I thought this interesting enough to share:
Zoltan Istvan was my favorite presidential candidate in 2016. He toured the country in a bus modeled to look like a coffin, with the message that death is a curable disease.
—In a statement, co-author Monica Driscoll of Rutgers University said that “the real goal of aging research should not be longevity at all, but rather a person’s health span — how long they can maintain an active, disease free, high quality of life.”–
NO. The real goal is extending lifespan. The lifespan of the organism was doubled, that is why people will like this when I share it.
Most of us try to avoid artificial coloring, but a dye that is used to detect plaques in Alzheimer’s brains is being tested for its seeming ability to counteract the effects of aging.
Continue reading “Chemical Dye Doubles Roundworm Lifespan, Could Extend Human Longevity” »
Cryopreservation is the process of freezing organs and tissues at very low temperatures in order to preserve them. While it sounds simple in theory, only a handful of cells and tissues have survived this method. This is because while science has successfully developed ways to cool organs to the very low temperatures required for preservation, thawing them out has proven far more difficult. As the specimen thaws, it forms ice crystals, which can damage the tissue and render organs unusable.
Right now, the process is only a viable option for small samples, such as sperm or embryos. Previous efforts using slow warming techniques have proven to be effective on samples of that size, but haven’t worked for larger tissue samples, like whole human organs. The inability to safely thaw the tissue has also precluded the theoretical concept of cryogenically preserving entire human bodies, with the intention of reanimating them later. The concept has roots in cryogenic technology, but is actually referred to as “cryonics”, and the scientific community generally considers it to be more science fiction than science fact — at least for the time being.
A recent study has made a significant breakthrough which may well begin closing that gap even more. Using a new technique, scientists were able to cryopreserve human and pig samples, then successfully rewarm it without causing any damage to the tissue.
Continue reading “Scientists Have Made a Huge Breakthrough In Cryogenics” »
Is the future going to be so bad that longer, healthier lives will be undesirable? No, probably not.
The future looks grim? That’s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there’s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can’t promise the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how ‘sure’ pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I’m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won’t be worth living and there’s thus no point in extending it anyway.
First, we need to take into account that the quality of human life has been improving, not worsening, throughout history. Granted, there still are things that are not optimal, but there used to be many more. Sure, it sucks that your pet-peeve politician has been appointed president of your country (any reference to recent historical events is entirely coincidental), and it sucks that poverty and famine haven’t yet been entirely eradicated, but none of these implies that things will get worse. There’s a limit to how long a president can be such, and poverty and famine are disappearing all over the world. It takes time for changes to take place, and the fact the world isn’t perfect yet doesn’t mean it will never be. Especially people who are still chronologically young should appreciate the fact that by the time they’re 80 or 90, a long time will have passed, and the world will certainly have changed in the meanwhile.
Continue reading “The future looks too grim to wish for a longer life” »
Transhumanism appearing in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) magazine: Science…
Modern technology and modern medical practice have evolved over the past decades, enabling us to enhance and extend human life to an unprecedented degree. The two books under review examine this phenomenon from remarkably different perspectives.
Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine is an examination of transhumanism, a movement characterized by technologies that seek to transform the human condition and extend life spans indefinitely. O’Connell, a journalist, makes his own prejudices clear: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist,” he writes. However, this does not stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement.
Continue reading “Life and death: When the end arrives, should we upgrade or shut down?” »
Speaking at the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum, Dr Brad Perkins, chief medical officer, Human Longevity, said: “Right now the most daunting and expensive human health problem that the world is facing is age related chronic disease. Our hypothesis at Human Longevity is that genomics and the technologies that support its application in medicine and drug discovery are going to be the next accelerant in extending a high performance human lifespan.
Dr. Brad Perkins and other anti-aging researchers at commercial companies made the more conservative for anti-aging researchers that within about 40 years human longevity (maximum lifespan) will reach 140 years. Current life expectancy is about 80 years but with some countries and states at about 90 years for women. The confirmed longest lived person reached 122 years of age.
