For me it is important to introduce here people with different professional background who are life extensionists, but being a biotech blogger I would like to focus more on life scientists, stem cell researchers, biologists, biotechnologists, medical doctors, since they (we) are the ones who have a chance to realize any little piece of life extension technologically. In my opinion this is the stable way to make life extension acceptable in front of decision makers and the public. So I’ll continue the interviews, try to evoke mature scientists, and try to be more and more disciplinal except when I am not.
I am in Budapest again from December 23. The Cambridge months were extremely useful from a scientific point of view. (You can hunt down my 2 AA batteries on the photo)
Forget about governmental funds for a minute. According to you which companies have the chance to develop an indefinite life extension technology? Let us assume that even today there exists a company, or a predecessor of it which can eventually realize indefinite LE and customize it. Will it be a biotech company, like Genentech, Geron, ACT, or a big pharma, like Eli Lilly or an IT Giant from the other high tech sector, like Google? What are the institutional, financial, human conditions that must be suffice for that task?
Doing my first PCR (polymerase chain reaction) in this millenium, last time it happened to me in 1999. From 2003 I am in stem cell biology and with the exception of some nitric oxide intermezzo I’ve met directly only with mitochondria and cells, not with individual molecules and now eventually I can connect these levels. Not much changed in the setup since the 90s and if you did that many times it is stored in your hardware.
Is is easy to realize on a conference when you are hearing a good talk. The audience starts to take notes and gets focused. That happened today during Austin Smith’s talk (look at Day 1 picture). Straightforward, not overcomplicated line of thought presented by easily conceivable, step by step slides, and hardcore science (facts). These are the elements of a compelling scientific argument. Starting with a dogma, which is that the default in vitro state of embryonic stem cells without any additional factor is neural differentiation, attacking this dogma through carefully executed independent experiments, and proposing a replacement claim: in the case of culture grown hESCs self-renewal is the default state. The “neural commitment by default” is a constructive dogma anyway, it can give rise to nice hypotheses because it captures the imagination with its counterintuitive offer: undifferentiated, pluripotent, self-renewing cells become neural type of cells in normal simple medium by themselves, although neurons are one of the most specialized cell type of the human body, and the nerve system is a young organ system measured on the scale of philogenesis.
Another fruit of the talk for me was meeting with the term “stiff upper lip“. Thanks, Hannah.
Best talk point goes to Allan Bradley, Martin Evans‘ disciple – in science these genealogical tales really matter – who summarized Evans’ tuition in a short form: ambition, independence, invention.
At the poster session I got many valuable and useful comments from my fellow colleagues, thanks for that.
Now I start to answer my blogterview questions concerning life extension. Here is the first:
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? since the age of 15. I started my first offline diary at that age with a sentence something like this: I have eventually find the aim and meaning of my life which is the extension of human life, understanding the aging process and eliminating aging-related problems. The key for that is in mitochondrial DNA mutations, which must be reversed, here is an idea how..followed by some childish argumentoid how to repair them. And I have a sharp memory about the formulation of the argument that led me to this “aim” conclusion: I, A.Cs. would like to become a good scientist, but I need 50 years for biology, 50 years for physics, 50 years for mathematics and so on…and the only way to achieve this is not concurrently but consecutively, so I need more time, a lot much more than my evolutionarily fixed biology allows me to expect. (Of course today, if I had the chance to live as long as I can, I would prefer to become a little more than a pure scientist, say 50 years for web technology, 15 years for journalism, 15 years for travelling, 20 years for playing go …any way I can fully develop my own capacities, abilities let it be mental, physical, or moral. The list is mildly determined by Zeitgeist.) Next thought was to extend the range of this possibility to family members, friends…and people all over the world, because everybody has the right to live as long as they can. Oh yeah, this business is about eliminating ageing, get enough time to explore individuality and has nothing to do with eliminating death once and for all. I don’t want to become a wholly immortal person, and my motivation was not exactly the childhood fear of death and dying.
In the early 90s, when I was a school boy, the most exciting buzzword in life sciences was molecular biology, not stem cell resesarch nor whole genomes or omics or system biology. My definite professional motivation traces its roots back to a Scientific American article with the name (for me it was in Hungarian) Sense and nonsense DNA. The basics of molecular biology (replication-transcription-translation) were crystal clear and well established and conceivable at the first sight for a teen, and the aesthetic simplicity behind it was amazingly attractive. So I decided to become not a medical doctor but a molecular biologist. Read the rest of this entry »
1. Bloggers met with Bill Gates, one question and answer was:
Q) What would you be looking at today if you were an independent entrepreneur?
A) Something dramatic like artificial intelligence. Biology. Energy. Link
2. Aaron Swartz on Google childish simplexity: “Everyone I know who works there either acts childish (the army of programmers), enthusiastically adolescent (their managers and overseers), or else is deeply cynical (the hot-shot programmers). But as much as they may want to leave Google, the infantilizing tactics have worked: they’re afraid they wouldn’t be able to survive anywhere else.” Link via Dentonite
3. Sergey Brin on Apple simplicity in December Business 2.0: “…simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. … Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.” Link via regularly buying the magazine offline
Kevin Dewalt, who was blogterviewed by me on his life extension centered life, started his personal blog this week. Excerpts from Kevin’s last post inspired by a lunch with David Gobel, founder and CEO of the Methuselah Foundation: ” The easiest way to simplify something is to look for a reason why it “won’t work”. It is easy to fall into this trap when evaluating potential start-up ideas and find all of the reasons why something won’t work. Here I was in the company of someone who was pursuing perhaps the greatest human endeavor in history. Against all odds and critics, David Gobel was trying to defeat age-related diseases and turn back the aging clock for all of us in our lifetime. I mean no disrespect to the other great human accomplishments, but does anyone know of another pursuit which measures up to this level of challenge and importance? Wallking on the moon? Discovery of DNA? Theory of Evolution? In any case, can you imagine how many people have told David Gobel that his outlandish idea “won’t work”?”
Rather than jumping to reasons why something “won’t work”, I’m going to focus on the problem and the vision.
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, a movie-long effective presentation on climate change and crisis has made him the chief environmental evangelist of U.S. Incorporation. (I liked that he is doing his Keynotes himself, my Apps.) Now I have a better offer for Al Gore: be the first networking-presentation man of healthy life extension and an official aging crisis oracle. The facts are given, and the truth is unfortunately more inconvenient, specially from the mouth of a Baby Boomer. More inconvenient because unlike weather it is something that concerns our very physical make-up. But the technologies are within range.
Here is a not very well known Al Gore documentary made by Spike Jonze himself. Part 1:
18-19, December, Babbage Lecture Theatre, Cambridge: Opening Symposium including “A celebration of 25 years of embryonic stem cell research in Cambridge” From the intro: In 1981 two papers appeared that reported the derivation of pluripotent stem cell lines from cultured mouse embryos (1, 2). Now called embryonic stem (ES) cells, they have since transformed research in mammalian development, genetics, stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. Program here. I’ll have a poster there. The 2 papers:
Evans, M. J. & Kaufman, M. H. Establishment in culture of pluripotential cells from mouse embryos. Nature 292, 154-6. (1981).
Martin, G. R. Isolation of a pluripotent cell line from early mouse embryos cultured in medium conditioned by teratocarcinoma stem cells. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 78, 7634-7638 (1981).
In the 15th, December Cell issue Kuo et al. published a study according to which “mice whose brains were severely damaged by loss of the genes “Numb” and “Numblike” in one region just after birth showed substantial mending within weeks. The researchers attributed that repair to neural stem cell “escapees” that had somehow retained or restored the genes’ activity and, with it, their regenerative potential.” Effectively a big brain hole was largely repaired. The finding casts a light on the amplification of the neural plascticity in the subventricular zone stem cell niche. Here you can read the abstract.
The trendy cancer stem cell theory highlights that there is a functional hierarchy between different tumour cells and only a small portion, the so called cancer stem cells have crucial role in initiating tumour growth. This assumption was confirmed in the case of blood, breast and brain for example. Based on that a new therapeutic approach of cancer is delineated which can induce differentiation of tumour cells rather then killing them. Indeed a very natural and useful stem cell targeted therapy by concept: redifferentiate cancer stem cells into harmless and in some cases useful functional tissue cells. I call it the concept of cancer regenerative medicine: redifferentiateall the tumour initiating cancer stem cells in a patient into functional tissue and organ cells. In Nature, 7 December Issue Piccirillo et al. addressed the question whether the stem-like tumour initiating cell subpopulation of a glioblastoma, marked with a specific antigen, CD 133+ can be differentiated with Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP) into a functional type of brain cells? Ok, vocabulary first: glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common adult malignant brain tumour, CD133+ is a neural precursor cell marker and the members of the BMP family make neural precursor cells differentiatie into mature astrocytes, glial cells. So the lab guys were dissociating solid tumour samples into single-cell suspensions and were testing their response to BMP.The large picture is that BMP treatment (specially BMP4) reduced cancer cell proliferation, induced astrocyte-like differentiation, effectively blocks the tumour growth and prolonges survival.Read the rest of this entry »
“Allowing research into the medical uses of adult stem cells, but not embryonic stem cells, is the equivalent of sending astronauts to work on the international space station with a single tool” according to Dr. Geoffrey Lomax, senior officer for medical and ethical standards of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, running California’s $3 billion stem cell research program. Link
Well, if we ever would like to use stem cell therapy to extend healthy lifespan through continuous regeneration of every organ and tissue we have to use probably all available forms and sources of stem cells.
2 unintended consequences of stem cell research via Lomax’s MIIS talk yesterday:
i.,Improved therapeutic techniques can drive medical costs up, because all patients will want the new, expensive cures.
ii.,Intellectual property questions have arisen over who or what agency “owns” the fruits of stem cell research financed by the taxpayers.
Yesterday I was at the Eagle by accident with András and Krisztián, and a Cold Guinness, an Abbot Ale (Aubrey’s favourite), an Old Speckled Hen… Then suddenly my iSight saw this:
Maximum life extension is deeply in your mind, people, on the search level and on the intention level too. The old school term, anti-aging also got 5,470,000 results. And the term ‘longevity’ is the most popular on the market: 16,800,000 results. With GoogleFight. Just do it.
Finally a journalist at Wired, Brandon Keim thought it’s time to check out some facts and formulate real arguments in the embryonic stem cell funding debate instead of boondoggling. He has collected good historical examples of long-term funding in drug research, which then saved many lives, like Taxol, and has enumerated fields of promising science, like proteomics, gene therapy and nanotechnology which are heavily donated with hundreds of millions of dollars by federal government, although as unproven yet as regenerative medicine based on embryonic stells. Thank you Brandon it is really wired. Link
“A favorite argument as to why the federal government should not fund embryonic stem cell research is that the science is unproven. It has not led to any cures or FDA-approved treatments. That happens to be true. But that doesn’t make it a good argument. In fact, most of the science funded by the federal government is not successful yet, since proven science doesn’t usually need funding.”
Links I enjoyed recently all from mainstream media:
San Fransisco Chronicle: THE LOST TAPES Conversations tape-recorded in the early years with Google’s founders illuminate how their actions forged the growth of a Silicon Valley giant via Philipp Lenssen’s blog.
San Fransisco Chronicle: Question: What other names were considered? Sergey Brin: I think the previous contender to that was called the “Whatbox,” which would have been OK. But then we decided that “Whatbox” sounded like “Wetbox,” which sounded like some kind of a porn site or something, and we decided to stay away from that. Actually the old version of the system was called Backrub. That was because our technology had to do with looking at the link structure of the Web and looking at the backlinks — which pages link to what pages. So Backrub was sort of an immature technology and we turned the idea of looking at backlinks into a search engine.Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve worked all day and still have some commitments with my stemy cells, you know feed ‘em, split ‘em, torture’ em, and voyeur ‘em so this is a weekend on session. Tomorrow is the same, I am adapted to this lifestyle and my girlfriend is tolerant blissfully. Left you can see my first rat fibroblast cells followed by confocal laser microscopy, which produce the green fluorescent protein, isolated from jellyfish. GFP’s role is to transduce the blue chemiluminescence of the protein aequorin into green fluorescent light. Fluorescent spectra of GFP and additional information is here. It is a big thing in biology, that now we also have stable green rat cell lines, not just mouse, zebrafish, drosophila,… If you search for the term “GFP rat fibroblast” in BioMed-Search, similar and better pictures will occur. Now go back to the tissue culture room, CU later.
I am more and more surprised on how journalists are verbalizing the $6 billion California Stem Cell Situation. On the one hand California Institute of Regenerative Medicine has just got the first big, $181 million fundin state and private loans to scientists for realizing embryonic stem cell research out of the promised billions called Proposition 71 initiative but on the other hand journalists have already started to talk about boondoggling, $3 billion jug of snake oil and cash-starved scientists. Now we are sitting in the middle of the under simplified and over-conceptualized Bubbleboom concerning public opinion on the stem cell happenings at the West Coast.
Disclosure: According to WikipediaBoondoggle is a North American term which has come to refer to the performance of useless or trivial tasks while appearing to be doing something important. In the United States, the key feature of this “art” is the waste of time and/or money involved. In Canada, however, the term has come to mean, more specifically, a government scandal involving the wasting or misallocation of public funds causing a project to be well over-budget, frequently more than double or triple the original cost.
John Schloendorn has a master’s degree in biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Currently he is a graduate student at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, USA. John is heavily involved in the LysoSENS project of the Methuselah Foundation, which aims to remove some intracellular waste products for example via microbe-derived hydrolases targeted to the lysosome. Yes, this is the aubreyesque way of thinking on and experimenting with life extension.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? Since I first learnt that everyone was going to fall apart brutally, it was my goal to help with fixing aging somehow. To do that I needed to learn as much about aging as possible, and also needed to learn what everyone in the field was doing, so it seemed straightforward enough to study biochemistry. By the time my graduation came closer, Aubrey was running around, telling everyone he had a plan to fix aging. The plan seemed to make sense (true to its name), or at least it seemed like by far the best plan I could find. So I contacted him a lot over the web, eventually met him and volunteered to do some basic proof-of-concept’ing of some of his ideas. LysoSENS seemed like the fastest way to do that, it had already taken some baby steps thanks to Mark Hamalainen whom you interviewed recently, and there was enough Foundation money to keep it going. One can hardly hit upon a more fortunate situation.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension?LysoSENS by itself is meant to address only parts of the age-related damage we accumulate. Magically achieving all LysoSENS goals would not extend life greatly, because other exponentially rising causes of death should rapidly take over, most importantly cancer. Thus, LysoSENS by itself would presumably count as moderate life extension.Read the rest of this entry »
Probably you people in life sciences and biomedical fields with open eyes to current academic and advanced web developments (like BioMed Search and JovE) have happened to meet and try sometimes Google Scholar, Google’s own scholarly search engine, leaving PubMed for a moment behind. Now here is an interview with Scholar’s founding engineer, Anurag Acharya on the story, aim and progress of Scholar:
“Can you tell us something about how Google Scholar came about?
Alex Verstak and I used to work on building Google’s web index. This was very hectic work and after several years of it, the two of us took a break — a sabbatical of sorts — for a few months. Google Scholar came out of that sabbatical. I had already been working on including scholarly literature in Google’s index. For the sabbatical, we worked on improving indexing, automatically extracting metadata and ranking for scholarly literature. Our hope was to weave this information into Google web search. But “there’s many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip.” A working demo we sent out internally became popular and Google Scholar was born.Read the rest of this entry »
spacetime coordinates: 6.00 pm Wednesday 13th December 2006, King’s College London, Guy’s Hospital Campus at London Bridge, London SE1. REGISTRATION IS FREE. Link (funny, Apple-type site)
AGENDA:
18.00 – Registration + networking over tea and coffee
18.30 – Welcome – Dr. Stephen Minger (KCL) – Co-organiser – LRMN
18.35 – “Retinal repair by transplantation of photoreceptor precursors: implications for stem cell therapy” – Prof. Robin Ali – Institute of Ophthalmology/Moorfields Eye Hospital
19.05 – “Tissue Engineering: Great Expectations” – Prof. Michael Lysaght – Brown University, RI, USA and President-Elect of the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs
19.35 – “Development of human embryonic stem cell technology for human therapeutic application” – Dr. Anthony Davies, Geron Corporation, CA, USA
20.05 – Closing remarks – Chris Mason (UCL) – Co-organiser – LRMN
Check out the brand new BioMed Search, it is fantastic, currently over 1 million images have been indexed from peer-review journals in biomedical fields and more is on its way. BioMed Search has been created by Alex Ksikes, currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science with focus in Computational Learning Theory at the University of Cambridge (good town, good to be here). The About says: “The goal of BioMed search is to organize figures, images or schema found in biomedical articles. BioMed Search indexes image captions along with the citations to these images. “ Pictures can be seen with full and thumbnail view. Recent Searches, my favourite, show terms recently searched for, with which you can catch research trends. If the number of users grew exponentially, a digg-like real-time spy could spectacularly dinamise the site.
With BioMed Search you can search for general terms like mitochondria, phrases like “proteomics”, search in the title of the articles only for “Mfn1″, get images from an article with a concrete PMID (PubMed Identifier), find images authored by “Nicholls”, limit results to content from a specific year date:1996 (actually just from 1996 presently), and limit search to a specific journal. And this is just by default.
Young science people with an entrepreneurial spirit full of diy hacker skills backed by current web technologies, like Alex Ksikes, who is a real coder, and Moshe Pritsker, biologist, founder of Journal of Visualized Experiments make filtered academic information instantly and easily accessible. And so academic scholar science becomes not just updated, but simply …cool.
Thoughtful short piece on the new science video experiment site JoVE in The Scientist blog by Brendan Maher: “Videos like this could cut down troubleshooting time considerably. Moreover, there’s a great opportunity to create some new science stars. Who, after all, doesn’t have a running commentary going through their head as they run through the little tricks that make their experiments work sublimely? Now you can find an audience.” Link
Scientists, scholars in the lab: let us video bioDIY!
A question today for every maximum or indefinite life extensionist: Are you a 100% lifelong life-extensionist? Can you imagine that for thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years you are equally committed to continue your life in your present physical make-up with the help of a more and more perfect life extension technology? This question catches the somewhat paradox nature of being an indefinite life extensionist in every decisive moment of your coming life. Or the term ‘lifelong’ cannot be interpreted properly, when the concrete human life in question is indefinitely elongatable? I think we can gain slightly different answers formulating the question this way, then to ask: what is or could be the meaning of an indefinite life?
Without any doubt the commitment is not worth a dime.
I tried to explain to my girlfriend the historical recipe of discovering the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 3 shots. Place: in front of the blue paque outside Eagle Pub near old Cavendish, Cambridge, UK. (For me, iMovie is not as intuitive without the Help, which explains the poor quality.)
From the annotated version of the Watson and Crick paper: “Their competitive spirit drove them to work quickly, and it undoubtedly helped them succeed in their quest. Watson and Crick’s rapport led them to speedy insights as well. They incessantly discussed the problem, bouncing ideas off one another. This was especially helpful because each one was inspired by different evidence. When the visually sensitive Watson, for example, saw a cross-shaped pattern of spots in an X-ray photograph of DNA, he knew DNA had to be a double helix. From data on the symmetry of DNA crystals, Crick, an expert in crystal structure, saw that DNA’s two chains run in opposite directions.”
Mark Hamalainen is a young PhD student at Cambridge University at the mitochondrion lab of Ian Holt. Mark received a Bachelor of Science Honours degree in biochemistry and computing from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He also had research training as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University. Mark’s research project is MitoSENS, the artificial transfer of mitochondrial genes to the nucleus in order to defend mitohondrial DNA from the high mutation rate. The technical difficulties of such a project are characterized in this article. The idea generator behind is Aubrey de Grey. I met Mark yesterday at the Eagle Pub and we had a very nice conversation on life extension technologies, strategies and philosophies.
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? From a very early age (before I can even remember for myself, my family has informed me indirectly), I’ve had a strong fear of death and love of life. Later on, I discovered science fiction and realized that other people had ideas about overcoming death. In high school I began investigating how close science was to implementing life
extension, first in popular non-fiction books, then in scientific journals. This search inevitibly led me to the work of Aubrey de Grey, and shortly thereafter I became involved with SENS research for the Methuselah Foundation.
2. Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension? Maximum. Though I prefer the term ‘indefinite’.Read the rest of this entry »
1. Bloggers met with Bill Gates, one question and answer was:
and useful stem cell targeted therapy by concept: redifferentiate cancer stem cells into harmless and in some cases useful functional tissue cells. I call it 
Links I enjoyed recently all from mainstream media:
I’ve worked all day and still have some commitments with my stemy cells, you know feed ‘em, split ‘em, torture’ em, and 
John Schloendorn has a master’s degree in biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. Currently he is a graduate student at Arizona State University’s 
Check out the brand new 
in the title of the articles only for “Mfn1″, get images from an article with a concrete 
Mark Hamalainen is a young PhD student at Cambridge University at the mitochondrion lab of 