rather full than semi RT @ericsuh wonder if 5 yrs ago anyone imagined that Apple&Google would be referred to semi-regularly as"competitors" 2 hours ago
still don't know which will be the 1st fiction/complete book I'll actually finish on Stanza/iPhone: Makers or Red Mars, probably former 3 hours ago
During my #singularityu Silicon Valley months last year I saw n=1 person w/ a Palm Pre who was really proud of that gadget,1 app especially 3 hours ago
In the unique state of California there is now an offer for individuals to place orders from October 3 during a $250 million sale of state debt to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The minimum bet is $5,000 and over 1 million you need special permission (just like buying more than 2 iPhones in the early days). That is unique. But wait…
“Of the $250 million issuance, $200 million will fund stem cell research and roughly $45 million will cover the cost of issuing the debt and retiring bond anticipation notes sold while the stem-cell measure was being contested in court.”
It’s Friday so the web is going to sleep for the weekend, but here is one more opinion on life extension, in this case the opinion of Arthur Caplan chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, and columnist on bioethics for MSNBC:
Source: TechJournal South (I’ve never heard of it before and not sure about its bias, if there’s any)
Caplan says the question of whether or not modern science and medicine should extend our lives and enhance our capabilities is going to be “the battleground of the next ten years and even of the 21st century.” He noted that while some may ask, what’s wrong with living forever, repairing damaged organs, or fixing genes, a lot of people and organizations from the left and right of the political spectrum oppose these advances.
My question: Exactly who are these guys from the left and from the right and what are their aims?
“Is it really unnatural to seek a longer better life, as critics argue?” Caplan asked. He pointed out that there is really nothing natural about a 70 or 75-year average lifespan. Read the rest of this entry »
Similarly to the Edmonton Aging Symposium which reportedly “was a WORLD FIRST! in being streamed live onto the internet” (Kevin Perrott) amongst conferences, a selection of the presentations of the SENS3 conference are now available at the personal website of Richard Schueler. Richard is a big mouthed, cowboy hat geek with a serious life extension commitment who orchestrated the Kurzweil distance video talk on his sony tx and logitech webcam at the conference.
Google’s Palimpsest project, once realized (in the near future) has the potential to change the way science is done by accepting gigantic (raw?) data sets from all disciplines and making them open and free (including dark data?). Jon Trowbridge from Google Inc. had a presentation on SciFoo, 2007 at the Googleplex not documented well, but you can download his slides on the project that was presented at XTech 2007 in Paris, this May: Making Massive Datasets Universally Accessible and Useful Presentation. You are not restricted to the zip file as Jon kindly gave a permission to publish his slides with SlideShare here. From his intro: This talk will discuss a project underway at Google to collect and distribute large scientific datasets using a 21st century “Sneakernet”: multi-terabyte disk arrays shipped via FedEx and other common carriers. The project is strictly non-profit, but fits well with Google’s mission.
Positive, published scientific data form the tip of the iceberg of any scientific data produced in labs. As at least 90% (my guess) of all experiments are failed or lead to negative results, those data sets become “dark data“. But those dark data are as important for making science happen as positive data and this information must be free – argues Thomas Goetz Wired’s deputy editor (and another SciFoo camper) in an opinionated piece in the October issue of Wired (available only offline at this moment, update: it is now online), called Mind the gaps. The idea is to push open access science to its limits.
“Liberating dark data makes many scientists deeply uncomfortable, because it calls for them to reveal their “failures”. But in this data-intense age, those apparent dead ends could be more important than the breakthroughs….Your dead end may be another scientist’s missing link. Freeing up dark data could represent one of the biggest boons to research in decades, fueling advances in genetics, neuroscience, and biotech.”
“Advocating the release of dark data is one thing, but it’s quite another to actually collect it, juggling different formats and standards. There’s the issue of storage….Google, among others, is lending a hand with its Palimpsest project, offering to store and share monster-size data sets (making the data searchable isn’t part of the effort.)”
Stop for a minute! The Palimpsest project was entertainingly presented at SciFoo by Jon Trowbridge (my iPhone shot of one his slide published here with Jon’s permission) and my guess is that this presentation is the source of Thomas Goetz’s sentence. I tried to make a hint of this project in my SciFoo Camp, 2007: data (Google) publishing (Nature) geeks (O’Reilly) post:
“scientific data”
One of the most frequently used key term was “scientific data”. And the question is: how to collect, upload, organize and index them. With the exponentially increasing data sets, that are produced by scientists worldwide, it is obvious that we need really powerful tools to benefit them. After a couple of beta years it is highly probable that Google (according to its mission statement) will offer new ways to manage the enormous amount of valuable scientific data. Without that, the efficiency of the science industry will dramatically decline.
Here is my favorite part out Goetz’s article about the science culture problem of freeing dark data:
“If their research is successful, many academics guard their data like Gollum, wringing all the publication opportunities they can out of it over years. If the research doesn’t pan out, there’s strong incentive to move on ASAP, and a disincentive to linger in eddies that may not advance one’s job prospects.”
Wait for a sec! During the summer I did 2 experiments that failed (=negative data), but then I explored in the literature why I exactly failed and now this knowledge and insight presumably will lead me to successful experiments. Read the rest of this entry »
A major cause of cell death caused by genotoxic stress is thought to be due to the depletion of NAD+ from the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Here we show that NAD+ levels in mitochondria remain at physiological levels following genotoxic stress and can maintain cell viability even when nuclear and cytoplasmic pools of NAD+ are depleted. Rodents fasted for 48 hr show increased levels of the NAD+ biosynthetic enzyme Nampt and a concomitant increase in mitochondrial NAD+. Increased Nampt provides protection against cell death and requires an intact mitochondrial NAD+ salvage pathway as well as the mitochondrial NAD+-dependent deacetylases SIRT3 and SIRT4. We discuss the relevance of these findings to understanding how nutrition modulates physiology and to the evolution of apoptosis.
Researchers report in the journal Cell that the phenom is likely linked to two enzymes—SIRT3 and SIRT4—in mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse that, among other tasks, converts nutrients to energy). They found that a cascade of reactions triggered by lower caloric intake raises the levels of these enzymes, leading to an increase in the strength and efficiency of the cellular batteries. By invigorating the mitochondria, SIRT3 and SIRT4 extend the life of cells, by preventing flagging mitochondria from developing tiny holes (or pores) in their membranes that allow proteins that trigger apoptosis, or cell death, to seep out into the rest of the cell.
“We didn’t expect that the most important part of this pathway was in the mitochondria,” says David Sinclair, an assistant professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and a study co-author. “We think that we’ve possibly found regulators of aging.”
Sinclair says his bravado and drive come from his grandmother Vera, who fled to Australia in the wake of the failed 1956 revolution in her native Hungary. Her son, David’s father, changed the family name from Szigeti. “My grandmother is the black-sheep rebel of the family,” he says. “She gave birth to my dad at age 15 in 1939 – imagine the scandal then – and has lived with natives in New Guinea and eaten human flesh,among other things. She once got in trouble with the police for being the first person to wear a bikini on a Sydney beach. She’s a 60s bohemian who helped raise me and taught me how to think differently and question dogma.”
For me, it was on SENS3, the presentation of Anun Hallen, who blamed only extracellular crosslinks (e.g. advanced glycation end products) for ageing. It was not the best presentation I’ve ever seen, I can tell ya. (I heard once, that there was a high school science contest in the 80’s with an overhead projector only as a presentation tool, and there was one nerd participant with only a floppy disk to present his data, so he put the disk on the overhead projector to visualize)
Instead of picking three individual blogs, I’d like to mention three topic-related branches of blogs or blog aggregators, referring this way to many individual bloggers and a larger amount of information and information filters. This approach follows from my blog reading habit as my starting point for blogs and all web related science and technology things, are the web sites that could be reached through RSS feeds using a feed reader, which is Google Reader, in my case.
The groups are: a) science blogs written by scientists, b) science related blogs written by journalists and editors, and c) technology and web related blogs written by “alpha geeks and early adopters.” Read the rest of this entry »
Linda Powers is the managing director and co-founder of Toucan Capital Corp, a $120 million venture capital fund (SBIC) focused on seed and early-stage life science and advanced technology investments (the fund markets itself as the The Leading US Investor in Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine). Out of here insights and facts presented on the SENS3 conference (I caught some of her slides with my iPhone, see below) I’d like to highlight the following ones:
- the anti-aging market today is approx. 42 billion dollars,
- the number of issued and published U.S. stem cell patents has been decreased for the first time since 2000 compared to the earlier year,
- viable business models in regenerative medicine are still missing,
- first-to-trial and -market is not always advantageous in regmed.
If you compare the Nature and the Science front pages (which is not the topic of the current post) you can notice a big difference: there are a lot of “web 2.0″ish fresh features on the Nature site while significantly fewer on the Science counterpart. Now Science came up with a new, less academic and more popculture driven (the name is telling) column, The Gonzo Scientist written and edited by John Bohannon, regular Science contributor. Bohannon writes and even audioslides (illustrations by Katrien Kolenberg) about his experience in IdeaCity.
IdeaCity is Canada’s premier geek summer camp in Toronto, and was modeled after the TED conferences. Now my synonym for the geek camp is SciFoo, but there is a big difference here: IdeaCity is free only for the 50 invited celeb speakers, while it is $3000 for the 3 days for every other visiting Idealists.
A supercentenarian is anyone with the chronological age of 110 years or older. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group kindly sent me his slides of the presentation he held last week on SENS3 entitled the Secrets of the oldest old and he gave a permission to publish these slides here in the form of a slideshow. The readers can now gain now some scholarly insights on what it is to be a supercentenarian. I cut out the autopsy slides (1 week after death) showing the pretty healthy organs (brain, liver, spinal cord, heart…) of the recently died 106 yo centenarian but all slides can be viewed at the GRG homepage (click Resources). Long live the 75 validated supercentenarians and all the unvalidated ones!
Rutledge Ellis-Behnke from M.I.T. talked on “a nano hemostatic agent that immediately stops bleeding. Hemostasis is a major problem after trauma and during surgery; as much as 50% of surgical time can be spent packing wounds to reduce or control bleeding and there are few effective methods to stop it without causing secondary damage. We show that hemostasis can be achieved in less than 15 seconds, in multiple tissues as well as a variety of different wounds, using a self-assembling peptide, demonstrating the first time that nanotechnology has been used to stop bleeding in a surgical setting for animal models that does not rely on heat, pressure, platelet activation, adhesion, or desiccation to stop bleeding.” The video he showed us was pretty convincing.
Embedded on the slideshow below 9 slides of Michael Rose’s presentation called Slowing and then stopping aging on the SENS3 conference on the 9th of September. (Photos made by me with the iPhone.) Rose’s argument was: Aubrey de Grey’s original SENS proposal is based on the non-evolutionary assumption that aging is a process of accumulating damage, while according to the evolutionary SENS version of Rose aging should be interpreted as a loss of adaption. The script is: breed mice with delayed reproduction over multiple generations (let evolution by natural selection give us the answer of how to build a long-lived animal), and then reverse engineer this answer to develop anti-aging therapies for genetically unaltered humans. The experimental basis of this proposal: Rose’s own ancient experiments with fruit flies (sorry, no reference yet, that’s what I’ve heard) showed that there is a plateau in mortality rates after many generations of breeded Drosophilas with delayed reproduction time which leads to the cessation of the aging process.
Does this method sound as one that gives us a complete engineering toolkit to achieve robust healthy life extension for early generations of humans under the reverse engineered treatment?
Michael Rose had a nice presentation (I’ll cover it in my next post) on SENS3, here is just one slide from that, photo made with iPhone from the first row:
The edited version of Pimm’s January 30th, 2007 post How to filter and read PubMed articles through RSS feeds? was published in The Summer 2007 issue of Nurture, the magazine for past and present Nature journal authors. According to Maxine Clarke, Nurture editor: The Summer 2007 Issue of Nurture celebrates our blossoming “science 2.0″ activities, which invite authors and reviewers to participate with Nature Publishing Group in an interactive, global scientific community. Indeed, there are quick intros to Nature Precedings, Nature Network London, Nature Report Stem Cells, Scintilla, but besides that my favourite reading are the personal editor and author profiles. (On the cover of Nurture you can find one of my confocal microscopy pictures out of the Nature Precedings poster.)
Well, I’ve lost the first part of this MacBook made iSight video as I used the iMovie file’s backup version on my Windows partition but out of this segment of the talk you can form some idea on what was going on during Kurzweil’s talk. The distance talk was orchestrated from a little Sony laptop by Richard Schueler. As Kurzweil’s friend Terry Grossman (they together wrote the book the Fantastic Voyage) informed me, Ray does not really like to leave the United States. Anyway, his talk was not typical, the conference was basically a biology-biotechnology conference with an amazingly broad range of the topics, covered.
says Steve Coles in his short presentation, Secrets of the oldest old. They found healthy sperms in the testis of a recently died 106 year old Californian.
I am off to Cambridge to the SENS3 conference. The New Orleans – Washington – Heathrow London – Cambridge trip is about 16 hours from house to house. I’ll be based at Pembroke College. The picture was made by Anna last year in Cambridge at the steps of the old Cavendish Laboratory Building on Free School Lane, near to the Eagle Pub.
The immortal strand hypothesis captures stem cell scientists’ imagination these days. According to Thomas Rando The immortal strand hypothesis posits that the propensity of stem cell compartments to give rise to cancer in later life can be minimized if stem cells, during the process of self-renewal, retain those DNA strands with the fewest mutations acquired during DNA replication. Key concepts of biology are connected by the hypothesis: stem cells, cancer, aging, symmetric and asymetric cell division, DNA replication and replication-induced mutations.
At the SENS3 conference Mike Conboy from Berkeley, who is a former postdoc of Thomas Rando at Stanford gives us some muscle regeneration related data concerning the hypothesis:
Department of Bioengineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA
Before cells divide, they duplicate macromolecules and organelles. When they divide, sometimes they sort the older versus newer “parts” to the daughter cells. Over 35 years ago Cairns proposed the “Immortal DNA Strand hypothesis”, where the stem daughter cell might retain the older or more “original” strands of DNA and thus limit accumulating errors of replication, while continuing to proliferate for the life of an organism. Originally based on observations in animal and plant cells, this hypothesis has remained largely unknown or unaccepted because of few additional reports, relatively few cells displaying template strand segregation and alternate interpretations of the data. We used sequential pulses of different thymidine analogs to label DNA strands of different ages in the cells in regenerating muscle, in vivo. We observed extraordinarily high frequencies of cells segregating older versus younger DNA to the daughter cells. Furthermore, this DNA inheritance asymmetry correlated with asymmetric cell divisions yielding daughters with divergent fates. Daughter cells inheriting the older templates exhibited a stem-like immature phenotype, whereas daughters inheriting the newer templates showed a more differentiated phenotype. These data provide compelling evidence of the Immortal DNA phenomenon in muscle regeneration and suggest that it may be more common in stem cell self-renewal than previously assumed. We propose that the Immortal DNA hypothesis be revisited as pertains to aging, cancer and development, and suggest implications for the SENS.
Help me to collect the list of art illustrations that are frequently used and overused by scientists on their slides either as background or as an analogy for some biological or other scientific phenomenon! The first one is the “Fons Juventutis” (“Fountain of Youth“) and now quickly switch to wikipedian composed by Cranach, executed by his son, a picture in which hags are seen entering a Renaissance fountain, and are received as they issue from it with all the charms of youth by knights and pages. Scientists are used to illustrate their stem cell and regmed related presentation with the Fountain of Youth and I guess the concept they have in mind in doing so is rejuvenation, or on the cellular level, dedifferentiation.
J. Schloendorn, M. Hamalainen, S.K. Kemmish, L. Jiang, J. Rebo, B. Turner, B.E. Rittmann
Center for Environmental Biotechnology, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, 1001 South McAllister Ave., Tempe, AZ 85287-5701, USA
Medical bioremediation is the proposal to utilize the catabolic diversity of environmental microbes to treat all conditions associated to catabolic insufficiency in aging humans. Here we report on our progress towards medical bioremediation. We have isolated several bacteria degrading 7-ketocholesterol and other oxysterols implicated in atherosclerosis. We also present a method to determine the early steps in the biochemical pathway of 7-ketocholesterol degradation, which may be used to screen different species for therapeutically interesting reactions. We have also recently begun work on other targets, such as lipofuscin components and advanced glycation end-products. We hope that enzymes derived from our work can be used to put the role of catabolic insufficiency in aging to a final test, and if such a relationship exists, provide a therapeutic opportunity. Unconventional interdisciplinary collaborations will be required to make this possible.
Key words: medical bioremediation, catabolic insufficiency, aging, atherosclerosis, 7-ketocholesterol
John Schloendorn is one out of the new wave of researchers and life scientists who can perfectly fit their scientific drive and skills with his serious life extension commitment. In fact, I dare to say that John would not be involved in life sciences if he did not have the chance to explore a healthy life extension technology.
Let’s emphasize the role of good food in efficient brainstormings (just like SciFoo was) now and ever. Bad feelings were simply excluded about the food at the Googleplex. I shot these pictures with myPhone. Thanks, chef!
Positive, published scientific data form the tip of the iceberg of any scientific
“scientific data”
The immortal strand hypothesis captures stem cell scientists’ imagination these days. 
