BBC News on life extension ambitions: quantity or quality?

BBC News UK has an article today with the screamer Live forever by Brendan O’Neill. It is as mainstream as superficial. Correction: The supporters of life extension are not just transhumanists and the members of present day health and beauty establishment. The piece consequently confuses maximum life extension with “living maybe a couple of years longer” through present treatments. So it is not surprising that the composition of the poll question itself is dead wrong because of the cloudy premises behind: it is not clear, whether you want to live to 1000 with a continuously ageing condition, losing gradually vital functions (of course we do not want it, this is not a Swift story), or we want first to fix the ageing process, so that the biological age of the individual can remain constant, and his metabolism and energy household normal. Really different parameters. And one more thing: it is not exactly the magic number 1000 that matters, choosing a number that is one order of magnitude higher than our present maximum life expectancy is just an attempt not to confuse people’s everyday intuitions. We really have to modify our intuitions, we have to learn thought experimentation if we want to catch the idea of maximum life extension.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, main expert of the article, says: “The quest for longevity leads to the subordination of life to the goal of delaying death. The quality of life is surrendered to the quest for quantity.” It is not as sound as it sounds. Partial immortalization would eliminate problems concerning ageing (ageing related physiological problems), while it is conceptually whole immortalization that would eliminate death related problems. And no one thinks seriously about whole or strong immortalization in the science world. In addition, the quantity question is not to be confused with the quality question, rather say that the quality problem is underdetermined by the quantity problem. Healthy life extension is definitely not a penis enlargement. Naysayers, inform yourself other way, than just reading BBC News.

Stem cell therapy in Eastern Europe: the brute force method

Last week I was told by a man an interesting and weird story about his stem cell transplantation therapy somewhere in Eastern Europe. The elderly man was diagnosed with a motor neuron disease previous year which presently turned out to be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the same that attacked Stephen Hawking in the sixties. The first symptoms manifested 2 years ago, and nowadays there are breathing problems too. During the disease peripheral motoneurons, which innervate human striated muscle gradually degenerate, muscles weaken, waste away, and in the long run control of voluntary movement is lost. Most people with ALS die from respiratory failure, usually within 3 to 5 years from the onset of symptoms. Our man went to the transplantation clinic where he had spent 4 days. He was the only patient in the house surrounded by many doctors and nurses. On the first day his blood and nerves were analysed, on the second day the so called stem cells, 50 million (50×10(6)) in about 100 ml end volume were added systematically into his median cubital vein through infusion, on the 3rd day four shots of stem cells were locally added into his two arms and legs of the area in danger, the number of cells is not known, perhaps another tens of millions. The doctors informed their patient that the first effects of the therapy could be realized after two months of the treatment. The exact source of the cells is unknown, maybe they were embryonic stem cells from blastocysts, or from early foetuses. We are ignorant about the supportive factors, hormones which could be included in the infusion. Financial costs were extremely high. Because of additional treatment, the man has to shuttle between two countries as some material is labelled as a drug in one country but it is not in his native land.

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Pimm logo, first version: when bits meet molecules

Here is the pimm logo, which was invented by me, so you can see how amateur I am in Photoshop (second trial ever), but it will be improved later. The idea behind is more important: the logo symbolizes the future of partial immortalization, which will be extremely dependent on software development and hardware capacity. Bits are complementary with nucleotides, adenine and thymine meet with 0, while the pair of cytosine and guanine is 1. The logo is also a reference to the future of high tech, which is the perfect combination of its two main sectors, biotech and infotech.

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Are you immortalized? Never mind, you are still a moral person!

The first generation of partially immortalized people will form a minority. Then questions will emerge about the social status of human beings under continuous regeneration treatment.

In current moral philosophy, there exists a received view of the moral person, which was worked out in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. The moral person could only be the subject of rights and duties. It is a range property: a person is a moral person or not, there is not any hierarchical moral difference between moral persons. According to Rawls’s definition there are two necessary conditions of being a moral person: the person must have a capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good and ii., be capable of having a sense of justice. Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999.,p. 442. He defines goodness as rationality: if a man is capable of forming a rational plan of life, then „a persons’s good is the successful execution of a rational plan of life” Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999., p. 380 The presupposition of this condition is lifetime perspective, taking the life of one person as a temporal whole. With the pimm thought experiment an argument could be formulated against this „plan of life” criterion of Rawls’s definiton of a moral person.
i., Because of the unforeseen duration of one‘s lifetime, one‘s unlimited lifespan, the person under treatment is not able to consider his/her life as a temporal whole, so per definitionem he/she cannot form a rational plan of life.
ii., Immortalized persons are moral persons. We could not think intuitively that they are not moral persons just because they are under treatment.

Conclusion: „the plan of life” necessary condition of being a moral person is too strict, and a weaker condition is needed.

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Hype and hope: stem cells in action

Inspiration comes from 3 interconnected posts of Bodyhack which is always well-informed and easy to catch.
First, a couple in South Africa has been arrested for allegedly charging desperate patients $24,000 for stem cell treatments for a once-off injection of 1.5 million stem cells. From the source: “Patients were also told that once injected, the stem cells migrated to the site of the disease and began producing the needed cells.”
Now homing is one of the hardest question of stem cell research, it seems that the stem cells’ innate ability to travel to the right place in the body is real but very restricted phenomenon, if you add 1.5 million cells (I did it many times in rat) systematically, only a very small fraction will dock properly, the rest will be eliminated or become problematic. And out the proper small fraction only a few cells will differentiate into the needed, functioning cells. We do not know the exact list of signals, which makes homing a safe and well targeted process.
Second, an encoded article says, that current stem cell research are moving away from using the cells as therapies, and rather use them as tools of disease exploration and drug development.
I would rather say that instead of direct in vivo stem cell transplantation (homeless stem cells), in vitro tissue engineering (stem cells with prefab home) seems now more promising as a future therapy. Stem cells are of course good models of diseases (hypoxia, oxygen-glucose deprivation, diabetes, CNS problems) and are very useful for developing drugs, but that does not mean a lesser therapeutic potential. The opposite is true, I suppose.
Third, Washington scientists with the help of the founding father Gage demonstrated in vitro, using cocultures of treated cells and degenerated mouse retinas, that human ES cells can be differentiated primarily into inner retinal neurons with high efficiency by using a combination of 3 growth factors.
As I see, these experiments are rather just promising preparations for an in vivo repair, because they based on cocultures in vitro. Looking forward to a successful in situ retinal repair with these differentiated hESCs in a real animal.

I think this panorama: a crime story, an opinionated publicism, and a scientific result is a rather typical snapshot of our stem cell driven present. So take a look at my tile scan picture of human stem cells, which is like a distant galaxy.

Why is the moral problem of extending human lifespan is inevitable?

Let us see a philosophical connection between euthanasy and life extension: As the moral problem of ending human life is inevitable , so inevitable a moral problem is the extending of human lifespan, and exactly for the same two reasons as terminating life namely i., the pluralisation of world views and attitudes of life, some conceptions emerged, which, because of distinct type of reasons, require or prefer the extension of healthy human lifespan, increasing the maximum expected life expectancy and ii., the extraordinary development of medical technology and biomedicine. /The two reasons concerning euthanasy is explained in the euthanasy paper of János Kis, who was one of the mentors of my philosophy thesis./

Image is taken from my favourite movie ever: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead by Tom Stoppard.

Joining the healthy life extension community

Influential daily news article about the pimmblog on The Longevity Meme by Reason. Now LM is one of the main web channel of the worldwide but small life extension community, so it is an honor indeed.
Remember: we live in a niche, niche world. Today healthy and maximum life extension is in the minds of a few people but will eventually effect the lives of every human being.
Reason says: “The old brands (“life extension”, “anti-aging”) are losing their strength or merits, and new labels have not yet arisen to prominence. So everyone picks their own, which is fine – let cultural evolution sort out the winners.“.
In my opinion, the what-to-call-it question is just a language game, which could be important in marketing (it really is) but not in the research&development of a well functioning life extension technology, which is of utmost importance. The human body is one of the biggest engineering challenge, there are ten major organ systems, more than 200 cell types, about 10-100 trillion cells, three major types of biological macromolecules, unorganic components, so all the technologies, which can extend healthy human lifespan, be it in vitro tissue engineering, in vivo stem cell transplantation, fixing metabolism, genetic stabilizers, antioxidants, molecular repair systems, … must work together and will converge.
What concerns the distribution and publicity of LE idea: well here I make an attempt to think over the technological, scientific, economic, philosophical, moral and everyday aspects of maximum life extension and regenerative medicine in general and later publish it as a book. Anyone has an offer where to publish it? I would be very glad to hear some ideas. I’ve been thinking about the self publishing type of lulu.com which fits well with the current web era.
Thx for the attention once more and let’s start thinking together.

Who will be the first completely regenerated i.e. partially immortalized person?

Well, of course I don’t know his/her name, but I have a strong guess about the condition.
I think the first person, whose all tissues and organs will be regenerated and so fixed in a constant physiological age, will be a very sick patient with declining function in all tissues and organs, for instance a person with terminal cancer and metastases in every body part, so there won’t be any ethical obstacles to treat him or not, because that will be the only chance to save his life. This man will be between life and death, so it won’t be a question whether it is therapy or enhancement, good or bad, permissible or prohibited, legal or illegal. This would be just the way to achieve a medical breakthrough. By that time all parts of a complete body regeneration will be solved and tested separately on patients with local problems as an organic development of regenerative medicine for therapeutical purposes.
There is some non-zero probability that the first immortalized person of the future is alive at the present moment, although he must be not too old. It takes tens of years to develop every component of the total regenerative treatment. But not a hundred years.

Another option is to complete a whole body regeneration on a healthy person first, who is a volunteer.

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Why it is not a Grenzsituation to participate in a continuous regeneration treatment?

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For first readers: The aim of regenerative medicine is to regenerate all tissues and organs of the human body with the help of stem cells’ regenerative potential. Theoretically if all tissues and organs of an adult body were regenerated once, then it could be regenerated two and eventually n times. This technological possibility is called partial immortalization.

Let us turn to ordinary morality and ordinary, first hand moral intuitions. The focus here will be on the level of the individual, and not the direct human environment of the individual (family, colleagues), or the society in which the individual lives. Contrary to the supposed intutition we try to show, that it is not a boundary situation (Grenzsituation) for the individual to participate in a continuous regeneration treatment, than we could think at first sight.
In a Grenzsituation, per definitionem, the life of a human individual (or a community) is in real danger. „The „limit” is the boundary line between life and death.” A Grenzsituation occurs only once, it is not repeated at another time, the individual will win or lose. Thirdly, a Grenzsituation is a short interval, the participant individual usually has an intensive experience, and the situation deserves some strong gestures and moral top condition.
A typical Grenzsituation could occur in war, in slavery, in a concentration camp, or in an euthanasy situation, but not in an average working day in a liberal democracy. Now imagine again an adult individual under the decision, whether to participate in a partial immortalization treatment or not, or just imagine an individual under regeneration treatment, and his/her next time to go to the clinic. First, this won’t be a boundary situation for him/her, because it is not a choice between life and death, but a choice between life and life, between an average life expectancy and a partially immortalized condition. Second, this hypothetical scenario of the treatment requires continuous, recurrent choices and decisions while a Grenzsituation is a unique one-time event, as mentioned before. Third, the treatment does not require high moral sensibility and spectacular gestures. The maximum moral intensitiy probably occurs when an individual first decides to go to the regeneration therapy, but we could hardly say, that this means his/her whole life is in danger. So immortalization does not seem to be a Grenzsituation for three reasons, and morally on the level of the individual under treatment it is not necessarily a source of moral conflict. Moral problems arise when we turn to the direct human environment of the individual (family, colleagues) and the society in which the individual lives.

Google’s coming out in biotech: when and why?

When and for what reason will Google launch a biotech business, and why regenerative medicine?

It is a big question what kind of company Google Incorporation plans to become beyond the core search engine and ad business. Google is a geek company founded by two extremely talented IT nerds. My guess is that for Google the logical extension of its tech savvy philosophy is to start some biotech enterprise in the next ten years to come. Why do I think so?

First there is an original interest for biotech in G, we have the Venter story which was criticized by many. In The Google Story David Vise wrote about “ambitious long-term plans for Google’s expansion into the fields of biology and genetics and the fusion of science, medicine, and technology.”

Second, tech investment and development is near to a turning point. In the June Business 2.0 Magazine there was a list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies out of which the first ten is worth considering a little bit.

Five out of these top companies – Celgene the first, Palomar Medical Technologies, LifeCell, Gilead Sciences and Clinical Data are positioned in the Medical sector. The other five are distributed between Software, Electronics and Business Services sector, but the infotech umbrella term could easily be applied to them. The medical five are biotech enterprises not big pharmas, like GlaxoSmithCline or Novartis. No surprise, that it is a hidden trend in the Valley, that succesful IT entrepreneurs invest into BT start-ups. The statistics refer to an emerging phenomena not just in the Valley, but all the techhubs in the world, a phenomena, that deserves detailed discussions.
Third, and most importantly biotech is the next big thing in high-tech. The future of high tech is the perfect combination of its two main sectors, BT and IT. This creates not just a permissive but a highly supportive environment for new BT start-ups. Highlights its actuality. Biotech’s potential to transform human culture in all its segments is bigger than any other known technology. Red or medical biotech, which accounts for some 86% of all biotech companies is able to transform human beings in a way other technology could not. The most promising area of red biotech is regenerative medicine. Biotech is the next big thing in the overall tech sector, and consequently the next big determinant of the world.

And what business fits better with the long term strategy of a company, which aims to organize the world’s information ever, than maximum life extension, the ultimate and unlimited business enterprise which would be no other then prolonged regenerative medicine? So my guess is that Google will start some kind of biotech business in the next, say 10 years, and its focus area will be tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Good luck, brothers.

Partial immortalization: the ultimate business enterprise

What makes a business huge? If you’ve got a terrific product or service in your hand, there is a constant demand for it and the range of the potential customers is always rising. Now it is my pleasure to claim that partial immortalization is the ultimate business enterprise in every respect: in the long run the service time could be extended unlimitedly, and potentially every adult human being above a threshold age, say 30, could be a client. Think about it: regeneration of the whole human body inside out is no other, than inside plastic surgery for functional reasons.

The only thing is back is just to make it real.

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