Human Egg Market: the naked truth

Deep story by Kerry Howley, associate editor of Reason Magazine, aka “Donor #15” who sold 12 ova to a pair of strangers for $10,000. From the story: By the mid-1980s, babies were being born via donated eggs that were fertilized outside the womb and later implanted in women incapable of producing viable ova. If you can imagine a scenario involving IVF-related technologies, chances are it has already taken place. The once-hypothetical fears of bioconservatives are now walking and talking human beings, but the debate over the ethical implications of such children is still oddly abstract. “It is argued,” states a 2002 report by the President’s Council on Bioethics regarding the commercial trade in human, “that we stand to introduce a commercial character into human reproduction, and to introduce commercial concerns into the coming-to-be of the next generation.” If that is the risk, we’re already running it, because the market in eggs, sperm, and reproductive technology has never been larger or more accessible. Selling ova to another woman is at once impossibly intimate and wholly impersonal, a connected but highly distributed process of exchange. It is a transaction well suited to the Internet, which tends to provoke uninhibited sharing among strangers cloaked in anonymity. … Link

Image source

Human embryonic stem cell research historically and presently (see previous post1 and post2) is heavily depended on In Vitro Fertilization-related reproductive technologies, as most of the existing and established hESC line came from IVF surplus embryos. One kind of anti hESC argument originated from anti IVF agruments.

New Swiss Embryonic Stem Cell Lab

A Geneva lab headed by Anis Feki and Maris Jaconi tries to isolate embryonic stem cells using a new procedure that avoids exposure of the cells to animal components, which carry the risk of infections.

$16Million Israeli fund for anti leukemia treatment StemEx

$16-million round of financing goes for Gamida Cell to bring StemEx, a treatment for leukemia and lymphoma to the market. From Red Herring: The funds will be used to expand the Israeli stem cell startup’s pipeline and bring products to market. …The company reported extremely favorable clinical results from phase I and II studies of umbilical cord blood highly enriched with stem cells. If all goes well, the company plans to begin marketing StemEx in 2009 in partnership with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Israel’s largest drug company and an investor in Gamida Cell. Link

Crucial here is the cooperation of a stem cell biotech startup with a Big Pharma Giant. It is a whole new phenomenon.

Logo sources: Gamida, Teva.

American epigenetics expert in Mprize competition for Methuselah mice

From Market Wire: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Biochemist Dr. Craig Cooney today announced that he is entering the competition to win the Methuselah Mouse Prize (Mprize). Cooney is a epigenetics expert, which is the selective silencing of gene activity along specific segments of a DNA strand mainly through the methylation of the nucleotides. Trick is that Dr. Cooney’s group treats female mice before they give birth, instead of treating only the progeny. Link

Fixing the ageing process via this way is an indirect and different approach than partial immortalization through regenerative medicine. In the hypothetical Pimm process there is no need to experiment with Methuselah mice, because theoretically every tissue and every organ of the whole human body could be replaced and regenerated separately with the help of stem cells and tissue engineering. If an adult body was regenerated once, then it could be regenerated n times. Eventually all the separate regenerative stem cell work on animals and humans will converge on the whole regeneration of a complete human body.

Rumors on Amatokin: a skin stem cell wrinkle cream?

Is Amatokin the first product to harness the potential of your own stem cells to reduce serious wrinkles? From Businesswire: This “super-secret” wrinkle cream, called Amatokin, is not really a cream at all, but a “highly efficient ‘barrier-neutral’ emulsion” containing a unique polypeptide compound (known in official circles as polypeptide #153). This meta-peptide was developed 62 miles north of St. Petersburg, Russia in a high-security lab . The original goal was to find a better way to help burn victims heal, but the real money is in harnessing the power of stem cells to renew old skin and make it young. … Amatokin is the most controversial anti-aging skin cream in more than three decades. …While the public debate rages about the use of stem cells from fertilized human eggs, most people don’t realize that human skin is the largest repository of stem cells in the body. …If Voss Laboratories succeeds in bringing Amatokin to the American market for a price of under $200 for a 30-day supply, industry sources say Amatokin could be the most sought-after formula to ever hit the “anti-wrinkle, anti-aging market.” Bottom line: The ability of Amatokin and stem-cell science to deliver wrinkle-free skin remains mostly rumor – but a very persistent one. Link

Ok, it is one thing to use a polypeptide or a mix of them to make the endogenous, natural born skin stem cells move and divide and regenerate, but to put exogenous stem cells into a cream as a compound: that is a completely different project. For the latter you need to glue the cells somewhere with something (gelatin, colloid emulsion?).

Tony Blair: if America does not want stem-cell research – we do

From BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair’s last speech as Labour leader at the party’s annual conference: How to be the world’s number one place of choice for bio-science – if America does not want stem-cell research – we do. …The Google generation has moved beyond the idea of 9 to 5, closed on weekends and Bank Holidays. Today’s technology is profoundly empowering. … We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world. That is why Identity Cards using biometric technology are not a breach of our basic rights, they are an essential part of responding to the reality of modern migration and protecting us against identity fraud. I remember when I introduced the DNA database. On it go all those who are arrested. We were told it was a monstrous breach of liberty. Link

Pimm in the Growing Blogs list

Ladies and gentlemen: due to the heavy traffic yesterday Pimm is now on the list (updated every 6 hours) of the blogs experienced the greatest gain in traffic in the last 24 hours. Thank you. I have tremendous information to share you, but now I am doing an experiment in the lab. CU soon.

Terrific Pixar-style Harvard animation on molecular biology

In my biologically committed childhood I fantasized about a movie which presents all the main actors of the cell machinery: nucleic acids, enzymes, cytoskeleton (see left), ribosomes (mRNA translation into polypeptide chain, see right), hydrophob and hydrophil proteins, lipid membrane bilayers, kinesins and so on. Now BioVisions from Harvard made half my dreams (no intranuclear story just cytoplasmic) come true, although I am just not sure about the music. Conception and scientific content: Alain Viel, Robert A. Lue, animation by John Liebler. The company behind is XVIVO, a Connecticut based scientific animation company. The movie is extremely useful for educational purposes. Link via BoingBoing from astroshack.

Imagine this made out of Lego bricks. When will Lego produce MatterStorms for bioDIYers besides Mindstorms for infoDIYers? Bionicle is not about biology at all.

Pimm in analysis: blogger self-test

Business 2.0 September cover story is Blogging for dollars, and in that there is a little rulebook: the 7 habits of highly effective bloggers. Let us see if pimm can pass the exam.

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche Partial immortalization is an archetypal niche topic: it stands in the intersection of many sub-field disciplines: stem cell and mitochondrial biology, regenerative medicine, analytic philosophy, Wired-type journalism and so on.

2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL Done naturally by my favourite WordPress motor and host.

3. Think of your blog as database Hey man, this is mainly a bookblog, so the majority of posts organize themselves into a hierarchical database according to the book-genre. We shall see it, when I have enough time to update the content page.

4. Blog frequently and regularly My biggest sin: I plan to develop it highly, but as I work in an experimental field I have problems to set, say 5 posts a day.

5. Use striking images in your posts Try to do my best in that respect, precedent was, when the invention of a good image took more time than writing the post.

6. Enable comments and interact with readers Well, I m still very hungry for comments and interactive readers.

7. Make friends with other bloggers As life extension and aging research is a niche topic, there are not too many players recently on the Web. I have crosslinks with my fellow blogs Fightaging, Ouroboros, Michael Yamashita’s Blog Scan, with SENS and I continuously scan the area for new friends.

Impact of Longer Lives on Retirement and Careers

From NewsReleaseWire: Futurists Look At Impact of Longer Lives on Retirement and Careers at the 2006 meeting of the World Future Society in Toronto. How to choose you post-career life well in an ageless society. Link

International Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine in Vegas, December

14th Annual International Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine will be held in Las Vegas, December 7-10. Link

The program is definitely not about partial immortalization, rather on today’s techniques of minor life extension and hormonal practices to compensate aging. On the various meanings of the term anti-aging see this.

Wired’s bionic tour over your body

Today’s bioWired story is What if bionics were better on what-if scenarios in body hack by Chris Oakes.

Bionic in the present sense refers to having particular physiological functions augmented or replaced by electronic or electromechanical components. The article covers recent bionic projects like Cyberhand the European multidisciplinary hand prosthesis for amputees, and EyeTap, an always-on eye-cam that has been adapted for control via signals sent from the wearer’s occipital lobe. What are the similarities and differences comparing bionic trials to the continuous regeneration treatment called partial immortalization, the eventual stem-cell therapy? First, the pattern of future acceptance: the distance between denial and acceptance could turn as much on what current machines can and can’t do, as it does body image. Second it is interesting to see which option is more radical body transformation: bionics, electronic devices, Wi-Fi implant in your ears or maximum life extension treatment via regenerative medicine. The similarity is that both treatments could have deep psychological consequences. Both kind of treatments require early adopter character, and self-experimenting skills. Consider the Kurzweil case and the new kind of body awareness 250 supplements/day equals to.
Main difference is that in the case of partial immortalization the aim is to maintain body function with the same tools (molecules, cells, tissues, organs) evolution itself uses while in bionics, replacements come from silicon and not from carbon. There is a distinction in the focus of the treatment: pimm is just about feeling yourself indefinitely cool in your present make-up while bionics is into changing your very physical constitution.

Similar psychology and different physiology.

Arrested embryos as valuable sources of human embryonic stem cells?

An Open Access Article from latest Stem Cells Express: Derivation of human embryonic stem cells from developing and arrested embryos. The researchers from UK., Spain and Serbia demonstrate that arrested embryos which never reach the morula or blastocyst stage and are generally regarded as “dead” have proliferative potential and could be used for the derivation of hESC. Out of 13 late (16-24 cells) arrested embryos one stable and fully characterised hESC line was derived, which expressed specific pluripotency markers (TRA-1-60, TRA-1-81, SSEA4, alkaline phosphatase, OCT4, NANOG, TERT and REX1) and differentiated under in vitro and in vivo conditions into derivates of all three germ layers. One reason of embryo arrest used to be chromosomal irregularities, but interestingly the derived cell line showed a normal female karyotype. Link

Yet another offer for collecting human embryonic stem cells in an ethically less controversial way.

EuroOSCON and Make Fest is over

Check out the photos here.

Future Hollywood movie called “The Immortalist”

From Yahoo News: LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Bennett Miller, the Oscar-nominated director of “Capote,” is working on a futuristic movie called “The Immortalist.” The project, which has yet to be written, is a “character-driven drama set in the emerging world of life extension,” he said. Details of the plot are still under wraps, but Miller described it as “not a science fiction film … (but) a drama set in the very real world of those pursuing biological immortality.” He added: “It’s a pursuit that attracts some extremely brilliant, wealthy and influential people. It also attracts tragic figures. This story follows one such person on his disturbing foray into it.” Link

Well, what can I say? I am hungry for the technological details. I just wonder how these guys imagine the ins and outs of life extension.

Thanks Anna.

Update: those links are not working anymore, here is a stable one: Bennett Miller Helming The Immortalist

bioDIY on Euro Maker Faire: stem cells from the placenta

I am a big fan of bioDIY or home/garage biotech, the idea that tinkering could be extended to biological entities to. Just take a look at MAKE magazine current Backyard Biology Issue. I’ll be in Brussels at Wednesday at Maker Faire (list of Makers here) with the project: how to isolate stem cells from your baby’s placenta in a rent lab, or at home. Detailed instructions about the project will be published later so the information is restricted here.

From O’Reilly Radar:

There is plenty of room indeed for every biotech geek.

Bonus question for my stable readers: what can be the connection between private storage of placental derived stem cells and the continuous regeneration treatment called pimm?

PayPal founder’s $3.5 million support goes for life extension purposes

From SFGate: “Peter A. Thiel, co-founder and former chief executive officer of the online payments system PayPal, announced Saturday he is pledging $3.5 million “to support scientific research into the alleviation and eventual reversal of the debilities caused by aging.”
The grant goes to the Methuselah Foundation a nonprofit volunteer organization founded by Aubrey de Grey, whose SENS is an engineering proposal to fix ageing-related problems and reach indefinite healthy lifespan. Of course, this amount of money is not enough to solve the problem, just compare it to the $3 billion of Proposition 71 for stem cell research funding in California, where the annual limit is $350 million. Proposition 71 provides General Fund loan up to $3 million for Institute’s initial administration/implementation costs. But the $3.5 million comes from one wealthy man, and the 3 billion comes from a very wealthy state.

The grant marks well Bay Area IT entrepreneurs’s and venture capitalists’ growing interest in biotechnology and bioengineering. Take a look at a previous post here: Google’s coming out in biotech: when and why? IT entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley will be the eventual financial engine behind maximum life extension. They’ve got the money and the desire. Would you like to bet? IT money in BT business: sounds like the pattern of the future. Consider Arthur D. Levinson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Genentech, the most successful biotech company in the U.S., who serves on the corporate boards of Apple Computer and Google. Congratulations for the grant, I hope that valuable experiments will be backed by that. With stem cells too.
Link

Can partial immortalization be permissible to those who can buy it?

In the last philosophical-political section of Pimm I tried to delineate how to protect the right for partial immortalization when the costs of the treatment are extremely high. After it turned out that on the grounds of equal dignity it is hard to make the treatment impossible for those, who can afford it, the second question is: Can the continuous regeneration treatment called pimm be permissible to those who can buy it? The answer is yes, because the persons under treatment are moral persons, are not morally in a lower class. Being a moral person is a range property: a person is a moral person or not, there is not any hierarchical moral difference between moral persons. If the treatment would not be permitted to them, this would violate their right to self-determination, and their right to self-determination cannot be legitimately interfered with.

Considering the other 2 hypothetical cost stages of the treatment, when it is moderately expensive, and eventually cheap enough that the state can guarantee it for its citizens, our question about the permissibility do not rise at all, because during that 2 pimm will be an organic and decisive constituent of society.

Third question: could we justify the right for partial immortalization with instrumental premises?

image source

Patent trends in recent tissue engineering

In Nature Biotechnology 24, 1095 (2006) there is an interesting table made by Thomson Scientific Search Service about recent patent applications in tissue engineering. From that we can gain a picture of what is hot in current tissue engineering: popular organs, tissues, regeneration targets are skin, bone, cartilage, main problem is how to make 3D scaffolds with predetermined geometry, foam and matrices with proper stretch capacity and tensional strength, magnetic pole matrices for targeted drug delivery, new culture mediums, electronic devices like biosensors, microchips. For example Patent CN 1746295 is:
Competitors are: China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, USA, Germany.

Hematopoietic stem cell regulation: over the hedgehog?

Latest PNAS Early article by Stanford and McMaster researchers about the regulatory role of Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway in the balance between hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) homeostasis and regeneration in vivo. In brief: continued Hh activation during regeneration leads to HSC exhaustion. Link.

How to protect the right for pimm when the costs are extremely high?

Now we have the introduction into the basic language of rights, duties and moral persons, and set the 3 hypothetic cost stages of the continuous regeneration treatment called pimm. The probable course of introducing pimm treatment into the real world is this: first the costs will be very high, then moderately expensive, eventually cheap enough that the state can guarantee it for its citizens. I focus here only to the very costly situation, because we will face with that condition first in real, 3 dimensional life within risky circumstances. Life extension supporters must prepare for the problems, when only rich people can afford partial immortalization and must fit pimm into liberal democracy . When the costs are extremely high the first question is: does the principle of equal dignity require us to make the treatment impossible for those, who can afford it? The answer is no, it does not, because immortalized persons are rational moral persons too, and forbidding their participation in the treatment would degrade them as morally inferior ones.

Three more questions arise:

2., can the treatment be permissible to those who can buy it?

3., could we justify the right for partial immortalization with instrumental premises?

4., could we argue, that the right for partial immortalization is a human right?

image source

Conservative argument FOR life extension

Charles N. W. Keckler, a litigator and former law professor of Washington, D.C., tries to develop an argument for conservatives to support maximum life extension in TCS Daily. His main trick is to tell “revolutionary” change from “good, innovative” change, former opposed, later supported by conservatives.

“It is false that extending lifespan blunts innovation, except, perhaps, that of the “paradigm-shifting” sort. Conservatives are generally ambiguous about that sort of change, anyway. Therefore, I see no inconsistency in conservatives also seeking to preserve the true embodiments of the past, the repositories of wisdom and experience we ourselves will become if fate — and the federal government — let us.”
Link

Complete regeneration of sceletal muscle: how much work?

Complete regeneration of the muscular and skeletal system of an adult human body forms the crucial part of the pimm draft, let us take a look at the muscle world only. With 250 million skeletal muscle fibers in the body (give or take a few million), and about 420,000 motor neurons and calculating 100 trillion cells per adult human body, if we can continuously regenerate the whole sceletal musculature, then very roughly the 1/400 000 (10(14)/2.5×10(8)) part of partial imortalization job is done. Of course this number refers only to the quantitative cellular turnover level, but the whole muscular system regeneration is worth a much bigger portion of the work, if we consider the organ system level. As there are 12 major organ systems and muscular is one out of the 12, the output is 1/12 part of continuous regeneration treatment calculating that way. The real value could be somewhere between the 2 estimations, closer to the organ system calculation.

In future posts I will survey the role of bone marrow cells and satellite cells in sceletal muscle regeneration.

image source

Moral, instrumental, human rights: framework for pimm philosophy

In order to get new philosophical insights from the pimm thought experiment and to prepare well for the future, we have to set up a philosophical framework, so let us move to normative morality, and the concept of rights. Normative morality is referred here by Bernard Gert as a code of conduct that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents. One example of normative morality is the Egalitarian theory of human rights by János Kis (see the picture), my main source in this respect was the book called Do We Have Human Rights?, that was published in English at Budapest, AB Independent Publishers 1985. The core of this theory is the principle of equal dignity: humans, as moral persons, as the subjects of moral rights and obligations, are equal. Rights and duties are complementary concepts, when there is a concrete right of somebody then there must be a concrete duty of some persons matching to this right. In the literature, positive and negative rights are discriminated. In the case of negative rights, there are complementary negative duties regarding everybody. For example, the right to life requires that it is our duty not to kill any person who has the right to live. Concerning positive rights there are complementary positive duties regarding some people, for example someone’s right to medical treatment requires complementary duties of doctors and nurses to treat the patient. The other basic distinction lies between instrumental vs moral rights. The difference between instrumental and moral-restrictive rights is based on the way of justification of the rights. In the case of instrumental rights the moral principle with which we would like to justify the right put on an aim, and the right is introduced as the powerful instrument to realise this aim, for example the right to property was justified this way by the utilitarians. Talking about moral-restrictive rights, first, we refer to a distinctive ethical quality of the subject of law, and, second, we mark the upper limit of the permissible instruments against the subject of the law, fix the minimal moral standard of admissible treatment. It is worth mentioning that the same right could be justified with moral-restrictive and instrumental premises, too. Human rights are moral rights, and the distinctive ethical quality which deserves respect is related to the fact, that the subject of law is a human being. Human rights are changing, they depend on time and place, and their range is gradually broadening.

image source

Pimm in Korean language: 부분적인 immortalization

I found the Korean version of the Pimmblog at my stats panel, it was generated by the Google Translate First I did not even know it is in Korean, but with the help of this program I could figure it out that it is in fact in Korean. Although I have doubts whether the automated translation is able to catch the points in every detail, the whole thing is welcome. And now something completely connected: according to Google Trends Korean is the top language in the total number of searches done for the search term: biotechnology in Google.

Wiki possibilities for life (extension) sciences

Yesterday some friends and me organized a meeting where the speaker was the convincing Jimbo Wiki Wales, founder of Wikipedia. He told us about the overall wiki phenomena and his latest proposal the Campaigns Wikia website, which is about participatory politics made by web users and wiki software. I had a concrete campaign offer in July to support life extension and regenerative medicine. Not the last time, my thoughts went for LE during Jimbo’s talk and I saw a light (see the picture): what exactly can collaborative wiki software based communities do for sciences behind life extension? Do we have an existing community along those lines, which can build a collective knowledge-base around the topic? Although we have interesting and worthy wikisites in bioinformatics, like BioWiki and Wikiomics, one more step is needed: some real collaborative effort to collect all knowledge – medical biotech, molecular and cell biology, bioinformatics, IT, systems biology, traditional medicine… – that can become indispensable for life extension technologies. And presently, wiki is the best option to do that online.
expert community+ wiki software= knowledgebase for maximum life extension

Cool stuff: Wiki edited Wired article about the wiki phenomena beyond Wikipedia: Veni, Vidi, Wiki.

Meditating on the extension of life by Sunday Times: good old confusions

Another day, another mainstream media attention to life extension in general and on a large scale: Minette Marrin philosophizes on aging aging anti-aging. Logical extension of the previous BBC News piece mainly in its blurry points. It is risky to confuse the attempt to technologically eliminate ageing related problems with the desire to eliminate death related problems. See the critics below. Suppose we are partially immortalized: In that case we could die in all the known forms of external death except only the internal causes of death through ageing and chronic diseases. For example, a partially immortalized person could die in a car accident, could be stabbed by a knife, or shot by a gun, a nuclear weapon …and she could commit suicide with these means. She could also die in an acute disease, in hepatitis, virus infection, kidney failure, liver cyrhosis, or a stroke…. She could die tragically, heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly… Whatever you want dear death-is-the-only-thing-that-can-give-meaning-to-life believers. Old intuitions just won’t live up to expectations.