http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net Medicine Ball Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:04:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.11 en http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6225-tedmed-day-2-coverage.html http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6225-tedmed-day-2-coverage.html#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:04:15 +0000 Luis Healthy Life Extension Community http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4443 MedGadget: "Also before lunch was the science of aging pair up with Aubrey de Grey, CSO of the SENS Foundation, and David Sinclair, professor at Harvard Medical School. If you've not heard of these gentlemen before, both view aging as a disease but both are approaching aging in very different ways. Aubrey spoke first and has a more futuristic view of aging. His mantra is that aging is metabolism caused cellular damage that leads to organism pathology, and the human body, just like cars, can be made to run longer with adequate maintenance and repair. He views age related problems as belonging to seven types and in order to tackle aging, all seven cellular and molecular problems need to be cured. Aubrey also coined the idea of a Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), which is the point of life span where progress in aging science is occurring faster than the degradation of the body itself. He believes that if someone is able to live to 150 years old, then by that point the progress in the ability to keep them alive will be faster than their rate of death, thus they will live into their 1000s. Still focused on the same target, but shooting from a different angle was David Sinclair, who focuses his research on a set of proteins called sirtuins."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_2.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> MedGadget: "Also before lunch was the science of aging pair up with Aubrey de Grey, CSO of the SENS Foundation, and David Sinclair, professor at Harvard Medical School. If you've not heard of these gentlemen before, both view aging as a disease but both are approaching aging in very different ways. Aubrey spoke first and has a more futuristic view of aging. His mantra is that aging is metabolism caused cellular damage that leads to organism pathology, and the human body, just like cars, can be made to run longer with adequate maintenance and repair. He views age related problems as belonging to seven types and in order to tackle aging, all seven cellular and molecular problems need to be cured. Aubrey also coined the idea of a Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV), which is the point of life span where progress in aging science is occurring faster than the degradation of the body itself. He believes that if someone is able to live to 150 years old, then by that point the progress in the ability to keep them alive will be faster than their rate of death, thus they will live into their 1000s. Still focused on the same target, but shooting from a different angle was David Sinclair, who focuses his research on a set of proteins called sirtuins."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_2.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6225-tedmed-day-2-coverage.html/feed/ http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6226-prospects-for-brain-regenerative-medicine.html http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6226-prospects-for-brain-regenerative-medicine.html#comments Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:48:50 +0000 Luis Medicine, Biotech, Research http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4442 EurekAlert!: researchers have "found that using an animal's own brain cells (autologous transplant) to replace degenerated neurons in select brain areas of donor primates with simulated but asymptomatic Parkinson's disease and previously in a motor cortex lesion model, provides a degree of brain protection and may be useful in repairing brain lesions and restoring function. ... We aimed at determining whether autografted cells derived from cortical gray matter, cultured for one month and re-implanted in the caudate nucleus of dopamine depleted primates, effectively survived and migrated. The autologous, re-implanted cells survived at an impressively high rate of 50 percent for four months post-implantation ... Researchers found that the cultured cells migrated, re-implanted into the right caudate nucleus, and migrated through the corpus callosum to the contralateral striatum. Most of the cells were found in the most dopamine depleted region of the caudate nucleus. This study replicated in primates the success the research team had previously reported using laboratory mice."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/ctco-rfb102809.php
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> EurekAlert!: researchers have "found that using an animal's own brain cells (autologous transplant) to replace degenerated neurons in select brain areas of donor primates with simulated but asymptomatic Parkinson's disease and previously in a motor cortex lesion model, provides a degree of brain protection and may be useful in repairing brain lesions and restoring function. ... We aimed at determining whether autografted cells derived from cortical gray matter, cultured for one month and re-implanted in the caudate nucleus of dopamine depleted primates, effectively survived and migrated. The autologous, re-implanted cells survived at an impressively high rate of 50 percent for four months post-implantation ... Researchers found that the cultured cells migrated, re-implanted into the right caudate nucleus, and migrated through the corpus callosum to the contralateral striatum. Most of the cells were found in the most dopamine depleted region of the caudate nucleus. This study replicated in primates the success the research team had previously reported using laboratory mice."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/ctco-rfb102809.php
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6226-prospects-for-brain-regenerative-medicine.html/feed/ http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6227-tedmed-day-1-coverage.html http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6227-tedmed-day-1-coverage.html#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:32:00 +0000 Luis Healthy Life Extension Community http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4441 MedGadget: "we heard from a series of speakers involved with regenerative medicine. Daniel Kraft (flashback: MarrowMiner) spoke of the role of stem cells in medicine and how he discovered a better way to harvest them from the pelvis. Damien Bates, the chief medical officer of Organogenesis, the company behind biologic wound healing film Apligraf, passed around a sample of their wound healing tissue for people to feel as well as talked about how the skin heals and how it can be aided by regenerative biology. Anthony Atala, from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, talked about the various methods his research center is using to grow specific tissues and organs. He described much of the tissue creation process as sort of building the layers of a cake, with each tissue type placed one on top of the other. For linearly organized organs, such as arteries, this isn't so much of a problem, because you can just grow layers upon layers of tissues. However, for the more complicated, highly solid organs with lots of blood vessels, this methodology breaks down, and the scientists have to either use some sort of pre-made matrix or need to harvest tissues from other sources and de-cellularize them, leaving behind only the collagen scaffold that can be populated by cells."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_1.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> MedGadget: "we heard from a series of speakers involved with regenerative medicine. Daniel Kraft (flashback: MarrowMiner) spoke of the role of stem cells in medicine and how he discovered a better way to harvest them from the pelvis. Damien Bates, the chief medical officer of Organogenesis, the company behind biologic wound healing film Apligraf, passed around a sample of their wound healing tissue for people to feel as well as talked about how the skin heals and how it can be aided by regenerative biology. Anthony Atala, from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, talked about the various methods his research center is using to grow specific tissues and organs. He described much of the tissue creation process as sort of building the layers of a cake, with each tissue type placed one on top of the other. For linearly organized organs, such as arteries, this isn't so much of a problem, because you can just grow layers upon layers of tissues. However, for the more complicated, highly solid organs with lots of blood vessels, this methodology breaks down, and the scientists have to either use some sort of pre-made matrix or need to harvest tissues from other sources and de-cellularize them, leaving behind only the collagen scaffold that can be populated by cells."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/10/tedmed_2009_day_1.html
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6227-tedmed-day-1-coverage.html/feed/ http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6228-the-possible-is-not-necessarily-the-desirable.html http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6228-the-possible-is-not-necessarily-the-desirable.html#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:02:41 +0000 Luis Of Interest http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4440 IEET Blog, a look at plausible outcomes in advancing computational power and biotechnology - such as being able to emulate a human brain in software. I have no doubt that this will happen within the next few decades, but is it desirable? A human mind running on software could last as a pattern for as long as civilization persists, but unless deliberately engineered for continuity it would not survive as an individual in the way we presently understand that term. For example: we are quite used to moving data from hard drive to hard drive, restoring from backups when data becomes corrupt, and constantly shifting the running of software from machine to machine. Cost-effective human emulations would likely undergo exactly these sorts of events under the hood. If you are concerned with personal continuity, as I am, this would be an existential nightmare - you would exist as a flickering series of different people, each one killed by the normal operation of computing systems, and then the next picks up where the prior left off. Yet it will be quite possible to engineer an artificial brain in software and hardware that has continuity in the same way as we do presently: a collection of nanomachines, each machine playing the role of a single neuron, for example. That strategy is probably not cost-effective in comparison to running everything in software, however - and most people won't care about the existential issues so long as everything looks good from the outside.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/3476/
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> IEET Blog, a look at plausible outcomes in advancing computational power and biotechnology - such as being able to emulate a human brain in software. I have no doubt that this will happen within the next few decades, but is it desirable? A human mind running on software could last as a pattern for as long as civilization persists, but unless deliberately engineered for continuity it would not survive as an individual in the way we presently understand that term. For example: we are quite used to moving data from hard drive to hard drive, restoring from backups when data becomes corrupt, and constantly shifting the running of software from machine to machine. Cost-effective human emulations would likely undergo exactly these sorts of events under the hood. If you are concerned with personal continuity, as I am, this would be an existential nightmare - you would exist as a flickering series of different people, each one killed by the normal operation of computing systems, and then the next picks up where the prior left off. Yet it will be quite possible to engineer an artificial brain in software and hardware that has continuity in the same way as we do presently: a collection of nanomachines, each machine playing the role of a single neuron, for example. That strategy is probably not cost-effective in comparison to running everything in software, however - and most people won't care about the existential issues so long as everything looks good from the outside.

View the Article Under Discussion: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/3476/
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6228-the-possible-is-not-necessarily-the-desirable.html/feed/ http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6229-an-examination-of-the-longevity-trend.html http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6229-an-examination-of-the-longevity-trend.html#comments Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:18:28 +0000 Luis Medicine, Biotech, Research http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/view_news_item.cfm?news_id=4439 senescent and non-senescent mortality proves to be very valuable for describing and analysing age patterns of death rates. Unfortunately, standard methods for estimating these mortality components are lacking. The first part of this paper discusses alternative methods for estimating background and senescent mortality among adults and proposes a simple approach based on death rates by causes of death. The second part examines trends in senescent life expectancy (i.e., the life expectancy implied by senescent mortality) and compares them with trends in conventional longevity indicators between 1960 and 2000 in a group of 17 developed countries with low mortality. Senescent life expectancy for females rises at an average rate of 1.54 years per decade between 1960 and 2000 in these countries. The shape of the distribution of senescent deaths by age remains relatively invariant while the entire distribution shifts over time to higher ages as longevity rises."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://pmid.us/19851933
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> senescent and non-senescent mortality proves to be very valuable for describing and analysing age patterns of death rates. Unfortunately, standard methods for estimating these mortality components are lacking. The first part of this paper discusses alternative methods for estimating background and senescent mortality among adults and proposes a simple approach based on death rates by causes of death. The second part examines trends in senescent life expectancy (i.e., the life expectancy implied by senescent mortality) and compares them with trends in conventional longevity indicators between 1960 and 2000 in a group of 17 developed countries with low mortality. Senescent life expectancy for females rises at an average rate of 1.54 years per decade between 1960 and 2000 in these countries. The shape of the distribution of senescent deaths by age remains relatively invariant while the entire distribution shifts over time to higher ages as longevity rises."

View the Article Under Discussion: http://pmid.us/19851933
Read More Longevity Meme Commentary: http://www.longevitymeme.org/news/ ]]> http://travel-health-insurance.orlyowl.net/6229-an-examination-of-the-longevity-trend.html/feed/