On Thursday, Google and IBM will unveil a new initiative that will allow Google Health, a site where users can store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. In demonstrations, IBM and Google fitted Wi-Fi radios to gadgets like heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuffs, scales and blood-sugar measurement meters, allowing the devices to communicate with a PC and feed real-time medical information directly into Google’s online records.
Hooking up those devices to the Web, IBM argues, will offer a new immediacy and granularity of health monitoring. A user can remotely track the blood pressure readings or glucose levels of a diabetic parent living alone, or stream his or her medical information like weight or heart rate directly to a doctor or physical trainer.
“If there’s something abnormal, you can catch it before you have an episodic intervention, like going to the emergency room,” says Dan Pelino, manager of IBM’s health care division. “This is like OnStar for a patient, keeping constant information about you and sending alerts even before you have a problem.”
How do you interpret the following situation: we have a life extension technologist whose all endeavors is about pushing this issue to its very limits and making things possible but on the other hand this very life extensionist himself is not driven by actually living as long as he can.
It seems that SENS theorist Aubrey de Grey, who is chronologically 45, (BioBarCampphoto by Ricardo) is taking roughly the above position in a recent interview. Aubrey is a good and wittyinterviewee and of course the interpretation of what he is saying is strongly context dependent so here is the full question and answer:
Question: One hundred years of life can wear you down physically, but it can also wear you down emotionally… perhaps even existentially. For you, is a desire to live long accompanied by a desire to live long in a much-improved human civilization, or is this one satisfactory?
Aubrey de Grey: I’m actually not mainly driven by a desire to live a long time. I accept that when I’m even a hundred years old, let alone older, I may have less enthusiasm for life than I have today. Therefore, what drives me is to put myself (with luck) and others (lots and lots of others) in a position to make that choice, rather than having the choice progressively ripped away from me or them by declining health. Whether the choice to live longer is actually made is not the point for me.
Let’s see 2 possible and extreme interpretations of this answer (neither of them is my own interpretation) and I hope my readers can find fine-tuned arguments in between while thinking a bit about this still rather philosophical topic:
1., Saying that we want the process (a robust healthy lifespan technology) but not necessarily the product (a robust healthy lifespan) of our own business is a disaster Read the rest of this entry »
A new, completely rewritten, integrated nature.com website blogs.nature.com has been launched by the Natureplex people – informed his Twitter pals Euan Adie:
Also, blogs.nature.com v1 is live! Tequila and donuts all round. Early n’ often release v2 coming on the 18th so get any bug reports in now.
Suggest good science blogs that are not listed on the Nature Blogroll yet.
I ordered my first commercial genetic profile from 23andMe on the 9th of September online, FedExed my 2 ml saliva from Budapest to 23andMe, Mountain View on the 12th of September. I got the results today. That said within 3 weeks since the birth of the idea I purchased more than 500 000 SNPs of mine analyzed, evaluated and ready to be browsed. With this step I finally and quickly entered into the age of personalized genetics no matter how embryonic it is.
After a superficial first scan of my results I can say that it is a really interesting thing that instantly pushes me towards accumulating more knowledge on the personalized genetics field concerning specific traits, stats, risks and studies.
Here is a first look on what my Y chromosome SNPs are saying on my paternal haplogroup:
I learned for instance that based only on my genotype and not any environmental factors involved I have a lower than average riskRead the rest of this entry »
The Institute for the Future‘s X2 project is all about tracing future trends in science and technology As the steward of the Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology Group I collect signals in these fields on which some forecasts can be based later on. Here are some issues I found future sensitive enough recently:
I had problems with my handwriting since elementary schools, or at least my teachers had continuous problems with it. Even during my university years I was asked sometimes to read out loud my essays, papers to them otherwise risking bad grades. Maybe it’s because I am a hidden right-handed using my left hand for writing or maybe I am just too impatient over the slow pace of handwriting (needless to say computers mostly solved this problem).
On this George Dysonphoto here you can see the SciFoo schedule in progress and I think you can easily pick the one with the ugliest handwriting on Aging and Life Extension:
It was already known that amongst the Google top people Sergey Brin is the one who is most interested in pushing biotechnology and the biomedical sciences: in his Stanford years he was interested in biology courses according to The Google Story, he married Anne Wojcicki (who graduted from biology at Yale), Google invested $4.4 million into 23andMe the pioneering personal genomics company co-founded by Anne, then Google invested into 23andMe competitor Navigenics too.
Now Sergey Brin added another, serious and personal reason to think that he is really, personally committed to the quick progress in the biomedical sciences: in his new blog – already a bit of an Internet history – called Too he disclosed that using the 23andMe personal genetics service he figured out something worrying about his and his family’s risk of Parkinson disease (his mother and her aunt are being already diagnosed with PD):
“I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too. The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.
The G2019S mutation is actually the rs34637584 SNP and lies in the gene LRRK2 encoding leucine-rich repeat kinase on chromosome 12. The mutation affects the first codon of the gene and is a guanine (G)-to- adenine (A) substitution resulting known as a missense and leads to a glycine – serine (hence the name) amino acid conversion in the protein product. Here is how the SNP position looks in the 23andMe browser using the sample family, the Mendels.
As the second operation of building my genetically well informed future yesterday (2 days after completing the order) I collected 2 ml of my saliva with the help of 23andMe’s Oragene DNA self-collection kit manufactured by DNA Genotek. First operation has been the sequencing of the D-loop of my mitochondrial DNA out of 5 ml of saliva in the lab at Tulane as a last control experiment, more on that later.
I’d be curious to know approximately how many people in Hungary or in Central Europe, or in all Europe have already used personalized genetics services like 23andMe or the Iceland based deCODE genetics’ genotyping services. As the whole industry is less than 1 year old (starting November 2007) there are not too many public stats available or at least I haven’t found any. With the recent (8th Sep) announcement of the modest $399 kit price reduced from $999 the pioneering personalized genetics service is now affordable for a lot more people, like me (compare it to the $600 iPhone early adopter fee, which I was unable not to buy). Read the rest of this entry »
If “Science has a really serious marketing problem” as Larry Page observed, then life extension technologies face even bigger marketing problems. I am definitely not a marketing expert but realized the problem early on when thinking about the lag-phase period of a robust life extension technology. So I made a short email interview with Dave Gobel, the marketing and business mind/strategist behind the Methuselah Foundation (official title: Chief Executive Officer) following our meeting and chat at the SENS3 conference in Cambridge, UK, 2007.
1. What is the biggest marketing problem of any future (or present) healthy life extension technology?
The biggest marketing problem today is the time it takes for a beneficial effect to present itself. For instance, a product such as resveratrol may take months to present beneficial results, or it may never show up clinically. People who are scientifically sophisticated can appreciate the value of reduced circulating fats or glucose, but to the typical individual, there are much sexier things to spend money on that give immediate gratification and clear utility. The proof of this is illustrated by a counter example – how ridiculously easy it would be to sell a product that biologically reversed grey hair. The effect might be seen gradually but incontrovertably by all and in the mirror directly.
It seems to me that the best way to proceed from a business standpoint therefore is from the outside in. Create legitimate products that improve a person’s visual image and therefore social standing and they will flock for the result. Try to engineer those products to have globally beneficial effects, and marketing becomes easy.
So, for the present, the problem is delayed, and difficult to pinpoint results in exchange for expensive pills/treatments and never ending taking of pills. What about the future? The problem of marketing will evaporate as tissue engineering provides an immediate benefit by eliminating hip, knee and similar pains while restoring or even improving base functionality. When biologically matched teeth can be implanted and grown anew in gums, marketing will be easy.
2. How to market life extension for different generations (teenagers, college students, young adults, mature adults, grandpas and grandmas) and what are the main differences here?Read the rest of this entry »
Last year I was probably the only SciFoo Camper with an explicit life extension commitment. I suggested & held a session which was related a bit to partial immortalization but was rather about the systems biology perspective in general, illustrated with some examples. So throughout the terrific SciFoo Camp 2007 life extension as a conversation topic remained rather implicit (ok, close to zero) and there was not much room to discuss it in the lack of other fellow life extensionists.
In my opinion the whole point of unconferences is to form the good aggregate of people with a common interest & similar/complementer message to join forces in order to draw enough (intellectual) attention for their topic. In this context, an unconference is about topics at the first place, not just about people. Idea networking is as important as social networking.
And if something fits 100% with the idea of SciFoo it is life extension/aging just as handling terrantic scientific datasets, open science or climate change as all these topics are utterly complicated and quite urgent screaming for the attention of the smartest people.
So I emailed Timo Hannay, SciFoo organizer:
“One thing I’ve noticed is that it would be very good to organize a session on scientific life extension technologies and consequences, because the SciFoo people are ideal to see and discuss all angles of this really important topic.”
Finally Chris over at Ouroboros came up with the idea and the quick implementation of Hourglass, a blog carnival devoted to the biology of aging/biogerontology. For some reason I am not an explicit supporter of blog carnivals – many of my posts were chosen by carnival editors but I never hosted one -, but Hourglass will be the big exception in which I participate, submit posts and host it later. The reason: first it presents aging/biogerontology related posts, which fits my profile and second it was instigated by Chris Patil, whose work is a guarantee for keeping all this in the good direction. So if you want to read on the evolution of longevity and aging, calorie restricition, stem cells/tissue engineering/regenerative medicine, or on the association of long life and intelligence at once, Hourglass is for you.
I try to cover some interesting, sciencey points on the conference in later posts, right now just a brief, subjective human- and strategy focused summary:
Congrats to Aubrey de Grey and the team, everything went well and if finally a worldwide consensus is around the corner claiming that robust healthy lifespan extension is technologically possible and worth achieving it is largely due to Aubrey’s relentless networking, organizing activity and American like pushy marketing strategy! Well done!
Had a nice chat with a diverse bunch of interesting people amongst others: Barbara Logan, Nason Schooler, Todd Huffman, Betty Liu, the startupperAndregg brothers, Mark Hamalainen, Keith Causey, Ben Zealley, Brian Martin and sure I forget to mention many more here.
In the photo (thanks Barbara Logan): Neal Van De Ree, Florida auctioneer and activist, John Furber, Legendary Pharmaceuticals, Florida, Aubrey, Paul Logan, Alex Zhavoronkov, GTCBio, BioGerontology Research Foundation Damian Crowe, Genescient, BioGerontology Research Foundation and yours truly.
It is just good to go to a conference where the overwhelming majority of attendees think (and many of them act) that by science & technology we can actually get rid of aging related health problems and develop a robust life extension technology. I sense a lot of freedom here which I sense since the age 15 but now – thanks to Aubrey de Grey – this is all happening in a community (with a diverse chronological age distribution) that is becoming more established and more funded. Whether this is only a freedom to do something or also a freedom from a constraint or from interference… well you are free to decide it dear readers.
The “Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches”conference will be held from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA organized by Aubrey de Grey, Irina Conboy and Amy Wagers.
The emphasis this time (just check the coorganizers Conboy and Wagers) is on stem cell research and regenerative medicine, which I think is the only coherent engineering concept outside for robust life extension in the form of systemic regenerative medicine while SENS by definition (strategies) is a flexible enough umbrella term to include other coming life extension technologies and concepts under its brand.
In the age of Twitter and FriendFeed the blog genre is just too slow to cover the event, so I use the FriendFeed room for the conference as it seems to be a perfect place of live microblogging the conference, sharing any kind of links, videos, comments, feeds and feedbacks. I hope others will make it too.
I argued many times here that biology based biotechnology is the next information technology but in order to do so, biotech should harness good IT patterns and mimic its massive computing practices to handle the enormous amount of constantly accumulating data. Often this trend could be summarized in a simple way: keep your eye on Google and conduct thought experiments in advance in which science is done in a Googleplex like environment in terms of the computing & financial resources and algorithm heavy engineering culture. Use Python and learn cluster computing and MapReduce. With the expected launch of the massive scientific dataset hosting Google service – nicknamed Palimpsest – this year finally a direct interface between scientists and Googlers emerges and hopefully opens up possibilities for scientists to cooperate with Google. (Remember my joke on Google BioLabs back in 2006)? I get emails from biologists, bioinformaticians asking me how to be hired by Google ever since then. As I tweeted yesterday: I growingly have the impression that “being ambitious” today = ‘worked, is currently working, is going to work at/for Google’ Taking Google’s inter-industrial power into consideration I see a real chance that some day the “Google of Biotechnology” title goes not to a startup yet to be emerged, not to Genentech or to 23andMe but……to Google itself. No kidding here. Fortunately Google’s model is “to build a killer app then monetize it later” says Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android mobile software in the July issue of Wired so scientists working for the big G probably won’t have to worry about turning their scientific killer app into an instant cash machine.
And now in the very issue of Wired magazine (not online yet ) there is an exciting cover story on the same pattern I talked about concerning the life sciences but in the broader context of every kind of science with the provocative, Fukuyama-like title The End of Science. There is a witty and short essay from editor-in-chief Chris Anderson entitled The End of Theory followed by examples of the ‘new science’ like the The Large Hadron Collider expected to generate 10 petabytes if data/second, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey heaven catalog maker accumulating 25 terrabytes of data so far, the skeleton scanning project of Sharmila Majumdar and the Many Eyes project “where users can share their own dynamic, interactive representations of big data”.
For many people around the globe, Chris Anderson is a freeconomist & the author of a popular airport book but fewer people are aware that he was actually trained as a (quantum) physicist and even worked at Los Alamos Read the rest of this entry »
The “Understanding Aging: Biomedical and Bioengineering Approaches”conference will be held from June 27-29, 2008 at UCLA organized by Aubrey de Grey, Irina Conboy and Amy Wagers. I like to call it UndertsEnding Aging in myself and I am excited to go to LA and meet new people also people from SENS3.
Yesterday I created a FriendFeed room for the conference as it seems to be a perfect place of live microblogging the conference, sharing any kind of links, videos, comments, feeds and feedbacks. Working on aging and the postponement of it (you can bravely say life extension) is always a pioneering work so it’s time to use pioneering web apps for that purpose, just like FriendFeed.
Aubrey de Grey, Kevin Perrott and Kevin Dewalt have already joined the room. What about you? See you on FriendFeed, see you on LA!
I asked the following question on Twitter recently:
“A question for all of you Twitterers: Are you for, against, or just neutral on healthy life extension? How long would you like to live? Why?”
I have to tell you it’s hard to give good links to the whole chat without noise. Maybe on FriendFeed.
To my big surprise, many people were neutral about life extension using different arguments & beliefs and those are all smart, well informed geeky persons, many of them biologists.
On the other hand it’s hard to formulate an exact question in 140 characters and to give a good specification on exactly what type of healthy lifespan extension is addressed.
But nevertheless the conclusion for me is that life extensionists should pay a bigger attention to all the ‘neutral’ – ‘pseudo neutral’ arguments. A pseudo neutral argument could turned out to be a for- or anti- life extension argument after a thorough analysis.
When Google Trends went live one of my first search was for “life extension” and posted a little analysis about that. Here is a quick update with a serious question about the stagnating or declining popularity of ‘life extension’ searches. Explanations are needed. /I don’t know the exact search scale for the y axis/.
With the public launch of the X2 project, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang realized one of his dreams. Alex is the research director of The Institute for the Future (IFTF), an independent nonprofit research group headquartered in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley. He writes:
The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of science, technology and innovation. The name may sound like science fiction, but it’s actually an historical allusion. In my previous life as an academic historian, I studied the X Club, a group of Victorian scientists who were very interested in the future of British science. The Club formed when its members were still young, ambitious outsiders, fighting to establish their reputations in a world in which social connections and privilege mattered more than scientific achievement; by the time they retired, its nine members were among the leaders of British science.
It seems that my favorite ever unconference, the SciFooCamp will be aroundunconferenced by a BioBarCamp this year. The whole idea of the BioBarCamp is based upon the SciFoo Camp, so it is by no means a competitive but a complimentary event.
From the BarCamp wiki: “The BioBarCamp is an idea (fed by the tweets of the BioTwitterer community) to organize a life sciences – biotechnology – personalized genomics & medicine – bioinformatics unconference at the Bay Area around the 3rd SciFoo Camp time, which is 8-10th August. The SciFooCamp generates a lot of enthusiasm & activity but not just for those who are invited (only 200). On the other hand, it would be nice to organize a bio-related BarCamp, just like the Cambridge BarCamb, in which the bio-related SciFoo Campers and all the other biogeeks could gather together.”
The main activity is happening right now at the public BioBarCamp Google Group. If interested please join there or just follow the discussions. We are right now in the process of finding a proper venue and sponsors and any help would be most welcome. Right now 6 or 7 August seems to be the consensus day and we have a very generous offer from The Institute for the Future via Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in Palo Alto (no response from 23andMe so far, see below).
It’s against a classic Twitter story, just like this before. You can reconstruct the whole conversation with Twitter Search Engine Tweet Scan by searching for terms SciFoo, BioBarCamp, SciBarCamp but here are my selected tweets:
Scene One, 04/10/08 How the idea was born on that day in reverse chronological order:
Scene Two 04/22/08 How the biospecificity and name was born alongside with a possible venue idea: Read the rest of this entry »
The 3rd Science Foo Camp, organized by Nature, O’Reilly Media, and Google will be held on August 8-10 and hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.
From the mail: “Now in its third year, Sci Foo is already achieving cult status among those with a passion for science and technology. The Economist said that it “capture[s] the essence of innovation”; in a photo essay for Edge, George Dyson wrote of the “the impossible choice” when deciding which sessions to attend; another attendee described it simply as “The best gathering ever. Period.”
In order to have the slightest change to design a robust, systemic life extension technology, we need to accumulate every systemic macromolecular, cellular, tissue- and organ level data of the normal, physiological human body, connect the trillions of nodes with scalable software algorithms and suck out the draft of the proper sequence of consecutive treatment/regeneration steps later. Fortunately not only life extension technology needs systems biology projects (this is not enough for getting grants), but more importantly the effective design of new drug targets and the discovery of disease biomarkers are clearly crying for the systemic level. The urgent diagnostic and therapeutic demands are sufficient to launch international, many-lab projects.
Finally a complete ‘Human Proteome Project’ is in the pipeline (illustration via BioMed Search). It aims the tissue-level complete knowledge of the human proteome revealing “which proteins are present in each tissue, where in the cell each of those proteins is located and which other proteins each is interacting with”. Keep in mind also that around 21’000 human genes encode 1 million different proteins and that the effort cannot localize exactly which cell types in a given tissue is producing which protein.According to Nature’s Helen Pearson: Biologists initiate plan to map human proteome
“Those involved in the draft plan say that a human proteome project is now feasible partly because estimates of the number of protein-coding genes have shrunk. It was once thought that there might be around 50,000 or 100,000, but now, just 21,000 or so are thought to exist, making the scale of human proteomics more manageable. And the group plans to focus on only a single protein produced from each gene, rather than its many forms.
The plan is to tackle this with three different experimental approaches. One would use mass spectrometry to identify proteins and their quantities in tissue samples; another would generate antibodies to each protein and use these to show its location in tissues and cells; and the third would systematically identify, for each protein, which others it interacts with in protein complexes. The project would also involve a massive bioinformatics effort to ensure that the data could be pooled and accessed, and the production of shared reagents.”
The idea is to analyze and list all the proteins manufactured by chromosome 21 within 3 years as a pilot study and then finish the whole project within 10 years. Chromosome 21 is the smallest child in the family and likely contains between 200 and 400 genes, so the pilot study can yield us a couple hundreds proteins. Another powerful idea (actually I prefer this) is to start with the human mitochondrial proteome which is around 1000-1500 proteins as far as I know, that is at least 3 times as many as encoded by chromosome 21.Read the rest of this entry »
In the live thesis building blogxperiment I edit (digest, compile, write, rewrite, delete) my ongoing doctoral thesis in blog posts and put the parts together on thesis live. The title: The physiologic role of stem cells in tissues with different regenerative potential.
1.2. Tissues, organs with different turnover and regenerative potential In the adult kidney the nephrons (approximately 500 000 nephronic units/kidney) develop from the metanephric mesoderm/mesenchyme while the collecting ducts are coming from the ureteric bud. The kidney is a complex structure with at least 26 different cell types. The renal function is particularly age-dependent (loss of functional renal mass up to 25%). The kidney is an active tissue with high energy demand and contains a lot of mitochondria (especially in the proximal tubules). On the other hand, while the turnover rate is low, there is a robust although limited regenerative response to acute kidney injury. The candidate cellular sources of recovery, replacement: adjacent, less damaged tubular cells, resident adult kidney stem/progenitor cells and circulating mesenchymal cells from the bone marrow. Amongst others the following cell surface markers were used for isolating/enriching stem cell/multipotent renal progenitor populations: CD133, stem cell antigen-1 (Sca-1), CD24, CD90, Pax-2, Oct-4, Rex-1 (see table).
One such population was isolated from the cortical interstitium making up 0.8% of all cortical cells and were capable to differentiate into epithelial and endothelial like cells in vitro forming tubular structures in SCID mice [Bussolati et al, 2005]. In the lack of definitive markers of kidney stem cells not much certain could be said on the kidney stem cell niche.
Literature: Gupta S, Rosenberg ME. (2008) Do Stem Cells Exist in the Adult Kidney? Am J Nephrol. 19;28(4):607-613
Percy CJ, Power D, Gobe GC. Renal ageing: changes in the cellular mechanism of energy metabolism and oxidant handling. Nephrology (Carlton). 2008 Apr;13(2):147-52.
Bussolati B, Bruno S, Grange C, Buttiglieri S, Deregibus MC, Cantino D, Camussi G. (2005) Isolation of renal progenitor cells from adult human kidney. Am J Pathol. 2005 Feb;166(2):545-55.
So here is a short analysis and an answer of mine to this most important philosophical question from the point of view of a life extension supporter:
1. premise: this question could be answered only if it not about the general meaning of all life, but the particular meaning of individual human lives.
2. analysis: let’s fill the question up to show the variables in it: ‘what is the meaning of an individual human life (x) for somebody individual (y)?’Read the rest of this entry »
Today’s meditation is for serious healthy life extension supporters to consider the following 36 – general and sometimes corporate – ideakillers concerning our little project:
1. We tried that already
2. We’ve never done anything like that before.
3. Has anyone ever done anything like that before?
4. That never works
5. You’re fired
6. We will actively work against you
7. Laughter
8. Not in our budget
9. Not an interesting problem
10. We don’t have time/We’ll never find the time to do it. (I specially liked this one.)
11. Execs will never go for it
12. Out of scope/Not in our business
13. But its the law
14. Too blue sky / Holy grail
15. Wont make enough $$
16. That isn’t what people want Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve always loved the following scene from LOTR, but I’ve always imagined that they are the words of a man who is in a healthy physiological condition due to a robust life extension technology and not due to a mystical ring:
Bilbo: “Today is my one hundred and eleventh birthday!”
Hobbits: “Happy birthday!”
Bilbo: “Alas, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits.” [cheers abound.] “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
Larry Page is 35 years old today and it’s really easy to consider him as a representative man of his/our generation (I am 33 years old) including his future prospects. A company with an unlimited potential was built on Page’s unfinished PhD. research project.
Last year I approached a powerful Wirededitor with the following story pitch: “A full and deep but cool report on the current (scientific) life extension technologies, persons, battles, camps, grants, problems, perspectives.”
His reply was a diplomatic and definite naysaying:
“Thanks for the idea. Alas, we’ve done *way* too many stories on life-extension over the years, from profiles of the singularity guys and Aubrey De Gray (sic) to shorter takes on various startups and stuff. There may be cool stuff out there, but I’m afraid we’ve exhausted our appetite on the subject.”
However the life extension appetite is not something that could be exhausted until the problem is solved systematically and the Wired guys’ appetite seems to be restored and healthy again as in the April Wired issue (not online yet) there is a full story (or rather followup) on the No.1 singularity guy and baby boomer escapist artist Ray Kurzweil called Stayin’ Alive by senior Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf (whose book Wired – A Romance is a good reading).
What is interesting in Kurzweil for experimental scientists/robust life extension supporters is not his meditations on singularity, accelerating change and mind uploading (see the counterarguments by Mark Anderson in the same Wired issue), but his experimental, futuristic, life extensionist lifyestyle:
Kurzweil takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that doesn’t have time to organize them all himself. So he’s hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses. K. also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim.
The Warda-Han paper was retracted from journal Proteomics exactly one month ago unofficially due to its “mighty creator explanation” (covered here first)/officially due to its heavy plagiarism (flashmobbed so efficiently by the Pharyngula commenters).
Yet we are still very short about the details of what happened during the pseudo peer review of the paper.
So here I’d like to participate in the joint blogging iniciative of Lars Juhl Jensen and like to ask my readers to scan through the detailed questions of the following scientist/bloggers concerning the Warda-Han paper:
Buried Treasure by Lars Juhl Jensen: Update: Warda and Han, one month after the storm: “To prevent similar incidents inthe future, it is important to know whether the editor and the peer reviewers overlooked glaring flaws of the manuscript or if the flawed parts were introduced after peer review.”
Pharyngula by PZ Myers: One month of stonewalling: “We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are.”
PS: I shot the picture last week: that is an editorial by Mr. Michael Dunn, editor-in-chief of Proteomics in Proteomics and another book – I’d like to offer it to Mr. Dunn – in the Wiley stand at PITTCON:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – said Alan Kay, computer legend in 1971.
Recently I had a comment dialogue with Chris on whether state-supported research or industrial business enterprises can (or should) lead to big progress in robust and healthy life extension technologies. Besides the government and corporation coin the research breakthrough could come from an aging focused foundation like the non-profit Methuselah Foundation behind the SENS approach, which supports research projects (like MitoSENS and LysoSENS) and scientists (like Mark and John) through cooperation with university labs. And finally, there is going to be another option to contribute:
Huffington Post, Fortune’s Stanley Bing: The Next Big Thing? Please pay extra attention to the language here (especially transmogrification).
Human genome schmutz: Nobody wants to get old or worse, appear old. And forget about dying. That’s the ultimate bummer. Genetic research has been held back recently by a series of disasters too terrible to mention in this venue, or even look up right now, since we’re very busy. But the three-headed midget sheep problem will be solved by 2014 and recombinant DNA, stem-cell and mitochondrial transmogrification technology will begin making inroads into the problem of aging, extending human life to its ultimate limit and even beyond, particularly for really rich people who are on everybody’s nerves already. Another enormous opportunity for confabulators here.
Well, why exactly am I working with human mitochondria and stem cells at the bench? Maybe it’s time again to recall.
I emailed some of my life extension supporter friends because I think we have a ‘future’ situation:
Healthy life extension is not 1 out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges…that can be realistically met, most of them early in this century according to the Committee on Grand Challenges for Engineering with members such as Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Robert Langer and …lifestyle life extensionist, nanovisionary Ray Kurzweil. There is a challenge though called Engineer better medicines and the essay behind looks as if it had been hacked together by Kurzweil and Venter themselves during a sunny Californian Soy Beer Baby Boomer Beach Party. It is about personalized medicine in large and the only hint – I was able to find – to a recent discipline named regenerative medicine is a paragraph, not on, say the challenge of systemic regmed, but on synthetic biology.
It is a big challenge to learn how could healthy lifespan extension as a big and realistic challenge have been left out? Why did Kurzweil (author of the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever) not stand up for it? Why nobody out of the luminaries thought that regenerative medicine and stem cells worth discussing more than a tiny side note? And what about Venter, whom I still like to be interview as there are many points in his activity suggesting a life extension connection. Somebody in the committee was clearly against it?
One friend told me that he is not surprised by this, because it was announced at the AAAS meeting, which is very conservative. Out of the committee members Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Hillis, and maybe Dean Kamen would have been supporters of including LE as a challenge.
…that can be realistically met, most of them early in this century according to the Committee on Grand Challenges for Engineering with members such as Larry Page, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Robert Langer and …lifestyle life extensionist, nanovisionary Ray Kurzweil. There is a challenge though called Engineer better medicines and the essay behind looks as if it had been hacked together by Kurzweil and Venter themselves during a sunny Californian Soy Beer Baby Boomer Beach Party. It is about personalized medicine in large and the only hint – I was able to find – to a recent discipline named regenerative medicine is: Read the rest of this entry »
Colbert: “But if people lived to be a 1000 years old won’t that kill any ability for humans to take risks cause if I’ve known I lived to be a 1000 I am not going to cross the street because you can’t cure being hit by a bus.”
Aubrey: “Well, you’ll be able to get your grandmother to help you to cross the street.”
That is a witty (and the same time, deep) answer indeed: People usually help their grandmother to cross the street but in a many generational “rejuvenated” world people will be able to take care of their descendants to the same extent as they are able to take care of their ascendants today. Moreover, it has something to do with the philosophical question of intergenerational justice: Read the rest of this entry »
One strategy (call it Life Extension Gets Personal) to raise awareness for the idea and technology of healthy life extension is to publicly encourage life extension “coming outs” on behalf of mainstream celebrities. In order to get an academic legitimacy for LE (which is one of the most important aim of Pimm) I am interested specially mainstream or at least well established scientific celebrities. To accomplish this project a man needs to identify target persons to interview (finding hints that the person is positive about LE), contacting these persons and publish the final piece somewhere.
As a first target Craig Venter, the genomics pioneer seemed unconventional and free minded enough to approach with the idea of a LE blogterview. On the other hand I found definite signs of his interest in longevity and life extension suggesting that if Craig Venter had been given a technological-medical chance to extend his healthy lifespan significantly he would definitely not like to die due to accumulating functional declines associated with aging within the next, say hundred years. Maybe I am wrong here, maybe I am not but to figure this situation out I translated these signs into the following blogterview questions and tried to contact him in early December, 2007. So far I reached only his nice and diplomatic PR agent, who said that maybe we have a chance to get the blogterview done in the near future. Till we get there below please find my targeted questions to Craig Venter:
1. Once I’ve read somewhere but was unable to recall later that one particular motivation behind the sequencing of your own genome was your serious life extension commitment and the belief that genomics has something to say about life expectancy. Is it true? If yes, what is the story of your life extension commitment? Is it a commitment for moderate or maximum life extension? In A Life Decoded I’ve found only one paragraph in your molecular biography explicitly on Long Life about the I405V of the CETP gene but no more hint to this important topic.
2. What do you think about Aubrey de Grey’s SENS approach? You’ve been one of the judges on the The SENS Challenge Prize organized by the Technology Review in 2005 for those “who could prove that SENS was “so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate.” ? Who got the point there?
3. What do you think about the mitochondrial theory of aging? I was a little surprised when I’ve found that your circa 16.5kb mitochondrial DNA sequence was not published in the PLOS Biology paper: The Diploid Genome Sequence of an Individual Human Obviously it is not part of the diploid genome but I expected it at least as an appendix as those 37 genes and D-loop region can give important genetic information. Have your mitochondrial genome been sequenced already?
4. In a recent Rolling Stone interview you are saying that “There is probably nothing more important to study about human biology than stem cells.” What do you think about regenerative medicine’s role in a robust and healthy life extension technology? Read the rest of this entry »
The Economist print edition (Jan 3rd) has a summary article on the current healthy and scientific life extension scene starting with Aubrey De Grey’s engineering, umbrellaSENS approach and talking about anti-oxidants, mitochondria, sirtuin activators and stem cell based regenerative medicine amongst others.
To my positive surprise the unknown writer of the article (do you know who wrote it?) is using the term partial immortalisation when talking about regmed’s chance to extend healthy lifespan with a link to Pimm saying “Pimm is a blog focussing partial immortalistaion” in the web version:
Stemming time’s tide
One way that might let people outlive the limit imposed by disposable somas is to accept the machine analogy literally. When you take your car to be serviced or repaired, you expect the mechanic to replace any worn or damaged parts with new ones. That, roughly, is what those proposing an idea called partial immortalisation are suggesting. And they will make the new parts with stem cells….
Some partial immortalisers seek to abolish the Hayflick limit altogether in the hope that tissue that has become senescent will start to renew itself once more. (The clock that controls it is understood, so this is possible in principle.) Most, though, fear that this would simply open the door to cancer. Instead, they propose what is known as regenerative medicine—using stem cells to grow replacements for tissues and organs that have worn out. The most visionary of them contemplate the routine renewal of the body’s organs in a Lincoln’s axish sort of way.
The term Pimm – Partial immortalization was introduced by me in this blog referring the idea, gradual and continuous replacement process and future technology of systemic regenerative medicine aiming indefinite life extension. There is a compelling logic behind I explained it many times here. The difference is in the letters, the sense is the same: ‘immortalisation’ is a British English ‘s’ version while ‘immortalization’ with a ‘z’ is rather American English (see the Google Fight graph on the right). Enough said, it is an ad hoc translation from the Hungarian “részleges immortalizáció” by me.
The source and short history of the term: For my MA thesis in philosophy (in Hungarian) I chose the term “weak immortalization” to address the philosophical problems of a though experiment of an unlimited healthy life extension technology through regenerative medicine which would eliminate problems concerning ageing (ageing related physiological problems), while strong and (technologically impossible) immortalization would eliminate death related problems. Later I replaced the weak – strong opposition to the more proper partial – whole opposition and the credit here goes to János Kis philosopher who suggested the term “partial immortalization” for me instead of the more metaphorical ‘weak’ and the modified version of my thesis was published in a book using ‘partial’. You can download the pdf here.
Since then I totally switched back to science and today I am more inclined to use the term systemic regenerative medicine (I adopted this ‘term’ used first by Maximum Life CEO David Kekich in a life extension blogterview for Pimm) which denotes the future branch of regenerative medicine focusing on otherwise ‘healthy’, aged, ‘normal’, ‘physiologic’ people instead of the characteristically and FDA approved diesased and catches the technology that is needed to reach reversible unlimited healthy lifespan, that is partial immortalization. Systemic regmed is a rather immature from a scientific point of view without an established experimental basis, I admit and more of a theoretical frame of my thoughts on the science I am practicing right now. Nevertheless it gives a fruitful, heuristic and holistic angle on regmed.
“I’ve changed my mind about the use of enhancement drugs by healthy people. A year ago, if asked, I’d have been against the idea, whereas now I think there’s much to be said for it.”
Before citing further the argument of Campbell I’d like to remind the analogous problems of biotechnological life extension products targeted for healthy people in a “normal” physiologic state. Good example are the resveratrol-like but more effective sirtuin activators with a probably positive healthy lifespan extension effects developed by David Sinclair and his group at Sirtris. The trick is to market Sirtuin activators as anti-diabetes drugs, or find other registered diseases to target with the drugs. According to Mass High Tech:
“Aging is not a disease to the FDA,” Sirtris co-founder Christoph Westphal said, so Sirtris is focusing on drugs to treat ailments of old age.
With this story in our changed and future focused mind it is very promising to read for healthy life extension supporters what Campbell, a mainstream academic science representative has to say on cognitive enhancement drugs:
New cognitive enhancing drugs are being developed, officially for therapy. And the therapeutic importance — both current and potential — of such drugs is indeed significant. But manufacturers won’t turn away the significant revenues from illegal use by the healthy.
That word ‘illegal’ is the rub. Off-prescription use is illegal in the United States, at least. But that illegality reflects an official drugs culture that is highly questionable. It’s a culture in which the Food and Drugs Administration seems reluctant generally to embrace the regulation of enhancement for the healthy, though it is empowered to do so. It is also a culture that is rightly concerned about risk but wrongly founded in the idea that drugs used by healthy people are by definition a Bad Thing. That in turn reflects instinctive attitudes to do with ‘naturalness’ and ‘cheating on yourself’ that don’t stand up to rational consideration. Perhaps more to the point, they don’t stand up to behavioral consideration, as Viagra has shown.
Research and societal discussions are necessary before cognitive enhancement drugs should be made legally available for the healthy, but I now believe that that is the right direction in which to head.
In the 15 November Nature issue Judy Illes neurology professor turned neuroethics expert reviewsEnhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People by John Harris and Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime by Aubrey de Grey & Michael Rae.
From the review:
“Ending Aging is a more “new wave” treatment of enhancement, longevity and immortality…. The authors rather unnecessarily brand ageing as repugnant and curse, and use their book to preach on fund-raising opportunities.
The freedom to pursue ways to enhance human mental and physical capacities and to eliminate negative aspects of the human condition, such as suffering and death, is a fundamental tenet of the trans-humanist movement. Although seemingly worthy, there are problems ahead for the futurists, including for Harris, de Grey and Rae….
…Let’s not throw away today for tomorrow. Ending Aging is likely to appeal to those already converted to the author’s views, and perhaps will find some traction among those who are more curious than interested in deeper scientific engagement.”
Unfortunately Illes completely mixes transhumanism with the belief that robust life extension is possible and desirable due to handling the 2 books together and I think this is not a fair angle on life extension. Consequently she can say on the whole that those beliefs are “going well beyond what might be imaginable, or ethical today.”
But most life extension supporters are simply not transhumanists at all and it is a simple logical fault to think that ‘if A then B’ is true (every transhumanist is a life extension supporter), than it follows that ‘if B then A’. For instance, most life extension supporters that I’ve met, say in the SENS3 conference, are not transhumanists, but simply young life scientists for whom life extension is just the technological frame (the highest aim) of their translational science. Think systems biology: human organismal aging is a complex dynamics of a complex system and if you want to modify it you should think on the systemic level. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday I’ve sent the following (slightly edited) email to a bunch of science bloggers I know and respect for very different reasons. I plan to blog the answers (if they come) one by one:
Dear Fellow Science Blogger,
Every blogger has his/her blogging writing style and in many cases we do know the components our style is made of and recognize the different sources we use and mimic. Would you be kind enough to answer this question shortly in your style for me in order to show the variety of the genre called ‘science blogging‘?
Thanks in advance,
– Attila Csordas
P.S. For instance I am fully aware that my style is made out of the following components amongst others: spontaneity (to the extreme of originality sometimes), experimentalism, idiosyncratic non-native speaker errors, lack of time, partial attention, insider science heavy lingo that is “terminological arias” (by default), (brackets), question and exclamation marks, science essay writing style educated on British and American analytic philosophers, movie, literature and comics experiences, Wired type tech hype journalism and first of all…enthusiasm about science and technology.
Recently I wrote a meeting report on the SENS3 conference for a very prestigious science journal, but finally it did not go through the filters. I knew that the chance for publication is small as the journal rarely publish such meeting reports and as it was in many respects an unconventional science conference. The standards were really high and the genre itself is strictly restricted: no more than 900 words and only 1-2 conference topic could be covered focusing on new data. On the whole it was a really good science writing experience for me. I finally realized how challenging it is to introduce the concept of robust scientific life extension for the mainstream science audience although it is not impossible at all.
But if a man has an interactive blog with a quality readership even an officially unpublished text could be useful, so please read my draft in its final form and think about it. Links of the video versions of the referred presentations and references are included, a perpetual advantage of the web comparing to offline publication. I’d like to say thanks for the folks who helped me with the draft: Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae, Mark Hamalainen from within the SENS camp, Matthew Oki O’ Connor and Chris Patil, fellow scientists-bloggers and first of all, Anna.
Subject scrapline: Biotechnology
Title: Translating ageing
Summary: A recent unconventional strategic conference on translational science in ageing related damages helps to put some puzzle pieces together.
Changes in the adult tissue stem cells or in the mitochondria are two main processes under constant investigation amongst researchers curious about the ins and outs of the ageing process. At the SENS3 conference in Cambridge scientists and laymen shared their results and ideas, respectively.＊
Despite its mixed population with a scientist majority, the conference resembled a mainstream life science conference due to its topic sessions focusing on the different types of lifelong, ageing accumulated damages. SENS decodes as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, which aims to suggest a panel of interventions on how to robustly extend the mean and maximum human life span and claims to identify the adequately exhaustive list of main age-related pathologies ranging from cell depletion to mitochondrial mutations. SENS is by definition a flexible enough umbrella term to include other coming life extension technologies and concepts under its brand. Also, it is an engineering project compiled by main organizer Aubrey de Grey, a computer scientist turned theoretical biologist with a grand mission and hypotheses yet to be experimentally tested. The presentations were mainly reviewing the progress in the related branches, with enough new data to keep the experts interested.
However the life extension appetite is not something that could be exhausted until the problem is solved 
The Warda-Han paper was 
Recently I wrote a meeting report on the 
