Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: policy

Dr. Derek Yach, Founder, President, and Board Member of The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW), joined me on ideaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) to discuss his group’s work in the core areas of Agriculture and Livelihoods, Industry Transformation, and Health, Science, and Technology (Disclosure — FSFW is funded ~$US1 Billion by Philip Morris International, but take a listen to full story…) — #Ideaxme #Smoking #Vaping #Tobacco #Cessation #AlternativeUses #HarmReduction #WHO #CDC #Health #Wellness #Longevity #Biotechnology #LifeExtension #Aging #IraPastor #Bioquark #Regenerage World Health Organization (WHO) CDC CDC Global United Nations Philip Morris International.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Dr. Derek Yach, founder, president, and board member of The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, and passionate advocate for health promotion and disease prevention. Dr Yach’s objective is to end smoking in this generation. We investigated to see how that might be achieved.

Disclosure: The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World has received its initial funding pledge of $80 million USD annually for 12 years, beginning in 2018 from Philip Morris International (PMI) — The Foundation has a nonprofit status as a US 501c3 organization, and by law and policy must operate completely independently from PMI, and cannot engage in activities designed to support PMI’s interests. Further, PMI can have no involvement or say in their work.

Ira Pastor Comments:

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that we currently have over 1.1 billion smokers on earth, and that tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) say that cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day.

Smoking leads to disease and disability and harms nearly every organ of the body. More than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking including cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, as well as increasing risk for tuberculosis, certain eye diseases, auto- immune disorders including rheumatoid arthritis, and erectile dysfunction in males.

Total economic cost of smoking in the U.S. alone is more than $300 billion a year, including nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and exposure to secondhand smoke.

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The Royal Society is to create a network of disease modelling groups amid academic concern about the nation’s reliance on a single group of epidemiologists at Imperial College London whose predictions have dominated government policy, including the current lockdown.

It is to bring in modelling experts from fields as diverse as banking, astrophysics and the Met Office to build new mathematical representations of how the coronavirus epidemic is likely to spread across the UK — and how the lockdown can be ended.

The first public signs of academic tensions over Imperial’s domination of the debate came when Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, published a paper suggesting that some of Imperial’s key assumptions could be wrong.

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Greetings everyone, I am running a very unique digital conference time-slotted for participants in Asia, AUS, NZ etc on April 9, 5pm Sydney time, see details below, with 2 very well known Futurist colleagues, Ross Dawson and Shara Evans, on the Future of Work. We are using the Zoom platform again, and have room for up to 500 people; right now we’re at 280 signups but it’s filling up quickly so please sign up soonest:)

Please review the event details here, or here.

Some more related resources:

Archives of previous online shows

***** New: short film on impact of covid9

Read my take on the covid19 crisis

new resource hub on PostCorona Futures

The Future of Work — the Great Transformation. Free online conference with Futurists Ross Dawson, Shara Evans, Gerd Leonhard

The world ‘after Corona’ will be dramatically different (read Gerd’s take here: gerd.io/gr8transformation), and the way we work, when, where & why is changing forever.

Join 3 of the world’s top futurists to discuss the Future of Work: Ross Dawson (Sydney), Shara Evans (AUS/USA), Gerd Leonhard (Zurich)

Sydney 5pm

Auckland 7pm

Singapore 3pm

Mumbai 12:30pm

Dubai 11am

Zurich 9am

Themes: economic impact of the crisis, remote/distributed work, the changing role of offices, skills and capabilities soon required, how to tap into our unique human capabilities, well-being and working remotely +++

Gerd Leonhard

Quantum computers will revolutionize information technology, ushering in an era where certain types of calculations will be performed with almost unimaginable speed. Practical applications will include healthcare disciplines such as molecular biology and drug discovery; big data mining; financial services such as portfolio analysis and fraud detection; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The federal government is helping to create an environment in which quantum computing innovation and experimentation can flourish. The National Quantum Initiative Act puts $1.2 billion into the quantum research budgets of the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The law also outlines a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.

Meanwhile, The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is working to ensure that economic growth opportunities and opportunities for improving the world are baked into quantum policies and systems.

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Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly-cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, which has been cited by organizations like The New York Times and has been instrumental in governmental policy decision-making, offered a massive revision to his model on Wednesday.

Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve.

However, after just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured. Now, the epidemiologist predicts, hospitals will be just fine taking on COVID-19 patients and estimates 20,000 or far fewer people will die from the virus itself or from its agitation of other ailments, as reported by New Scientist Wednesday.

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Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an American oncologist and bioethicist who is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress as well as Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, said on MSNBC on Friday, March 20, that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told him it would probably take 8–10 weeks to get ventilator production started at his factories (he’s working on this at Tesla and SpaceX).

I reached out to Musk for clarification on that topic and he replied that, “We have 250k N95 masks. Aiming to start distributing those to hospitals tomorrow night. Should have over 1000 ventilators by next week.” With medical supplies such as these being one of the biggest bottlenecks and challenges at the moment in the COVID-19 response in the United States (as well as elsewhere) — something that is already having a very real effect on medical professionals and patient care — the support will surely be received with much gratitude. That said, while there has been much attention put on the expected future need for ventilators, very few places reportedly have a shortage of them right now. In much greater need at the moment are simpler supplies like N95 masks, which must be why Tesla/SpaceX is providing 250,000 of them.

Dr. Emanuel also said in the segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” he was on that we probably need 8–12 weeks (2–3 months) of social distancing in the US in order to deal with COVID-19 as a society. However, he also expects that the virus will come back and we’ll basically have a roller coaster of “social restrictions, easing up, social restrictions, easing up … to try to smooth out the demand on the health care system.”

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The mission of healthy life extension, or healthy longevity promotion, raises a broad variety of questions and tasks, relating to science and technology, individual and communal ethics, and public policy, especially health and science policy. Despite the wide variety, the related questions may be classified into three groups. The first group of questions concerns the feasibility of the accomplishment of life extension. Is it theoretically and technologically possible? What are our grounds for optimism? What are the means to ensure that the life extension will be healthy life extension? The second group concerns the desirability of the accomplishment of life extension for the individual and the society, provided it will become some day possible through scientific intervention.

How will then life extension affect the perception of personhood? How will it affect the availability of resources for the population? Yet, the third and final group can be termed normative. What actions should we take? Assuming that life extension is scientifically possible and socially desirable, and that its implications are either demonstrably positive or, in case of a negative forecast, they are amenable – what practical implications should these determinations have for public policy, in particular health policy and research policy, in a democratic society? Should we pursue the goal of life extension? If yes, then how? How can we make it an individual and social priority? Given the rapid population aging and the increasing incidence and burden of age-related diseases, on the pessimistic side, and the rapid development of medical technologies, on the optimistic side, these become vital questions of social responsibility. And indeed, these questions are often asked by almost any person thinking about the possibility of human life extension, its meaning for oneself, for the people in one’s close circle, for the entire global community. Many of these questions are rather standard, and the answers to them are also often quite standard. Below some of those frequently asked questions and frequently given answers are given, with specific reference to the possibility and desirability of healthy human life extension, and the normative actions that can be undertaken, by the individual and the society, to achieve this goal.

Q: Is human life extension possible? Why do you think so?

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