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THE SCIENCE TO STOP AND REVERSE AGING: Part 2

As was expected, the USA again bombed Iran last night.  From the New York Times this morning, a graphic showing that the USA/Israel vs Iran War recycles a series of conflict and calm:

Source: Data on U.S. and Iranian attacks comes from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, or ACLED, a nonprofit that tracks global conflict. Adina Renner/The New York Times

And, by the way, Israel is still doing things, yesterday bombing a mosque in Gaza they said was where the Hamas stored weapons.

Also this morning from the New York Times:

The number of data centers in the United States is poised to explode. Source: Cleanview. Jacqueline Gu/The New York Times

I earlier this month posted on:  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DATA CENTERS.

So on to Part 2 of my series about stopping, if not reversing, aging.

  • If new to this blog site, or you forgot what I earlier said, read Part 1.
  • My earliest posting on this subject reaches back to 1September2009.
    • Leonard Hayflick, a dragon twelve years older than me, is a professor of anatomy at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and is previously from Stanford University. He is known for the Hayflick Limit (most cells divide 20-100 times before dying, as a limit for humans), which directed research towards the cell as the controller of aging. Importantly, he determined that the capped telomere enzyme region appeared to be the key to aging. He effectively found this biological clock in 1961, when I was a chemical engineering junior at Stanford.
      • I should add that he did well, passing away 2 years ago at the age of 96.
    • University of Colorado behavioral geneticist Thomas Johnson, in 1988, extended the life of a worm called
      Caenorhabditis elegans by 60%, thus introducing this nematode to the scientific world. He chaired two Gordon Conferences on the Biology of Aging.
    • Biologist Cynthia Kenyon, MIT PhD associated with Lenny Guarente, holding the Herbert Boyer (who was earlier mentioned) Professorship, and who previously worked for Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner, wants to live to be 150. She has
      increased the life span of C. elegans by a factor of six, meaning the equivalent human life of 400 years. She has merely suppressed the regulator gene, daf-2. C. elegans is a good lab model because it only has about a thousand types of cells and is translucent, so you can see the organs. She helped found a company, Elixir, with Guarente, raising $37 million to find a Fountain of Youth pill. Kenyon believes it is in the realm of possibility that just changing the right human gene could double our lifetime. Then, who knows?
    • Aubrey de Grey a biomedical gerontologist from the United Kingdom, has been working on “strategies for engineered negligible senescence" (SENS), or, finding a cure for human aging. He lists seven types of aging damage, but I’ve compressed them into five:
        • cancer
        • mutations
        • junk molecules
        • death of cells
        • loss of elasticity linking cells
      • He co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize (MMP), with a sum of $4.5 million to fund researchers to extend the lifespan of mice.  
        Methuselah reached the age of 969 years in The Bible. 
      • Has been quoted to say that people will start living thousand year lives at any selected age in 25 years.
    • M
      ichael West offers a personal journey in his The Immortal Cell. He was initially a creationist, devoted to dispelling evolution, but made a full reversal after witnessing the death of his father, shifting from Greek and Hebrew to biology, gaining a PhD degree, and turning to immortality science. He co-founded Geron in 1990, the first to biotechnologically treat age-related disorders, becoming a pioneer in stem cell R&D. Very simply, their goal is to take the patient’s own cells, rejuvenate and modify them, and insert them back in the person to treat diseases. Specifically, telomeres would be lengthened. Their experimental cells now double more than a 100 times. Macular degeneration and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) will someday thusly be treated. He is now president and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, which is the only American company pursuing human therapeutic cloning research, and serves as Adjunct Professor Bioengineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

  • Sixteen years ago, my posting was on Eternal Life.
    • This article was released two years after publishing one of my books, described below.

Chapter 2 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity deals with immortality.  On July 15 The Huffington Post published my article on this subject (Science and the Future of Cloning: Is Immortality Possible?), the same day and time that another posting appeared by David Stipp on "Why Anti-Aging Science Really Matters."  Stipp just this month came out with a book entitled, The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution

    • Anyway, he drew 7 comments while mine received 222.  The best I can figure out is that his article is rather clinical and factual, while mine is somewhat conjectural.
    • Remember, this was 16 years ago, so I was definitely premature in saying the following in that posting:
      • There are at least two pathways to continue your presence. One does not involve human cloning. Without going into telomeres and ribonucleoproteins, let me just say that science is actually close to finding and checking the aging gene. Someday, you might be able to take a pill and stop growing old. The question is, can this technique be perfected before you get too old?
        • The other is cloning, and there are two kinds: therapeutic and reproductive. The former is almost okay, while the latter is verboten, except in certain countries where the laws are fuzzy. You can expect some future breakthrough in countries where religion is not dominant.
  • So let's say you can afford to be cloned.  You still need to transfer the information in your brain to this new cloned you.  Elon Musk has suggested that his brain-computer interface startup, Neuralink, could eventually allow humans to upload memories and consciousness into digital immortality.
    • However, when formed in 2016, Neuralink was not looking into this potential.
    • More recently in 2020, How to Live Forever was posted on progress.
    • I asked Google AI today, how Neuralink is doing:
Neuralink today is successfully translating specific physical and communicative intent from the brain into a computer, rather than directly downloading complex abstract thoughts. Patients with the implant use their thoughts to control a cursor, type text, play video games, and operate speech-restoration software. [1, 2, 3]

To come, Part 3.

The path of Super Typhoon Dolphin has shifted.  Formerly to Tokyo, now further south, with a median predictive path between Kyushu and Okinawa.

Dolphin:

  • Became a typhoon on July 28.
  • Attained super typhoon strength on July 29 up to 165 MPH.
  • Today still a super typhoon at 155 MPH.

To end, 50 years ago today, the #1 song on Billboard was Kiss and Say Goodbye, by The Manhattans.

In the UK on this day half a century ago?  Don't Go Breaking My Heart, by Kiki Dee and Elton John.

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