I’m 55 years old. I’m shooting for a multihundred-year lifespan. That’s my goal. If you don’t shoot for it, you’re not going to hit it, right?”
I guess he’ll want to speak to George Church.
The author of this titles it “to 150” yet Peter here says multi hundred, and included a pic of Venter who has said he doesn’t think people should live past 120.
Provided the variants for intelligence can be figured out and the genetic editing tools sufficiently refined (no small matter, in either case), Hsu thinks there’s an incredible potential for improvement. He’s written for the science magazine Nautilus that his calculations from the work at BGI indicate a potential for “very roughly, about 100 standard deviations of improvement, corresponding to an IQ of over 1,000.”
That’s a level of intelligence beyond what we can comprehend right now.
At the same time, we’re not just working on improving biological intelligence. We’re also working on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Smarter humans might be better able to solve those problems, helping us create smarter machines. Smart machines capable of processing big data are already essential for efforts to understand millions of human genomes. These things work together.
Continue reading “We’re about to become more intelligent than at any other point in human history” »
The new goal is to reverse aging, not only in animals, but in humans. And age reversal is essential, as significant age-related disruption has already occurred in most people due to changes in our gene expression profiles.
Gene expression patterns change with age. This influences the rate at which an individual ages, and also determines what senile disorders they are likely to contract. But innovative gene-editing methods based on a unique technology called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) are now being successfully harnessed for use as an age-reversal therapy for humans.
In response to these breakthroughs, Life Extension® magazine sent biogerontologist Dr. Gregory M. Fahy to Harvard University to interview Dr. George Church, who is a leading developer of cutting-edge CRISPR techniques. Here, Dr. Church explains remarkable opportunities for transforming human aging that may begin to unfold sooner than most have imagined.
Very insightful for my deep mind/ neuro mapping friends.
If you have trouble learning a new language as an adult, maybe you can blame your genes and brain structure, a U.S. study suggested Monday.
The study by researchers at the University of Washington showed that genetic variations of the so-called COMT gene and a measure of the strength of the brain’s communications network — known as “white matter”— jointly accounted for 46 percent of the reason for why some college students performed better than others in the second language class.
Continue reading “Genes, brain structure influence second language learning: study” »
Diabetes 2 tie to Vitamin D issues.
First study of Emiratis’ genes highlights the links between type 2 diabetes and a deficiency in vitamin D. Soon doctors may be able to prioritise care for those who are most at risk.
ABU DHABI // The first study to examine Emirati genes and the links between type 2 diabetes and vitamin D deficiency uncovered a genetic code that identifies those susceptible to the deficiency.
Continue reading “Emirati gene study shows diabetes and vitamin D deficiency risks” »
Jumping genes — not jumping beans.
“Jumping genes” are ubiquitous. Every domain of life hosts these sequences of DNA that can “jump” from one position to another along a chromosome; in fact, nearly half the human genome is made up of jumping genes. Depending on their specific excision and insertion points, jumping genes can interrupt or trigger gene expression, driving genetic mutation and contributing to cell diversification. Since their discovery in the 1940s, researchers have been able to study the behavior of these jumping genes, generally known as transposons or transposable elements (TE), primarily through indirect methods that infer individual activity from bulk results. However, such techniques are not sensitive enough to determine precisely how or why the transposons jump, and what factors trigger their activity.
Reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have observed jumping gene activity in real time within living cells. The study is the collaborative effort of physics professors Thomas Kuhlman and Nigel Goldenfeld, at the Center for the Physics of Living Cells, a National Science Foundation Physics Frontiers Center.
Using the CRISPR gene-editing tool, scientists from Harvard University have developed a technique that permanently records data into living cells. Incredibly, the information imprinted onto these microorganisms can be passed down to the next generation.
CRISPR/Cas9 is turning into an incredibly versatile tool. The cheap and easy-to-use molecular editing system that burst onto the biotech scene only a few years ago is being used for a host of applications, including genetic engineering, RNA editing, disease modeling, and fighting retroviruses like HIV. And now, as described in a new Science paper, it can also be used to turn lowly microorganisms into veritable hard drives.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5935415/why-dna-is-the-future-of-data-storage
Very cool.
Pinpointing the type of bacteria that are at the root of an infection in clinical samples removed from living tissues, such as blood, urine or joint fluids, to quickly identify the best anti-microbial therapy still poses a formidable challenge. The standard method of culturing can take days to reveal pathogens, and they often fail to bring them to light altogether.
A team lead by Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University now reports a method in PLoS, which enables the rapid isolation and concentration of infectious bacteria from complex clinical samples to help speed up bacterial identification, and it should be able to accelerate the determination of antibiotic susceptibilities as well.
