The marketing problem of life extension technologies

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…

Unpublished SENS3 conference report for mainstream scientists!

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…

The first stem cell related Nobel prize: Martin Evans, 2007

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2007 jointly to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for their discoveries of “principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells” Link It’s rather a 2/3…

SENS3: The stem cell marketplace by Linda Powers, Tucan Capital (slides)

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 photo with some unidentified participants

Source and list are on the SENS3 website.

SENS3: Rutledge Ellis-Behnke on a quick nano hemostatic agent

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…

Michael Rose, evolutionary SENS and aging as a loss of adaptation (slides)

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…

Ray Kurzweil’s distance talk on SENS3

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…

SENS3: English lesson, poster session

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SENS3: scaling up the human immune system

Arne Akbar had this surprising slide illustrating how powerful and flexible the immune system is in terms of cellular numbers:

SENS3 begins….

Back to Cambridge

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…

Meet the nodes, “clustered hubs” and links of clathrin-mediated endocytosis

Network biology is a way to integrate fragmented benchwork data in order to understand complex biological phenomena. In a recent Nature paper, entitled Integrating molecular and network biology to decode endocytosis Cambridge (UK) researchers authors Eva Schmid and Harvey McMahon of MRC, Cambridge give a good example of a predictive and experimentally useful systems biology…

Going to another unconventional science meeting: SENS3, Cambridge, UK

I am visiting the third Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS3) conference, which will be held from 6-10 September 2007 at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Aubrey de Grey (with whom I made a blogterview in 2006), the main organizer and soul behind the conference is clear about the purpose: “The purpose of the SENS conference series,…

The Cambridge Biotech Cluster: a slide

Here is one slide from my presentation yesterday introducing the merits of Cambridge, UK from a biological, biotechnological point of view:

Goodbye Cambridge! Hello Budapest!

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)

Best talk at Cambridge today, Austin Smith: self-renewal is default

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…

Cambridge Embryonic Stem Cell Symposium, Day 1

Wow, the promo materials are extremely good (background: my favourite logical towel) And when people are watching….speakers (like here Austin Smith, the leader of the Wellcome Trust Center for Stem Cell Research) try to say interesting things… Best talk point goes to Allan Bradley, Martin Evans‘ disciple – in science these genealogical tales really matter…

Cambridge Embryonic Stem Cell Symposium promoted by Nature

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…

Mobile Pimm

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:

The image of science: Google-like Biomedical Image Search Engine for pros

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…

Be fast, discover: the Watson-Crick paradigm (weekend session)

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…

Mark Hamalainen, the MitoSENS fellow: blogterview on life extension

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…

Blogterview with Aubrey de Grey: life extension stories

Aubrey de Grey is the man, who first made serious, scientifically conceptualized life extension speech acceptable within scholarly circles through good timing, well-done strategy and with a little bit of luck. The rest is … (I’ve slightly modified the original question 4 and separated questions concerning the probable technologies of moderate and maximum life extension.)…

Pimm in Cambridge

I have just arrived in Cambridge to work in an established stem cell lab from October till December. It is a tremendous opportunity for a rookie researcher. That means I’ll be doing experiments heavily, acquire new methods and hopefully work on my favourite puzzle topic yet. Oh, I almost forgot: this is old U.K. Cambridge,…