cyborg type enhancements, this CMU Robotics Institute Seminar gives an overview of the background and current developments in artificial vision. José Alain Sahel MD is a world leading ophthalmologist with a lengthy bio and numerous honors and appointments.

In the future, if you’re going blind, these sight restoration technologies may be used to remediate your vision loss.

Three major ideas are covered. 1) Implanting arrays of tiny 3-color LEDs under a failed retina to stimulate still-okay cells, and 2) using gene therapy to express a novel photoreceptor, borrowed from algae, to restore a form of sight to failed cells. These can be done together. Lots of studies in mice, primates, and humans. Some coverage is also given to 3) directly implanting electronics in the brain to send complete images to vision centers, but this is still at an early stage.

None of this is anywhere near total restoration. The patients can make out a few words for the first time. And unlike normal vision, the range of light intensity levels remains very narrow. But obviously it’s much better than nothing and will get better over time.

As a point of humor, he tells the story of one of his blind patients who totally redesigned one of his experiments for him.