Lifeboat Foundation

This week’s episode welcomes Bill Andrew’s, Ph. D., President and Founder of the biotechnology firm Sierra Sciences. Bill is widely considered the foremost researcher on aging and telomeres and most of his entire professional career has been devoted to finding a cure for aging. Most notably, he led a team in 1997 at Geron Corporation to successfully identify the human enzyme telomerase. An enzyme that causes Telomeres to lengthen, thus enabling cells to replicate itself without hitting their Hayflick limit (i.e. the number of times a cell is able to reproduce itself). It is believed that only human embryonic stem cells and cancer cells are immortal and do not possess a Hayflick limit.

Our conversation explores the science, possibilities, and social impacts of finding a cure for aging. He explains his company’s quest to create a safe and affordable drug that will lengthen telomeres in every cell in your body. He believes his research team is one year away from starting human trials if he receives the additional funding necessary to finish his research.

Join us in this fascinating discussion that is sure to change the way you view aging and our future.

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Aubrey de Grey wants to save lives. He wants to save as many as he possibly can, as soon as he can, and to do it he is going to fix ageing.

The prominent scientist and futurologist is on a crusade to beat ageing and when he does it will mean that we stay healthy and live longer – possibly for up to hundreds of years.

But, as de Grey emphasises, his primary goal is not just making people live longer; he wants us to live healthily, he wants to restore us to a state of health that is “fully functional in every way”. The ability to live for hundreds of years is just a side effect.

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We’re born, we grow, we age, and then we die. Well, maybe not all of us, according to a new study on the animals amongst us who, while they continue to grow older, don’t deteriorate with age.

A new study out of Nature takes a comparative look at the life cycles of 46 different species (us included) and finds that not all species live by this pattern of decline that we do. In fact some, the hermit crab, for instance, seem to have turned the whole process upside down. Virginia Hughes at National Geographic explains:

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Not everyone wants to sleep in. A growing transhumanism community wants to sleep less, and better, and they’re going to great lengths to make it happen.

For those unaware, transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that aims to improve the human condition, to push beyond our biological limitations, largely through technological advancements. They’re particularly focused on extreme longevity. But with treatments for an extended healthy life still works in progress (and playing out on a very long timeline), some transhumanists have turned their attention to sleep.

The average well-rested person sleeps eight hours a day. The average American lives 79 years. That’s a little more than just 50 years being awake. Life is much shorter than you realized — at least if you agree with your typical sleep-hacker that sleeping is wasted downtime.

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Another excellent blog by Dr Michael fossel PhD, md. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other related diseases could be treated potentially using telomerase.

Alzheimer’s: One Disease?

Date posted: 25.08.2015.

Continue reading “Alzheimer’s: One Disease? « Michael Fossel” »

If you want to increase your risk of multiple diseases, then smoking is one of surest ways to do it; it can even accelerate aging. So how do some long-term smokers beat the odds?

Long-lived smokers are fascinating. Not only do they live a long time, but they also appear unaffected by their habit. For most of us, smoking has been confirmed to be ‘toxic’, but these outliers somehow overcome this. So how can these people reach old age despite having smoked most of their life? Scientists predicted they must have some unusual genes, and they were right.

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Stem cells coming along nicely, Stanford demonstrate how creating artificial stem cell niches improve grafting and regeneration of bone and it should have a broad application for other tissues. Properly developed we could regenerate organs and tissues by injecting enough stem cells in these manufactured protective niches.

One could potentially take it a stage further and modify the stem cells with genes of interest to make them more robust. Ex-vivo cell manipulation is also considerably cheaper than in-vivo therapy.

New porous hydrogel could boost success of some stem cell-based tissue regeneration, researchers say.

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The Victoria Derbyshire programme’s Benjamin Zand goes on the search for immortality and meets the people who think we could live forever. This film is part of BBC’s ‘Intelligent Machines Week’.

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Our gut and the microbiome play a crucial role in our health, but could better understanding of that role help us avoid disease and live longer?

The microbiome weighs 2–3 pounds and contains 10 times more cells than our own, but we’ve neglected our microbial tenants for a long time. These little denizens help us break down food, provide key nutrients and even play a role in inflammation and the integrity of our intestinal tract. It’s no surprise then that fermented foods and probiotics are gaining popularity as we become more aware of how important our gut is. Recent evidence even links poor digestive health to chronic inflammation and Parkinson’s disease.

New research suggests that both gut integrity, and the amount and type of bacteria that reside within it, can actually predict an individual’s health. They may even quicken or slow the pace of aging.

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