Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

The connection between trees, human health and well-being dates back millennia. The ancient Celts worshiped in sacred groves, believing the trees would protect them from physical and spiritual harm. In Hebrew and Christian scriptures a tree of life in the Garden of Eden imparted immortality. Potted conifers helped to cleanse the air inside tuberculosis sanatoriums of nineteenth century Europe.

In recent years, scientists studying urban forests have turned up links between exposure to green space and health benefits, including fewer deaths from heart disease and respiratory diseases, fewer hospitalizations, better infant birth weights and even less crime.

"We've had this intuitive understanding that nature is good for us. Now we're backing it up on an empirical level," said Geoffrey Donovan, a resource economist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station in Oregon.

Donovan and others are digging into the underlying science to understand the relationship between nature and health, a step they say will help guide the design of healthier cities and suburbs.

"We've had this intuitive understanding that nature is good for us. Now we're backing it up on an empirical level."-Geoffrey Donovan, US Forest ServiceEarly indications of health benefits

In 1984, University of Delaware researcher Roger Ulrich made the observation that gall bladder surgery patients stayed in the hospital for less time and took fewer painkillers when they could see trees out their hospital window than when their window faced a brick wall.

Ulrich's studywas small -- just 46 patients -- and raised more questions than it answered. Yet it suggested for the first time scientifically that our perception of nature could potentially influence health outcomes.

That same year, American clinical psychologist Craig Brod coined the term "technostress" to describe the increasingly artificial elements of our built environment that appeared to be raising stress levels. Chronic stress can weaken the immune system. Some experts hypothesized that this kind of constant stress -- exacerbated by the urban environment -- was making people sick.

In Japan, Yoshifumi Miyazaki wondered whether the antidote could be as simple as a long walk in the woods. Miyazaki, a physiological anthropologist at Chiba University, is widely regarded in Japan as the father of forest therapy -- a preventive medicine approach aimed at preventing disease by exposing people to nature.

Over the last three decades, Miyazaki has led more than 60 studies investigating the physiological effects of being in a forested environment. His team has taken measurements including blood pressure readings and changes in heart rate. They've tested saliva samples for cortisol, a hormonal marker of stress. Overwhelmingly, they've found that when people spend time in a forest, their bodies act less stressed out.

Miyazaki hypothesizesthat exposure to natural stimuli -- the sound of a woodpecker drumming away on a tree trunk or the smell of damp pine needles, for instance -- promotes physiological relaxation. He's shown it may help to lower blood pressure, stress hormone levels, sympathetic nervous system activity (think fight-or-flight response) and relieve depression and anxiety.

But how much time in the forest is enough? A group of Stanford researchers in 2015 showed that just a 50-minute walk in a park or forest could decrease anxiety and rumination (a psychology term that basically means dwelling on the negative thoughts caused by upsetting situations) compared to a50-minute walkthrough an urban environment.

A New Environmental Exposure -- Greenness

What do those nature exposures mean when they add up over a lifetime?

Previous research suggested that neighborhood vegetation might reduce obesity, promote physical activity, and improve mental health and heart health. Yet most of these studies looked only at one point in time -- making it tricky to tease out whether living on a green block actually made people healthier or whether healthier people just chose to live in greener neighborhoods.

Adding to the problem, urban dwellers often pay a premium for access to green space. If wealthier people are more likely to live in greener areas and wealthier people also are more likely to have better health outcomes, maybe it's their wealth -- and not exposure to nature -- that's making them healthier.

James and his colleagues at Harvard set out to examine the association between greenness and mortality in a large, ongoing study of nurses living in mostly urban areas around the country. In gathering data repeatedly on the nurses over time (and the terminal nature of the chosen endpoint -- death) it was more likely that any association between greenness and mortality was actually due to the greenness and not some other factor.

And the fact that all study participants shared the same occupation -- nursing -- made it less likely that socioeconomics would confound their results.

In a2016 study, the researchers reported that nurses with high levels of greenness surrounding their homes over the course of the eight-year study were about 12 percent less likely to die during that period than nurses living in the least green areas. The associations were strongest for respiratory, cancer, and kidney disease-related deaths.

They found that the association between greenness and mortality appeared to be explained by women living in greener neighborhoods experiencing less depression, higher levels of social engagement, more physical activity and lower exposures to air pollutants than their peers living in less green neighborhoods.

A Natural Experiment

"If nature can make us feel better in the general sense, then we should be able to see measurable differences in human health," said Donovan, who studies the social and health benefits provided by urban trees.

Under normal circumstances, he said, studying how large-scale changes in foliage over time impact the health of communities would take ages. It could take a generation or more before newly planted trees form a mature urban tree canopy.

Yet nature set up the experimental conditions Donovan needed to study the relationship between trees and health outcomes. The loss of more than 100 million ash trees over the last decade and a half has drastically changed the landscape in many U.S. cities -- making them a perfect laboratory to study the relationship between tree cover and health.

"Exposure to vegetation can be very restorative, but design does matter."-William Sullivan, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignThe culprit? A shiny green beetle named the emerald ash borer. The ash borer, native to Asia, first turned up in Detroit in 2002. It's been spreading across the Northeastern U.S. since, leaving behind a trail of dead ash trees.

Using the presence of the ash borer as an indicator for tree loss, Donovan and his colleagues showed an increase in deaths associated with the presence of the beetle. In counties across a 15-state area, Donovan attributed about 15,000 additional heart disease-related deaths and about 6,000 respiratory disease-related deaths to a loss of trees caused by the emerald ash borer. They publishedtheir results in 2013.

"The magnitude of the effect was really eye-opening," Donovan said.

New Tools to Quantify Effects

Studies such as Donavan's natural experiment with the emerald ash borer give experts confidence that nature really is affecting health -- that researchers haven't just stumbled upon a giant set of coincidences.

Yet more science is needed "to tell us the conditions under which nature will and will not improve health, and how to use nature to improve health," said Ming Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Exposure to vegetation can be very restorative, but design does matter," said William Sullivan, a landscape architect also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hacking your way through an overgrown lot, for instance, may not have the same calming or restorative effect as a casual stroll through a grove of trees or an urban park.

As landscape architects move toward creating more ecologically healthy landscapes that foster ecosystem services -- for instance flood mitigation or temperature regulation -- it's important to understand the human health implications too, Sullivan said. For instance, are you creating a reservoir for mosquitoes, ticks or other insects that could be carrying disease?

"We need information on how exposure to different forms of green space impact health, how much exposure people need, and what kind of designs -- arrangements of plants, types of plants -- are healthy for the environment and for people," he said.

"Planting trees can literally save the lives of people."-Satoshi Hirabayashi, The Davey Tree Expert Company, US Forest ServiceResearchers now are developing tools that may soon answer some of these questions. Satoshi Hirabayashi, an environmental engineer at The Davey Tree Expert Company and the US Forest Service in Syracuse, New York, studies how much air pollution is removed by different types of trees and then estimates how those reductions in air pollution benefit human health. Previous studies suggest as many as 135,000 US deaths annually can be attributed to ground level ozone and fine particulate matter. Trees absorb some of those airborne particles by trapping them on their leaves and bark while gaseous pollutants are taken in through the leaf stomata.

Hirabayashi and colleagues are developing a national database that will allow users to quantify the air quality and related human health benefits associated with any forested area anywhere in the US. "We will be able to show people what kind of air pollution removal is going on in their own backyard," he said.

So far, they've shown that tree type matters and that urban trees give more bang for the buck when it comes to health benefits. Evergreens do a better job of removing pollutants year-round than deciduous trees, which drop their leaves in the fall, Hirabayashi found. And while rural areas experience more total air pollution removal from trees than urban areas (due to more tree cover in rural areas), the effects of that air pollution removal on human health appear greatest in urban areas where the most people are concentrated.

Urban forest managers and city planners around the country have begun using this technology to better understand the health savings associated with city trees on both a community and backyard level using tools such as i-Tree Eco and i-Tree Design, according to Hirabayashi. These programs can estimate air quality and associated human health benefits anywhere in the US.

"Planting trees can literally save the lives of people," he said.

Read more:
Trees, Science and the Goodness of Green Space - Truth-Out

In my experience, there are two kinds of science fiction that tend to make their way to movie audiences: action blockbusters with a veneer of futuristic technology like The Terminator or The Matrix, or glorified disaster movies depicting the triumph of the human spirit (Armageddon and The Martian spring to mind). Those sorts of movies are fine, sometimes great; occasionally, though, a more thoughtful, emotional, personal take on sci-fi squeaks through the Hollywood machine, a Moon, or a Children of Men, or more recently an Arrival. These films follow a more literary tradition of science fiction, in the vein of Robert A. Heinlein or Philip K. Dick; they ask big questions about human nature and how we might act and think in an uncertain future.

Ive always been drawn to these types of stories, whether they be on film, in print, or (rarely) in theater. Thats what I attempt to create in Lazarus. Its sci-fi with a heart, focused on people rather than spectacle. It builds a speculative world of the future, but with an emphasis on timeless aspects of human nature that make it relevant today.

The imaginative seed for this play was a dream, if you can believe that. No, even more cryptic: it was a scrawled note on my nightstand, written by a 4 AM me recently woken from a dream Ill probably never remember. Four words, barely legible: I sell life, secondhand. Reading those words, I get a vague image of a man. A doctor. Disgraced, reduced to patching up criminals in abandoned buildings. Hes bored, hes tired, hes forgotten the why behind his work. He sells lifeis there any idea more dystopian than that? Life as a commodity, bought, sold, traded.

From this seed sprung Lazarus. Its the 2160s. The Lazarus procedure has revolutionized medicine and made it possible to live foreverfor the right price. The wealthy have achieved functional immortality, while the poor, the genetically inferior, the Plebes scrabble along underfoot.

Dax, the doctor born from my dream, helped develop the procedure and was an early recipient of it, but later fell from grace and now operates on wealthy felons as a back-alley cut man. When a woman comes to him asking for help with her dying infant, hes forced to question what immortality really means: is it simply his continued existence, or might it be the mark he leaves on the world?

Ive thought a lot about death and mortality in the past few years. Too many loved ones exist now only in memory. Im not alone in this, of course, but thats precisely the point, thats the human condition. Science fiction gives me the freedom to explore a world where that human condition has changed, while still getting at some fundamental truths from our collective experience of loss, grief, and hope in the face of it all.

Its my hope that audiences for this show will think about their own views on life and death, the world that theyll leave behind, and what resonance their life will have after they move on. Given the current state of our country, I think that idea weighs heavy on many of our minds: what world will we leave our children? What legacy will we leave as a nation, as a generation, as a human race? Moreover, what will our personal immortality be? What will remain of us when we are gone?

Tickets for Lazarus

Evan Crump is an award-winning playwright and actor in the DC area. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Unstrung Harpist Productions, which won Best Drama at the 2010 Fringe Festival for his play Genesis. He has an MFA in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature from Mary Baldwin University and the American Shakespeare Center, and is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at The George Washington University. Between this and his work for companies like the Kennedy Center, WSC Avant Bard, First Stage, and NextStop, he still finds the time to be a long-suffering DC sports fan.

Originally posted here:
Lazarus. A Fringe Peek - DC Theatre Scene

Adam and Eve lost it, alchemists tried to brew it and, if you believe the legends, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon was searching for it when he discovered Florida.

To live forever while preserving health and retaining the semblance and vigor of youth is one of humanity's oldest and most elusive goals.

Now, after countless false starts and disappointments, some scientists say we could finally be close to achieving lifetimes that are, if not endless, at least several decades longer. This modern miracle, they say, will come not from drinking revitalizing waters or from transmuted substances, but from a scientific understanding of how aging affects our bodies at thecellular and molecular levels.

Whether through genetic tinkering or technology that mimics the effects of caloric restrictionstrategies that have successfully extended the lives of flies, worms and micea growing number of scientists now think that humans could one day routinely live to 140 years of age or more.

Extreme optimists such asAubrey de Gray think the maximum human lifespan could be extended indefinitely, but such visions of immortality are dismissed by most scientists as little more than science fiction.

While scientists go back and forth on the feasibility of slowing, halting or even reversing the aging process, ethicists and policymakers have quietly been engaged in a separate debate about whether it is wise to actually do so.

A doubled lifespan

If scientists could create a pill that let you live twice as long while remaining free of infirmities, would you take it?

If one considers only the personal benefits that longer life would bring, the answer might seem like a no-brainer: People could spend more quality time with loved ones; watch future generations grow up; learn new languages; master new musical instruments; try different careers or travel the world.

But what about society as a whole? Would it be better off if life spans were doubled? The question is one of growing relevance, and serious debate about it goes back at least a few years to the Kronos Conference on Longevity Health Sciences in Arizona.

Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLAs School of Public Health, answered the question with an emphatic "Yes."

A doubled lifespan, Stock said, would "give us a chance to recover from our mistakes, lead us towards longer-term thinking and reduce healthcare costs by delaying the onset of expensive diseases of aging. It would also raise productivity by adding to our prime years."

Bioethicist Daniel Callahan, a cofounder of the Hastings Center in New York, didn't share Stocks enthusiasm. Callahans objections were practical ones. For one thing, he said, doubling life spans wont solve any of our current social problems.

"We have war, poverty, all sorts of issues around, and I don't think any of them would be at all helped by having people live longer," Callahan said in a recent telephone interview. "The question is, 'What will we get as a society?' I suspect it won't be a better society."

Others point out that a doubling of the human lifespan will affect society at every level. Notions about marriage, family and work will change in fundamental ways, they say, as will attitudes toward the young and the old.

Marriage and family

Richard Kalish, a psychologist who considered the social effects of life extension technologies, thinks a longer lifespan will radically change how we view marriage.

In todays world, for example, a couple in their 60s who are stuck in a loveless but tolerable marriage might decide to stay together for the remaining 15 to 20 years of their lives out of inertia or familiarity. But if that same couple knew they might have to suffer each other's company for another 60 or 80 years, their choice might be different.

Kalish predicted that as life spans increase, there will be a shift in emphasis from marriage as a lifelong union to marriage as a long-term commitment. Multiple, brief marriages could become common.

A doubled lifespan will reshape notions of family life in other ways, too, says Chris Hackler, head of the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas.

If multiple marriages become the norm as Kalish predicts, and each marriage produces children, then half-siblings will become more common, Hackler points out. And if couples continue the current trend of having children beginning in their 20s and 30s, then eight or even 10 generations might be alive simultaneously, Hackler said.

Furthermore, if life extension also increases a woman's period of fertility, siblings could be born 40 or 50 years apart. Such a large age difference would radically change the way siblings or parents and their children interact with one other.

"If we were 100 years younger than our parents or 60 years apart from our siblings, that would certainly create a different set of social relationships," Hackler told LiveScience.

The workplace

For most people, living longer will inevitably mean more time spent working. Careers will necessarily become longer, and the retirement age will have to bepushed back , not only so individuals can support themselves, but to avoid overtaxing a nations social security system.

Advocates ofanti-aging research say that working longer might not be such a bad thing. With skilled workers remaining in the workforce longer, economic productivity would go up. And if people got bored with their jobs, they could switch careers.

But such changes would carry their own set of dangers, critics say.

Competition for jobs would become fiercer as "mid-life re-trainees" beginning new careers vie with young workers for a limited number of entry-level positions.

Especially worrisome is the problem of workplace mobility, Callahan said.

"If you have people staying in their jobs for 100 years, that is going to make it really tough for young people to move in and get ahead," Callahan explained. "If people like the idea of delayed gratification, this is going to be a wonderful chance to experience it."

Callahan also worries that corporations and universities could become dominated by a few individuals if executives, managers and tenured professors refuse to give up their posts. Without a constant infusion of youthful talent and ideas, these institutions could stagnate.

Hackler points out that the same problem could apply to politics. Many elected officials have term limits that prevent them from amassing too much power. But what about federal judges, who are appointed for life?

"Justices sitting on the bench for a hundred years would have a powerful influence on the shape of social institutions," Hackler writes.

Time to act

A 2003 staff working paper drawn up by the U.S. Presidents Council of Bioethicsthen headed by Leon Kass, a longtime critic of attempts to significantly extend the human lifespanstated that anti-aging advances would redefine social attitudes toward the young and the old, and not in good ways.

The nation might commit less of its intellectual energy and social resources to the cause of initiating the young, and more to the cause of accommodating the old, the paper stated. Also, quality of life might suffer. A world that truly belonged to the living would be very different, and perhaps a much diminished, world, focused too narrowly on maintaining life and not sufficiently broadly on building the good life."

While opinions differ wildly about what the ramifications for society will be if the human lifespan is extended, most ethicists agree that the issue should be discussed now, since it might be impossible to stop or control the technology once it's developed.

"If this could ever happen, then we'd better ask what kind of society we want to get, Callahan said. We had better not go anywhere near it until we have figured those problems out."

See the article here:
Toward Immortality: The Social Burden of Longer Lives

A so called "immortality mushroom" was discovered by chance in the Kaz Mountains of western Turkey's anakkale province.

The "Reishi mushroom," also known as the immortality mushroom, is one of the 32 local species that grows in abundance in the Kaz Mountains. The inedible mushroom, which is used by the pharmaceutical industry, could be a new source of income for villagers in the region. Mehmet zen, a retired forest worker who lives in the rplar Village on the northern slopes of the Kaz Mountains, entered the forest looking for edible mushrooms when he encountered a species under some tree trunks that he had never seen before.

zen began to research his discovery, eventually determining that he had found the rare Reishi mushroom, nicknamed the immortality mushroom for its uses in curing diseases. "After learning that these mushrooms could be sold for 1,000 Turkish liras ($285) per kilogram, I thought that it could be a new income source for the villagers. However, because many of them do not know the value of the Reishi mushroom, villagers do not pick it," zen explained.

Reishi mushrooms, belonging to the Polyporaceae family of fungi, can be processed and sold as tea, capsules or liquids, thus having a significant economic value.

Reishi mushrooms have been used medicinally for 4000 years, especially in traditional China medicine. Though not edible in its full form, Reishi mushrooms have a bitter taste and are most commonly ground into a fine powder and dissolved in water.

More:
'Immortality mushroom' discovered in mountains of western Turkey's anakkale - Daily Sabah

Photo Credit: itzik Bellenitzki / TPS

Immortality may be a long way off, but for men it may be about to become a little bit closer.

Researchers at the University of Haifa have discovered a genetic mutation on a growth hormone receptor that could add as much as a decade to life expectancy for males.

We knew in the past that genetic paths related to growth hormone are connected to longevity and now we have discovered a specific mutation that is directly involved [in longevity], said Prof. Gil Atzmon, who runs Haifa Universitys aging and longevity lab and was the lead researcher on the study.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, looked at data from Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and then compared the findings with three other centenarian populations from France and the United States.

The researchers found that in all of the centenarian groups studied, a deletion of the growth hormone receptor Exon 3 was not only a marker of exceptional longevity, but it also made them taller.

The mutation was found at a rate about three times higher among the centenarians than in the control group of 70 year olds, but only among men.

In nature, explains Atzmon, smaller species usually enjoy longer life-expectancy than large ones for example ponies generally outlive horses and small dogs generally outlive larger ones. But in the study group those with the mutation received less growth hormone, yet grew taller by about three centimeters and lived longer by about 10 years on average.

While Atzmon says that clearly the mutation is not the only factor responsible for longevity among the centenarians, its presence was an almost certain marker for longevity.

Now our goal is to fully understand the mechanisms of the mutation and enable life extension while maintaining quality of life, says Atzmon.

Originally posted here:
Israeli Researchers Find Male-Only Longevity Gene MutationThe ... - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

Misao Okawa of Japan, who died April 1, 2015, was the world's oldest woman at 117.

For John Harris, saving a life and delaying its end is one and the same. Using this logic, Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester, England, figures that scientists have a moral duty to extend the human life span as far as it will go, even if it means creating beings that live forever.

"When you save a life, you are simply postponing death to another point," Harris told LiveScience. "Thus, we are committed to extending life indefinitely if we can, for the same reasons that we are committed to life-saving."

But the loss of a child and the passing of an elderly person are not the same thing at all, says Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center in New York. The first is premature, while the latter comes, hopefully, at the end of a well-lived life.

"The death of an elderly person is sad, because we lose them and they lose us, but it's not tragic," Callahan said. "One can't say this is a deranged universe to live in because people die of old age."

This is just one of several ethical and moral arguments that have cropped up in recent years as labs around the world aim at the dream of immortality, or at least to extend lives well beyond the century mark. Among other debates:

A world of 112-year-olds

The life expectancy for the average American is 77.6 years. Extending life spans will be an incremental process, most experts say. But there is great promise.

A 1990 study by University of Chicago biodemographer Jay Olshansky and colleagues calculated that even if the risk of death from cancer in the United States were reduced to zero, average life expectancy would increase by only 2.7 years. If the risks from heart disease, stroke and diabetes were also eliminated, life expectancy would increase by another 14 years, the researchers found.

In contrast, repeated experiments have shown rodents fed 40 percent fewer calories live about 40 percent longer. For reasons that are unclear, this "caloric restriction" regimen also postpones the onset of many degenerative diseases normally associated with aging.

If these effects can be replicated in humans, the average person could live to be 112 years old and our maximum life span could be extended to 140 years, says Richard Miller, a pathologist who does aging research at the University of Michigan.

The moral imperative

Furthermore, if rodent experiments are any guide, the future's elderly will be fitter, Miller said, with the average 90-year-old resembling todays 50-year-olds in mind and body.

For these reasons, Miller believes aging research could have a far greater impact on improving public health than trying to cure diseases individually.

If youre really interested in increasing healthy lifespan, aging research is more likely to get you there in a quick and cost-efficient way than trying to conquer one disease at a time," Miller told Live Science.

If extending life also prolongs health, as animal studies suggest, then the argument for anti-aging research being a moral imperative is strengthened, says Harris, the University of Manchester bioethicist.

"It is one thing to ask, 'Should we make people immortal?' and answer in the negative. It is quite another to ask whether we should make people immune toheart disease , cancer, dementia, and many other diseases and decide that we should not, Harris contends.

But even if humanity decides to green-light anti-aging research on moral grounds, other thorny ethical issues remain, ethicists say. Uppermost among these is the problem of social injustice.

Who will have access?

Most scientists and ethicists agree that life-extension technology will likely be very expensive when first developed, so only a small number of wealthy individuals will be able to afford it. Existing social disparities between rich and poor could become even more pronounced.

The fortunate few who could afford the therapy would not only have significantly longer lives, but more opportunities to amass wealth or political power and to gain control of economic or even cultural institutions, critics say.

Harris points out, however, that the modern world is already rife with similar injustices. The average life expectancy of people in the United States, for example, is about 78 years, but only 34 years in Botswana, which has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in Africa. In Ethiopia, where HIV infection is much less prevalent, life expectancy is 49 years.

Developed nations also have access to medicines and life-saving procedures, such as organ transplants, that are beyond the reach of poor nations. Yet Americans dont typically consider themselves wicked because they have access to things like kidney transplants while people in other countries dont.

Similarly, Harris says, the fact that only the rich would have access to life extension technology is not a good enough reason to ban it. For one thing, denying life-treatments to one group of people will not save another. Secondly, new technologies often start off expensive but become cheaper and more widely available with time.

"Injustice may be justifiable in the short term because that is the only way to move to a position where greater justice can be done," Harris told LiveScience. "Thats true of all technologies.

Centuries of torment

Another thing to consider is the effect longer lifetimes will have on some of our cherished values, ethicists say. For example, in the United States, the right to life is considered something that every person is entitled to, and both suicide and euthanasia are considered culturally and socially unacceptable.

But in a world where human lives are measured not in decades, but in centuries, or millennia, these values might need to be re-examined. One reason: Immortality will not mean invincibility. Diseases and wars will still kill, strokes will still maim and depression will still be around to blunt the joys of living.

The question of when, if ever, is it okay for someone to end their own life or to have someone else end it for them is already a topic of fierce debate. An answer will become even more essential if by telling someone they must live, we condemn them to not just years, but decades or centuries of torment.

Generational cleansing

Also,Earth can support only so many people . If everyone lived longer, generations would have to be born farther apart to avoid overcrowding.

To ensure ample generational turnover, Harris says, society might need to resort to some kind of "generational cleansing, which would be difficult to justify. This would involve people collectively deciding what length is reasonable for a generation to live and then ensuring individuals died once they reached the end of their term.

Such actions would require radical shifts in our attitudes about suicide and euthanasia, Harris said. People would either have to stop thinking that saving lives is important, or theyll have to stop thinking that there is something wrong with deliberately bringing about death at a certain point.

We've grown up with a certain set of expectations about life and death, and if those expectations change, a lot of other things will have to change as well, Harris said.

Go here to see the original:
The Ethical Dilemmas of Immortality

Its fair to say that U.S. culture obsesses over youthfulness. But its certainly not the only one. Dreams of immortality and everlasting youth have been a part of the popular imagination for millennia, and the quest continues today. Yet while most anti-aging products out there target the signs of aging that affect your body, a new cannabis study suggests a daily dose of THC can actually reverse the aging of the brain.

Teams from the University of Bonn and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a leader in medical cannabis research, came together to study how daily micro-doses of THC effected the aging process of brain cells.

Their subjects were mice, not humans. But the results were remarkable. Of course, mice dont live nearly as long as we do and their brains are much simpler. But they do live long enough and are complex enough that researchers can observe the effects of aging.

When the brain ages, it slows down. Older people literally get slower. The nerve impulses and transmissions take longer to reach their destinations. As a result, as we age our brains begin to lose cognitive functions like memory, the ability to learn new things, and motor coordination.

But with a little help from a daily dose of THC, the psychoactive cannabinoid found in cannabis, researchers found that many of those functions can be temporarily and significantly restored.

In short, THC helped turn old brains into young brains again. Or in the words of Professor Andreas Zimmer, The treatment completely reversed the loss of performance in the old animals.

In the study, researchers used mice of different age groups. The mice performed memory, recognition, and navigation tasks.

The younger mice completed the tasks with no problems when they were sober, not under the influence of THC. Presumably, this is because their younger brains were sharper. However, when researchers began giving the young mice adaily dose of THC, they began to significantly struggle with the puzzles.

The story was the complete opposite with the older mice. They struggled with the challenges without THC. But a daily dose of THC soon began to dramatically increase their brain performance, up to the same level as the younger mice.

Specifically, the study said that in terms of memory and learning, the older mice were able to regress to the state of atwo-month-old mouse.

These findings, while still at the level of animal testing, show significant promise for aging humans.

Co-authors Zimmer and Svenja Schulze believe a THC daily dose could be an effective alternative for treating problems like dementia. They hope to begin trials on humans later this year.

One thing that remains to be seen is whether the psychoactive effects of cannabis will produce different results in humans than in mice. According to the researchers, THC did not appear to influence the mice in the same way as humans.

In other words, the daily dose of THC didnt make the mice get high. However, there could be other negative side-effects for human brains. The research is of course still in the very early phases.

Restrictions on the legal research of medical cannabis in the United States and the UK have slowed the teams progress. So its unlikely that doctors will be prescribed THC for older folks memory problems anytime soon.

Nevertheless, the findings are extremely promising. As researchers discovered, brain health is very closely linked to the endocannabinoid system. Comprised of the neural pathways and receptors specially designed for cannabinoids, that system is essential in preventing brain deterioration. Its what makes cannabis such an effective medicine for neurological diseases like Alzheimers and epilepsy.

Weve written elsewhere about how cannabis can help save the United States medicare and medicaid programs. Thats because medical cannabis is a safe and cheap alternative to costly prescription drugs.

But if cannabis can help reduce the number of seniors needing care, it can help reduce the countrys healthcare costs even further. One of the studys co-authors, Dr. Andras Bilkei-Gorzo, is very optimistic in this regard. She told the Guardian, If we can rejuvenate the brain so that everybody gets five to ten more years without needed extra care, then that is more than we could have imagined.

Read this article:
Study: Daily Dose of THC Can Reverse Aging of Brain - Green Rush Daily

Oh dear. I have seen the future and I think it works. So if were going to worry wed better get moving because it certainly is.

I say all this after my first day at Moses Znaimers 18th ideacity conference (you can watch the free live stream at ideacity.ca, and that is also where the talks will be archived), where it was clear by lunch that many medical breakthroughs I thought decades away are at the door or in the vestibule. As for lunch itself, get ready for beef made from plants that you cant tell from the real thing. I know. I ate some. Im telling you, this stuff isnt just coming. Its here.

We got a fascinating look at the rapid evolution of organ transplants, including a machine wheeled out on stage with a pig lung inside being aerated, irrigated and generally kept alive. I never thought before about what the outside of a lung looks like. Very cool, and very practical. But were not just talking better lung transplants.

In the near future it would not just be possible for two men or women to have a biological child. One person could be both father and mother

Were talking titanium bones, designer children and artificial wombs. And while I dont know that preventative repair medicine will ever really let us live forever, barring accidents, one presenter argued convincingly that in the near future it would not just be possible for two men or women to have a biological child. One person could be both father and mother, using a sperm and an egg manufactured from their skin cells. But wait. You also get

Gene sequencing for that or any other child. Eliminating genetic defects that cause inherited degenerative diseases is hard to oppose. But why stop there? All sorts of things are drawbacks in life, including being short. And we may soon be able to edit them out with the new, astonishingly fast and cheap CRISPR/Cas9 method. Or its successors successor.

Dont get me wrong. The conference has been thought-provoking, rigorous yet accessible and highly relevant, including a fascinating, high-spirited talk on the human digestive tract. But its also been disquieting.

Presenter Andrew Stark did warn that living forever might bring all the pains we associate with mortality without even any prospect of an end to them. He said the problem isnt that we die, its that we live in time. And if hes right, then doing it longer, taller and sexier with custom earlobes wont help. (The immortality that writers like C.S. Lewis and Russell Kirk depict involves a radically different relationship to time that no amount of technique can deliver.)

A number of other speakers also touched on the need to debate the ethical issues. I myself would prefer to debate the morality but on the way to turning plants into meat and skin into sperm, scientific technique evidently transformed that old junk from the everyday concern of ordinary people to the arcane preserve of experts who have, sadly, no fixed points by which to navigate. Once we can choose what is right, in biology or morality, we have no basis for preferring any particular choice, which paradoxically gives us no place to stop and no basis for proceeding either.

To pick one example from the buffet, a presenter enthused about, as he put it, producing beef, pork or chicken from plants. But if were not stuck getting meat from a cow, why are we stuck with cow meat? Why not bork or picken? Or something radically new? To infinity and beyond!

But if were not stuck getting meat from a cow, why are we stuck with cow meat? Why not bork or picken? Or something radically new? To infinity and beyond!

If I were at the conference to cast my habitual pall of gloom over such prospects I would caution that many of our current problems stem from decades of exactly this blithe confidence and blind determination to improve on nature through technique. Food science, ingeniously combining heat, pressure and chemicals to turn plants into things never before eaten, from margarine to high fructose corn syrup, with flavours unknown to nature, already gave us Jacked Ranch Dipped Hot Wings Doritos that, Mark Schatzker notes in The Dorito Effect, have 34 ingredients. And it gave us an obesity crisis. How likely is it that food that tastes, smells, and otherwise behaves even less like what it is will make us healthy and happy next time?

I would also note that the tone of ideacity is, unsurprisingly, strongly environmentalist. Yet these projects are so stunningly unnatural that one presenter concluded cheerfully with Its Brave New World, possibly unaware that Huxleys novel was an agonized cry of warning and protest. But Im not here to cast a pall of gloom over such visions. Im here to cast a pall of gloom over the UN on Friday.

So for now Im a weatherman, whose main job is not to complain that wind blows dust into your eyes. Its to say theres wind coming, or a gale or even a hurricane. And the experts gathered here already convinced me a radical future is blowing in hard. And fast.

National Post

Original post:
John Robson: A radical future isn't just coming. It's arriving, now, and perhaps we should give some thought to it? - National Post

According to Greek mythology, when you consume ambrosia, the blood running through your veins is replaced with ichor, a golden fluid. Ambrosia, consumed only by gods and goddesses, grants immortality.

Ambrosia is also the name of a startup that aims to combat aging. Rather than golden fluid flowing through the veins of gods, the company's product is the blood of the young actual blood, donated by adults up to age 25 which it will inject in customers 35 and older who have $8,000 to spare.

The question remains: Do young blood injections actually work? Are we just a needle prick away from sweet, fresh-faced longevity?

"I know what you're thinking," said Ambrosia founder Jesse Karmazin in an interview. "Is it all just, like, Silicon Valley tech people?"

It's true: Silicon Valley has a fascination with immortality. Investors have poured billions into longevity research and startups. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the billionaire Facebook board member and adviser to Trump, has invested millions into anti-aging medicine. Ambrosia hasn't raised any capital yet, and Karmazin told me that the company has no affiliation with Thiel.

Actually, Karmazin said, Ambrosia's client base is "a real mix of different types of people."

Karmazin said that it's mostly Americans currently undergoing the treatment, with slightly more men than women. He said the company has treated doctors, lawyers, biotech CEOs, someone with a theater background and other individuals from a variety of different industries.

A quote from Jesse Karmazin

Ambrosia currently has two clinics, one in Florida and one in San Francisco. "The treatment is large: It's two liters, which is a pretty significant amount of blood. It's like four pints if you use the American measuring system."

Still, for $8,000 a pop, blood injections are meant for customers who tend to have a little more disposable income. Ambrosia may not be affordable for everyone, but the pricing is reportedly at cost for now; Ambrosia isn't making any money from it yet.

The company gets its spritely plasma from blood donors. It buys blood from blood banks, an industry Karmazin noted is both heavily regulated and expensive.

Karmazin said that the company has both subjective and objective evidence that its treatment is conclusive. He mentioned clients who looked younger after the treatment, as well as people having more energy, sleeping better and feeling stronger. He also noted that people have had "dramatic improvements in Alzheimer's disease."

From an objective standpoint, Karmazin said the Ambrosia treatment can improve cholesterol, amyloid levels plaques in the brain and cancer risk.

"I want to be clear, at this point, it works," Karmazin said. "It reverses aging. We're pretty clear at this point. This is conclusive. We are probably done with the clinical trial. It worked so well, we're going to start treating people. We're pretty amazed with this. Yeah, no, it works, there's really no question whether it works or not."

"I want to be clear, at this point, it works," Karmazin said. "It reverses aging. We're pretty clear at this point. This is conclusive. There's really no question."

But the lack of science casts doubt on Karmazin's confidence.

Evidence on the Ambrosia website includes a handful of links to both human clinical trials and mouse experimental studies. Of the six total human clinical trials included, one is sponsored by Ambrosia. The study was first received in June of 2016. The longest trial dates back to September 2014. The trials aren't yet completed. Some of then haven't even started enrolling yet. And they're small one has just 18 people. Phuoc V. Le, an assistant professor in the school of Public Health at University of California Berkeley and associate professor of Internal Medicine at UC San Francisco School of Medicine, said a clinical trial of this size is "minuscule" and just a first step to make sure there aren't any adverse reactions.

"Something like this needs to have large clinical trials for years before they can make claims as hefty as what they're making," Le told Mic. He added that "this is years and years away" and that that is something consumers need to be aware of. "This is an unproven remedy."

A quote from Phuoc V. Le

Nir Barzilai, a professor of endocrinology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director of Einstein's Institute for Aging Research, also agreed that Ambrosia's treatment can't be called conclusive just yet.

There would have to be clinical trials where some elderly participants receive infusions of something else rather than the blood from younger people because the placebo effect in such trials is high, he said.

Derek Huffman, assistant professor of molecular pharmacology and medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in an email that the willingness to treat individuals with transfusions for aging at this point is, in his view, "a distortion of the studies it is based on, and an example of an idea getting too far ahead of the science." He added that "this is not to say that this burgeoning area of science is not promising, and that related strategies will not one day come to fruition to successfully target aging, but they will require a much more targeted and fine-tuned approach than is being suggested here.

Le noted that for vulnerable populations, such as people suffering from stroke or early-onset Alzheimer's or dementia, they can't and don't want to wait, so it's dangerous for Ambrosia to make promises of reversal or amelioration of their conditions that are inconclusive, and at a considerable cost.

"For example, if I had early-onset dementia and I lived in Palo Alto and I'm a retiree and I'm living off of social security but I saved up $8,000, and I've seen my parents die of dementia, and saw how bad it was, I might consider spending essentially my savings on something that is unproven," Le said. "Although they are selling it as, not a cure-all, but potentially life-altering and so I worry that it's clearly not coercion but I worry that that people will fall into this trap of spending big bucks and not getting approving benefits."

It's also important to consider the ethical implications of companies like Ambrosia. As Karmazin mentioned, the company gets it plasma by purchasing blood from blood banks. If this type of treatment were to scale up, and companies had millions of people using it, the demand for young blood would be astronomical.

"Could we see a day when young people are selling their blood on the open market for companies like Ambrosia?" Le hypothesized. "And then what do we do in terms of balancing the public good? Meaning, if I were a patient in a hospital and I required plasma because I have a really bad medical condition, but maybe the Red Cross can't get any, because people would rather sell their blood to a company than to donate their blood because it's a limited public good."

Le compared this commodification of blood to the organ black markets in developing countries, noting how this can disproportionately coerce and hurt the poor while benefiting the wealthy. Someone can donate their kidney to a rich person and, as he noted, the type of individual to do this is someone extremely impoverished.

If large clinical trials do bear out, great. But Le believes there could be more benefits yielded from that type of research than just an outpatient elective treatment like Ambrosia. He said that we should figure out what is in plasma that actually confers the benefits, and potentially try and isolate that.

Le said that perhaps medical experts can make plasma synthetically, from animals or in a way that doesn't commodify a public good like blood. That way, it "can provide benefit not just to the rich or to the extremely desperate but also make it available equally to all people."

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Inside Ambrosia: Could infusions of millennial blood make you ... - Mic - Mic

While it is easy to forget about sage until Thanksgiving dinner comes around once a year, this herb is such an impressive natural remedy that you might want to give it some year-round attention.

As early as the tenth century Arab doctors prescribed sage (Salvia officinalis) as capable of producing immortality. While it may not help you to live forever, it might help you live longer and with a greater quality of life due to its many health-promoting properties, some of which include:

Sage is a great all-natural memory booster. A British research team conducted a study of sages therapeutic properties on a group of 44 adults between the ages of 18 and 37. Some participants were given capsules of sage oil, while others were given a placebo of sunflower oil. Results showed that those who took the sage oil performed significantly better on memory tests than those who took the placebo. The people who were given sage as part of the study had improvements in both immediate and delayed word recall scores, as well as mood improvements. Additional research by the same scientific team led them to conclude that sage may also be helpful for those suffering from Alzheimers disease.

While sage is showing promise in the treatment of brain disease, its also beneficial to the brain in healthy individuals. In research a number of significant effects on cognition were noted with the sage species Salvia lavandulifolia. The effects included improvements in both immediate and delayed word recall scores, mood and overall cognition. It appears to work by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. This enzyme breaks down the essential neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which plays a role in mood regulation, brain-muscle coordination, and the formation of new memories. Since acetylcholine tends to be depleted in patients with Alzheimers disease, sage may be helpful in the treatment of Alzheimers.

Sage has a proven history of boosting memory and alleviating menopausal and PMS symptoms, but perhaps the most exciting benefit of sage essential oil is that it may actually protect genes from damage. According to a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, compounds in sage may protect DNA from damage and even stimulate DNA repair in already-damaged cells. While the research is new and the effect has not been tested in humans, this exciting advance could help in the prevention and treatment of genetic diseases as well as diseases with a genetic component, like cancer and heart disease.

Sage has been found to be so powerful in its ability to treat Alzheimers disease that the German Ministry of Health is currently considering adding sage as a treatment for Alzheimers disease to its Commission E Monographsa compilation of the safety and effectiveness of herbs. While there are various species of sage, the one most commonly found to be beneficial for Alzheimers disease is Salvia lavandulifolia.

Because of its estrogen-like properties, sage can help balance hormones in menstruating, nursing and menopausal women. It may decrease excessive menstruation and lactation and alleviate menopausal symptoms like hot flashes. Inhalation of or massage with diluted sage essential oil is the most direct route of affecting hormones; however, using the herbal extract in tea or tincture form can also be helpful.

The German government already recognizes sage as a treatment for dyspepsia, excessive perspiration, and inflammation of the mouth and nose. (Dyspepsia is a medical term for gas, bloating, burning, and general discomfort of the upper abdomen.)

More than just seasoning for stuffing a turkey, fresh or dried sage is an excellent addition to soups, stews and other savory dishes. Add it toward the end of the cooking time, as excessive cooking can damage some of its therapeutic compounds. You can also use sage for tea: use one teaspoon of dried herb per cup of hot water and allow the tea to steep for 10 to 15 minutes before drinking two to three times daily. As with all herbs, fresh sage is best, but feel free to use dried if thats all you have access to. Remember that sage is potent medicine, so if you are on any medication, consult with your doctor before taking it to avoid drug-herb interactions.

While sage is most commonly available as a dried herb, most of the health benefits demonstrated in studies have been achieved using sage oil capsules from the Salvia lavandulifolia plant. Because oil constituents vary by brand, follow label directions.

Related:Dont Believe in Herbal Medicine? 10 Things to Change Your MindThe 5 Best Herbs to Soothe Your NervesShould You Actually Starve a Fever?

Dr. Michelle Schoffro Cook, PhD, DNM is the publisher of the free e-news Worlds Healthiest News, president of PureFood BC, and an international best-selling and 20-time published book author whose works include the upcoming book: Be Your Own Herbalist: Essential Herbs for Health, Beauty & Cooking.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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6 Health Benefits and Uses for Sage - Care2.com