Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

For Christians, the soul is an integral part of who you are. You have a body and you have a soul and the two are connected. Even if they dont believe in the resurrection of the body, most Christians, in fact most Americans, believe in the immortality of the soul.

Even if youre not religious you probably refer to the soul as a sort of fluffy spiritual term for your personality or even just a euphemism for a life: maybe youve bought Chicken Soup for the Soul or offered to sell your soul to Satan. Souls are a part of pop culture as well as religious belief. But, leaving aside religion, what is a soul, exactly? Is it some kind of immaterial ghostly stuff that is only accidentally attached to the body? Or is it more substantial? And if it is, of what is it made? And where is it in your body?

Christianity did not invent the concept of the soul, but, like many other things, it inherited it from Greek philosophy. For Plato the soul was the better half of the two parts of the human person. There was there body, which was cumbersome, temporary, and decaying; and then there was the soul (psyche), the invisible seat of wisdom, which was immortal and effectively trapped by the body until death.

In his dialogue Phaedo (also known by the title On the Soul), Plato recounts the final days of Socrates, who explains that not only will his soul live on after it is released from the body, but will also be all the better for it. Without the chains of emotions and senses, he says, his soul will get closer to true, pure knowledge of the natural world. Plato was the first to describe the soul as an intangible, incorporeal essence.

The majority of ancient philosophers argued that the soul was made up of physical elements. The Presocratics believed that the soul was invisible but made up of tiny particles of air (which still counted as matter). The philosopher Democritus asserted that the soul was composed of the same tiny atoms that made up fire. Heat came to be associated with the soul because it was thought to be the element that sparked life.

Epicurus, founder of the famous Epicurean school of philosophy, also believed that the soul was made from bits of air and fire, but that it also contained some special, unidentified material that was responsible for sense perception. The Stoics believed the soul was made up of many parts (including air and fire), but that rather than controlling senses, it was the seat of rationality and mentality.

For those who thought that the soul was material, this led to another question: where is it located in your body? Ancient philosophers and philosophically educated doctors like Aristotle and Galen wanted to know. For many, the soul resided in one of the mysterious and generally misunderstood internal organs. The stomach in general and the kidneys and liver, in particular, were commonly believed to be the fleshy containers of the soul. But while ancient physicians and philosophers sometimes caught a glimpse inside the body when it was wounded in battle or by accident, human dissection was largely forbidden.

The two prime candidates for the location of the soul, however, were the heart and the head. Galen thought that the life and proper thinking of the body was sustained by pneuma, which flowed throughout the body, holding it in tension. The rational soul, on the other hand, he thought was something more akin to your disposition or rational faculties. It was affected by the humors, was resident in your brain, and was thoroughly mortal.

The notion of a force spread throughout the body became influential on Christian leaders. Nemesius, a fourth century Bishop of Emesa in Syria, thought that the incorporeal soul was spread throughout the body while particular faculties were resident in the brain.

As Jessica Wright, a researcher in the Society of Fellows at USC, emphasized in her dissertation, Nemesius argued that the brain (or at least the hollow spaces or ventricles in it) was an instrument of the soul. You might not expect it, but Nemesius theologically grounded account of the brains functioning has been, as Wright puts it, foundational in the dominant theories of brain function that developed within Arab-Islamic and European medicine.

In articulating his theory, Galen was disagreeing with Aristotle, who thought that the heart was the seat of the soul and the brain moderated the humors. Even as Galen was profoundly influential on later medicine, the revival of interest in Aristotle in the twelfth century meant that medieval thinkers generally accepted Aristotles arguments about the heart. Even Parcelsus (1493-1541), who criticized Aristotle, thought that the soul took up residence in the heart. The metaphor that the head is really a reference to the dueling legacies of Aristotle and Galen (even though Galen would have admitted that the heart and brain were related).

The very same questions arose during the Enlightenment in Europe. Changing social norms, the rise of medical education, and an emphasis on observation and experimentation allowed doctors to perform anatomical studies on human cadavers. Executed criminals provided anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius (in the 16th century) and William Harvey (in the 17th) the anatomical proof used to overturn Galen.

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Questions about the soul now became rooted in finding material evidence. Despite having no overriding religious agenda, those who argued for the presence of a material soul were labeled atheists, since it was presumed that this meant that human bodies operated like clocks, with all the material pieces merely doing their jobs, unimpeded by a higher power. The possibility of a material soul was even more worrying to Christians, who were concerned that a material soul might get trapped or destroyed.

The use of human bodies in medical experimentation also raised questions about the integrity of its parts, particularly when it came to debates on resurrection. Laws were enacted to ensure that all bodies received a Christian burial once they had served their purpose, but people still worried about the afterlife of those who had been cut open and dissected. What if pieces of them were missing?

Exploration of the New World and the racist caricatures of the Natives as cannibals that resulted, led to more extreme questions: what would happen to bodies and souls if they were torn apart and eaten? If the soul is made of matter and that matter is ingested and processed into nourishment by an animal (or a cannibal), would the soul still be intact? But whereas in Harry Potter, the division of the soul into Horcruxes renders it near impossible to destroy, Enlightenment Christians worried that they would be lost forever.

The truth was that cannibalism wasnt really a threat to Europeans, but scientific investigation into questions of human anatomy posed a huge danger to criminal bodies. Dissections often took place in public and authorities would threaten people that crimes would be punishable by dissection.

As Raphael Hulkower has written, the 1752 Murder Act that was passed in England made dissection part of the sentence of capital punishment. In the United States a 1790 law the only federal law relating to cadavers to be passed -- made it legal for a judge to add dissection to a death sentence for murder and a piece of 1784 Massachusetts legislation devised to outlaw dueling threatened deceased duelists with dissection. For people in general dissection was worse than death. As Hulkower puts it, While execution was a threat to ones life, dissection was an assault on ones soul.

The theatrical medicine of the nineteenth century brought still more questions about the integrity of the soul. Using electricity, Giovanni Aldini and Luigi Galvani began performing live resurrections in city squares. As the bodies and faces of the frogs and cows used in the experiments twitched in lifelike fashion, onlookers wondered if the soul was even necessary for life. Could a human be just a bunch of matter animated by electricity? It was a good enough question to inspire Frankenstein, Mary Shelleys dramatic warning about the consequences of science attempting to triumph over nature.

Anxieties about the anthropological limitations of the soul are not limited to the Enlightenment period. During World War I, as doctors began to identify the soul with both the brain and the nervous system, people became increasingly concerned about the use of chemical weapons. The Hague Declaration (1899) and the Hague Convention (1907) had forbidden the use of poison or poisoned weapons because the physical effects of substances like mustard on the body were horrifying to behold. But it was not only the impact on the body that worried people. It was the idea that nerve gases were an attack on the soul and the essence of a person.

To this day some scientists continue to talk about the nervous system as the home of the soul. In 2012, Professor Stuart Hameroff and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose put forward the theory that near-death experiences are the result of the soul leaving the nervous system. They further hypothesized, in a way that would please the ancient Stoics, that when a person dies their soul does not die but dissipates into the universe at large. As might be expected, this theory drew some criticism, but it remains an interesting example of the way people continue to identify the soul with the nervous system.

But even though scientists are committed to the idea that you-are-your-brain, the heart continues to have a significant hold on popularly held beliefs about who we are. In the arena of organ donation, for example, heart recipients often experience depression and existential angst after they receive the transplant. This is in contrast to kidney, liver, pancreas, and lung transplantees who might experience a sense of guilt, but rarely worry about whether they are themselves anymore. Part of the reason for this is that, as a society, we associate the heart with our emotions and identity. For heart transplant recipients its hard to get away from the cultural baggage associated with the heart and the sense that something of ourselves is lost when we literally lose our own.

Whats most surprising about the search for the soul, is that we keep asking the same questions. We continue to wonder and worry about what makes us who we are and which parts of our body contribute to that sense of the soul, or me-ness. Today, we spend billions of dollars on research to help explain how the human brain works in a quest to understand what makes us human. On the assumption that our brains and neural pathways make us who we are, Silicon Valley is trying to download consciousness into computers to achieve a sort of virtual immortality. But neither quantum physicists nor cognitive psychologists have definitively answered questions about the existence, composition, location, or even the necessity of the human soul.

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Where In Your Body Is Your Soul? - The Daily Beast - Daily Beast

By the time Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 at the age of 31, she had already achieved a sort of immortality.

Without her knowledge, her doctor had harvested cells from a tumor on her cervix, where her cancer proliferated, and was attempting to keep them alive outside her body. Normally, human cells do not survive long once they have been severed from the organism they belong to: they will divide no more than about 50 times, then die through a process called apoptosis. Lackss doctor at Johns Hopkins Hospital, George Gey, figured he could cure cancer if only he had a line of cells that could reproduce indefinitely, but all of his cultures failed, until he met Henrietta. Her cells, later labeled HeLa, just kept dividing.

What was special about this woman, who was recently featured in an HBO movie, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks?

The answer has to do with particular mutations in her cells caused by the human papillomavirus that had infected them. HPV inserts its own DNA into that of the host, resulting in a genetic hybrid. Not all HPV infections lead to cancer, and not all cancer has the potential to be an immortal cell line, but Lackss specific mutations had at least two characteristics that made her cervical cells special.

For one, HeLa cells are prolific dividers. Gey was surprised at just how quickly his cultures doubled in number. Even among cancers, these cells were reproductive superstars.

Secondly, they have an enzyme called telomerase that is activated during cell division. Normally, it is the gradual depletion of telomeres a repetitive strand of DNA on the ends of the chromosomes that stops cells from dividing indefinitely. But active telomerase rebuilds telomeres cut during division, allowing for indefinite proliferation.

HeLa cells are not the only immortal cell line from human cells, but they were the first. Today new immortal cell lines can either be discovered by chance, as Lackss were, or produced through genetic engineering.

The cells have been a boon to biomedical science, playing a role in the development of the polio vaccine and thousands of other patented discoveries. HeLa gives researchers a way to conduct repeatable experiments on human cells without testing directly on humans, although the cells are arguably no longer human at all.

Genetically, HeLa cells contain parts of Henrietta Lackss own DNA, mutations introduced by the strain or strains of HPV that infected her, as well as uncounted numbers of new mutations introduced organically through cellular division after the original cells were harvested from her body. A normal human cell has 46 chromosomes a HeLa cells tends to have between 70 and 90.

According to some scientists, the HeLa cell line should properly be considered its own species. It is a sort of single-cellular organism that reproduces asexually through division and evolves through mutations that compound over time. It is a domesticated species, dependent on humans for food and shelter the cow of microbial life, perhaps.

The story of the woman who non-consensually gifted HeLa to the world was largely unknown for decades after her death, even as the cells themselves contributed to significant advances in medicine. That changed thanks to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book that chronicles the efforts of author Rebecca Skloot to find Lackss family and tell her story. The HBO movie, starring Oprah Winfrey, is based on that account.

Jacqueline Ronson is a science writer based on Vancouver Island, Canada. Before that she lived way up in Whitehorse, where she reported for the Yukon News. These days she likes to talk to smart people about the future of the planet, ride her bicycle, play her banjo, and frolic.

Link:
The Real Science of Henrietta Lacks's Immortal Cells | Inverse - Inverse

Kobe Bryant traveled to Germany one off-season several years back to have PRP (platelet rich plasma) therapy. The season after his first injection, he led the league in scoring for much of the year. Peyton Manning reportedly went to Europe in 2011, had stem cell therapy and broke every passing record in the NFL book shortly thereafter. Both athletes were well into their 30s when they had these cutting edge and often taboo treatments done.

In most every other walk of life, your mid-30s is supposed to be your prime. In professional athletics, 30 is considered old, and 35 is considered ancient.

That perception, however, could change radically in the next few years.

Lee Buckler is the CEO of RepliCel, a company in Vancouver, Canada, that is making extraordinary strides in researching cell regeneration for damaged tendons and is providing innovative treatment that promotes the healing process. When asked if he thinks that pro athletes will be able to play into their 40s and possibly even 50s in 25 years or so thanks to modern medicine specifically cell therapy Buckler was firm that it would not take nearly that long.

In the next five to 10 years were going to see it, Buckler told Metro. As a field of regenerative medicine, in the next five to 10 years were going to be able to see not only the high performance athletes, but the weekend warriors and aging baby boomers be able to regain the functionality in their beaten down ligaments and tendons.

Complete restoration

What RepliCel and other regenerative medicine companies are doing is completely restoring tissue using a persons own cells.

We take the patients own cells from a tissue biopsy that we take from the back of their scalp, Buckler said. There are cells in there that are highly expressive of the kinds of proteins that build tissue. We then grow millions more of those cells in the lab. And then we put them in a vile and send them back to the doctor for reinjection.

Surgery to repair broken-down knees and elbows are basically a quick fix Buckler says, and its just now that were getting to a point where full restoration is possible.

We havent just numbed the pain [with cell therapy], Buckler said. We havent just carved away chips in your joint or anything like that. What weve seen from the studies weve done so far, is weve regenerated your tendon in a very natural way using your own cells. How long that lasts depends on how well weve rebuilt your tendon and how much abuse you are going to subject your tendon to in the future. One thing that we believe with certainty is that its going to be a lot more doable than any other approach thats simply trying to address the symptoms or increase your function, without truly regenerating your tendon.

Whats next?

RepliCel has partnerships across the globe and is working on some emerging relationships in the United States, which Buckler says will soon lead to a pre-IND (investigational new drug) meeting with the FDA. He anticipates great activity in the U.S. soon.

Cell therapy is already commonplace in the NFL as Sports Illustrated reported in 2014 that stem cell treatments were already being used by hundreds of players (an average of six players per team). But the treatments are still largely frowned upon by the mainstream U.S. sports leagues. From the S.I. piece:

Stem cells are still somewhat in the shadows evidence of their usefulness in treating athletes injuries is so far largely anecdotal, NFL teams often will not pick up the bill for players, and the overseas market for treatments not approved in the U.S. makes the whole field seem somewhat taboo.

Strong results

Athletes who have reportedly used cell therapy in recent years include Atlanta Braves pitcher Bartolo Colon (still going strong at 43 years old), tennis star Rafael Nadal (ranked No. 5 in the world at age 30) and Spurs forward Pau Gasol (averaged 12.4 points per game this season at age 36). Bryants PRP therapy involved his own blood, which was churned and separated before giving him platelets above the normal human level. Platelets are the clotting cells of our blood.

Go here to see the original:
Replicel, cell therapy companies ready to give you athletic immortality - Metro US

Queen may have melancholically wondered who wants to live forever, but were pretty sure theres a few people out there that actually do. There are a few remarkable lifeforms out there that appear to be able to regenerate their cells Doctor Who-style, meaning they can technically live forever but this is something thats currently beyond the capabilities of humankind.

Does a new study give the dream of immortality a credible boost, though? Writing in the journal Preventative Medicine, a team from Brigham Young University has discovered a strange way to slow down aging, but one that comes with a genuinely frustrating catch.

Age may be defined colloquially as how many times each of us has orbited the Sun fair enough but our cells dont necessarily all age in the same way. If we have an unhealthy lifestyle, our cells worsen quicker than if we have a more pious style of living. Its far less fun that way, but sadly its true.

It shouldnt come as a surprise, then, that this new study has concluded that exercise, of all things, allows our cells to age far slower than they otherwise would. Specifically, adults with high-intensity exercise levels, such as 30-40 minutes jogging for fives days per week, appears to keep your cells nine years younger than your birthday cake would suggest.

Its all linked to your cells telomeres, the protein hats that sit at each end of our chromosomes. Every time a cell replicates, the hats become shorter. The more they shrink, the more we age.

To wit, this study took a look at the data of 5,823 adults that took part in the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Apart from a whole host of other things, the telomere lengths of the participants were also recorded.

The team found that those with the shortest telomeres and thus the greatest signs of cellular aging came from those who lived a sedentary lifestyle. Those with intense activity had the longest and youngest telomeres.

Frustratingly, only quite severe levels of physical activity seem to make a difference in this respect. If you think you can age nine years slower by having a quick walk to the shops or even a brief go on the bike, forget it the team found no significant differences in telomere length between those with low-to-moderate-intensity exercise levels and couch potatoes.

Although the youthful mechanism of telomere preservation is unknown, its likely because exercise suppresses inflammation and harmful chemical imbalances, both of which can damage those little chromosome hats.

So there you have it if you want to stave off death for a bit longer, youre going to have to sweat for it.

Read the original:
High-Intensity Workouts Could Slow Down Your Aging By Almost A ... - IFLScience

Viruses are notorious for taking over their hosts operations and using them to their own advantage. But few human viruses make themselves quite as cozy as the Epstein-Barr virus, which can be found in an estimated nine out of ten humans without causing any ill effects.

That is, until this virus causes mononucleosis in adolescents or various cancers of the lymph nodes, including Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphomas, in immune compromised people.

In a paper appearing in the open access journal eLife, a team of researchers from Dukes School of Medicine details just how the Epstein-Barr virus manages to persist so well inside the immune systems B cells, a type of white blood cell that is normally responsible for recognizing and responding to foreign invaders.

The challenge is that its a really efficient pathogen, and evades the hosts immune system well even when its recognized as an invader, said Micah Luftig, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology and co-author on the new study.

Luftigs team has found that with a few select chemical signals used early in the course of an infection, Epstein-Barr mimics the beginning of the B cells normal response to an infectious agent. From within, the virus manages to ramp up the B-cells reproduction of itself, while at the same time helping the cell resist its own self-destruct signals.

The virus actually taps into the B cells normal protection against apoptosis, the programmed cell death that takes B cells out of circulation, Luftig said.

Once the infection is established, Epstein-Barr prefers to hide out in what are known as memory B cells, relatively slowly reproducing cells that circulate throughout the body. All of this is about establishing latency, Luftig said, or the ability to hide quietly in plain sight.

Using a new technique developed elsewhere called BH3 profiling that allowed them to test the critical cellular pro- and anti-apoptosis proteins individually, the team was able to see which of these the virus was controlling and then watch the transition from an uninfected cell to the active early infection phase to the latent infection in an immortal cell. The key piece theyve uncovered is a viral protein called EBNA3A which manages apoptosis resistance in infected B cells.

The risk for cancers is largely an issue if youre immune suppressed, Luftig said. But, for example, a recent National Cancer Institute study found that children who receive organ transplants have a 200-times higher chance of getting Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, one of the cancers caused by Epstein-Barr.

The team thinks BH3 profiling could prove useful in guiding treatment decisions on Epstein-Barr associated cancers such as these.

This research was funded by the American Cancer Society, the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health (R01-CA140337, R01-DE025994, 5P30-AI064518, F31-CA180451, R01-DE023939, T32-AI078985, R01-CA129974).

CITATION: Epstein-Barr Virus Ensures B Cell Survival by Uniquely Modulating Apoptosis at Early and Late Times After Infection, Alexander Price, Joanne Dai, Quentin Bazot, Luv Patel, Pavel Nikitin, Reza Djavadian, Peter Winter, Cristina Salinas, Ashley Perkins Barry, Kris Wood, Eric Johannsen, Anthony Letai, Martin Allday, Micah Luftig. eLife, online April 20, 2017. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.22509 https://elifesciences.org/content/6/e22509O

Original post:
Cancer-Causing Virus Masters Cell's Replication and Immortality ... - Duke Today

Death is an old technology but, like the umbrella, it has endured. Will the concept of death, an ingenious idea of nature, ever be replaced by a more advanced science invented by a species?

Many have suspected that such a moment may miraculously arrive in their own lifetime. Among them are a group of people who have the best reasons to go on livingbillionaires. They have funded companies, started trusts and announced awards to solve the problem of death. The efforts would, in our age, lead to unnatural longevity at the very least. And if mankind achieves an escape velocity of longevity, where lifespans are so long, say 200 years, advancing and maturing technologies would stretch them even further. Then, one scientist says, people might live for 1,000 years. Aubrey de Grey, the British gerontologist, says 1,000 years because it is a famous round number. He would not be able to argue why the figure is not 2,000 years instead, or why people would die of natural causes at all.

Not all the billionaires of the world are investing in science to live long. Some Indian billionaires, for instance, pray to God. Most of the billionaires who have waged the war against ageing and death are from Silicon Valley because they are the sort of people who have been trained to believe that a problem, because it is a problem, must have a solution. Unity Biotechnology, one such effort funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, among others, has declared, Our medicines could make many debilitating consequences of ageing as uncommon as polio.

There is a hypothesis, endorsed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), that the eradication of polio involved a beautiful transaction in society: Children who were fortunate to receive the oral polio vaccine would excrete the virus, and children who lived by the sewers, too, could, by chance, receive immunity from the disease. The rich and the poor have always lived this way, exchanging maladies and favours without intending to. The quest of the super rich to live long, too, would deeply affect those downstream. Whether most of the world wants it or not, longevity is going to be thrust down their soul.

The search has many strands. The National Academy of Medicine in the US has announced a $25 million (around Rs160 crore) prize for scientists who find breakthroughs. Google and the chairman of Apple, Arthur Levinson, have founded California Life Company, or Calico, which hopes to end the many diseases associated with ageing. In the grip of the science of longevity, scientists are experimenting on themselves. They are taking medication that might be prescribed for the general public only years later.

Writer and podcaster Timothy Ferriss, in his book Tools Of Titans, which reveals the philosophies and processes of very interesting and successful people, states that several people he has interviewed, including scientists, the rich, and fitness freaks, take Metformin, a drug that is usually prescribed for type 2 diabetes. They take the drug because it is believed to have the ability to prevent or kill cancer. Ferriss also documents a diet that is taking over some circles of Americas successfulthe high-fat ketogenic-diet, whose goal is to make the body burn fat instead of carbohydrates, a process known as ketosis. This results in weight loss without significantly reducing muscle mass, improves mental alertness and creates other circumstances that are generally recognized as omens of a long, healthy life. The diet requires a person to fast for about 16 hours instead of the usual 8-10 that most of us observe in the form of sleep, and to eat foods that contain nearly 80% fat and almost no sugars. Malayalees may be delighted to know, and north Indians who live with them alarmed, that the odorous coconut oil is a venerated hero of this diet. Ferriss recommends adding it to coffee, instead of milk, but then do you love longevity that much?

Despite our reverence for science and the optimism of the tech billionaires, we really do not believe in immortality. There are, of course, some (almost) immortal (almost) living thingsbacterial spores, for instance. There is a view that life on earth itself was seeded by immortal organic matter that travels across space on asteroids. But still, the body is the problem. It is very poorly designed for immortality. The mind, we suspect, can go on.

Googles most famous computer scientist, Ray Kurzweil, believes that the next stage in the evolution of man is anthropogenic, or consciously influenced by humanswhen we upload our minds to a computer. This is the only meaningful way, at least from the understanding that we have, that man can become immortal and the machine can have sense. Immortality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a single phenomenon.

The tech super rich have been obsessed with AI for reasons other than mere business potential. They are a breed of people who are not oppressed by any human. But, it appears, the human mind is lost without an oppressor. Hence their deep interest in AI, and often, its power to destroy the world. But Kurzweils theory, and Elon Musks more concrete attempt to upload the mind, make AI more endearing to the billionaires because it turns out AI is going to be, after all, us.

Kurzweil has predicted that machines and humans would merge in 2045. So, Dmitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire who made his money in journalism (strange things happen in Russia), has created the 2045 Initiative which aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.

Itskov recognizes the general grouse that such non-biological carriers would be only for the rich, so he has offered to make cheaper carriers. A Nano of sorts for the poorer minds.

Immortality might be hard to achieve in the next few decades, but exceptional longevity spanning two centuries might be probable. It would create new problems. Are the tech billionaires going to destroy all industries, all human jobs and then make everyone live thrice as long as now? What are most people supposed to do for, say, 200 years? Some, like the billionaires and me, would enjoy the extra century, but most people would be lost in the gigantic ocean of life. They are even now. And how tragic would it be then if one dies at 80. Also, what if one wishes to opt out at 90, saying this is enough: would that be suicide or wisdom?

Manu Joseph is a journalist and a novelist, most recently of The Illicit Happiness Of Other People.

First Published: Fri, May 05 2017. 04 43 PM IST

See more here:
What happens when billionaires seek immortality - Livemint

Durham, NC (Scicasts) Viruses are notorious for taking over their host's operations and using them to their own advantage. But few human viruses make themselves quite as cozy as the Epstein-Barr virus, which can be found in an estimated nine out of ten humans without causing any ill effects.

That is, until this virus causes mononucleosis in adolescents or various cancers of the lymph nodes, including Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, in immune compromised people.

In a paper appearing in the open access journal eLife, a team of researchers from Duke's School of Medicine details just how the Epstein-Barr virus manages to persist so well inside the immune system's B cells, a type of white blood cell that is normally responsible for recognizing and responding to foreign invaders.

"The challenge is that it's a really efficient pathogen," and evades the host's immune system well even when it's recognized as an invader, said Micah Luftig, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology and co-author on the new study.

Luftig's team has found that with a few select chemical signals used early in the course of an infection, Epstein-Barr mimics the beginning of the B cell's normal response to an infectious agent. From within, the virus manages to ramp up the B-cell's reproduction of itself, while at the same time helping the cell resist its own self-destruct signals.

"The virus actually taps into the B cell's normal protection against apoptosis," the programmed cell death that takes B cells out of circulation, Luftig said.

Once the infection is established, Epstein-Barr prefers to hide out in what are known as "memory B cells," relatively slowly reproducing cells that circulate throughout the body. "All of this is about establishing latency," Luftig said, or the ability to hide quietly in plain sight.

Using a new technique developed elsewhere called BH3 profiling that allowed them to test the critical cellular pro- and anti-apoptosis proteins individually, the team was able to see which of these the virus was controlling and then watch the transition from an uninfected cell to the active early infection phase to the latent infection in an immortal cell. The key piece they've uncovered is a viral protein called EBNA3A which manages apoptosis resistance in infected B cells.

The risk for cancers "is largely an issue if you're immune suppressed," Luftig said. But, for example, a recent National Cancer Institute study found that children who receive organ transplants have a 200-times higher chance of getting Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, one of the cancers caused by Epstein-Barr.

The team thinks BH3 profiling could prove useful in guiding treatment decisions on Epstein-Barr associated cancers such as these.

Article adapted from a Duke University news release.

Publication: Epstein-Barr virus ensures B cell survival by uniquely modulating apoptosis at early and late times after infection. Alexander M Price et al. eLife (2017): Click here to view.

See the original post here:
Study Shows Cancer-Causing Virus Masters Cell's Replication, Immortality - Scicasts (press release) (blog)

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Viruses are notorious for taking over their hosts operations and using them to their own advantage. But few human viruses make themselves quite as cozy as the Epstein-Barr virus, which can be found in an estimated 9/10 humans without causing any ill effects. That is, until this virus causes mononucleosis in adolescents or various cancers of the lymph nodes, including Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphomas, in immune compromised people.

A team of researchers from Dukes School of Medicine details just how the Epstein-Barr virus manages to persist so well inside the immune systems B cells, a type of white blood cell that is normally responsible for recognising and responding to foreign invaders.

The challenge is that its a really efficient pathogen, and evades the hosts immune system well even when its recognised as an invader,

said Micah Luftig, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology and investigator on the new study.

Luftigs team has found that with a few select chemical signals used early in the course of an infection, Epstein-Barr mimics the beginning of the B cells normal response to an infectious agent. From within, the virus manages to ramp up the B-cells reproduction of itself, while at the same time helping the cell resist its own self-destruct signals.

The virus actually taps into the B cells normal protection against apoptosis, the programmed cell death that takes B cells out of circulation, Luftig said.

Once the infection is established, Epstein-Barr prefers to hide out in what are known as memory B cells, relatively slowly reproducing cells that circulate throughout the body. All of this is about establishing latency, Luftig said, or the ability to hide quietly in plain sight.

Using a new technique developed elsewhere called BH3 profiling that allowed them to test the critical cellular pro- and anti-apoptosis proteins individually, the team was able to see which of these the virus was controlling and then watch the transition from an uninfected cell to the active early infection phase to the latent infection in an immortal cell. The key piece theyve uncovered is a viral protein called EBNA3A which manages apoptosis resistance in infected B cells.

The risk for cancers is largely an issue if youre immune suppressed, Luftig said. But, for example, a recent National Cancer Institute study found that children who receive organ transplants have a 200-times higher chance of getting Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, one of the cancers caused by Epstein-Barr.

The team thinks BH3 profiling could prove useful in guiding treatment decisions on Epstein-Barr associated cancers such as these.

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Cancer-causing virus masters cell's replication & immortality - Drug Target Review

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We all grow old. We all die.

For Aubrey de Grey, a biogerontologist and chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation, accepting these truths is, well, not good enough. He decided in his late twenties (hes currently 54) that he wanted to make a difference to humanity and that battling age was the best way to do it. His lifes work is now a struggle against physics and biology, the twin collaborators in bodily decay.

He calls it a war on age.

Grey considers aging an engineering problem. The human body is a machine, he told me in the following interview, and like any machine, it can be maintained for as long as we want.

This is not an isolated view. There is a broader anti-aging movement afoot, which seems to be growing every day. As Tad Friend describes colorfully in a recent New Yorker essay, millions of venture capital dollars are being dumped into longevity research, some of it promising and some of it not. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, is among the lead financiers (hes a patron of Greys organization as well).

Greys work is particularly interesting. For too long, he argues, scientists have been looking for solutions in all the wrong places. There is no monocausal explanation for aging. We age because the many physical systems that make up our body begin to fail at the same time and in mutually detrimental ways.

So hes developed what he calls a divide-and-conquer strategy, isolating the seven known causes of aging and tackling them individually. Whether its cell loss or corrosive mitochondrial mutations, Grey believes each problem is essentially mechanical, and can therefore be solved.

But even if this Promethean quest to extend human life succeeds, several questions persist.

If we develop these anti-aging technologies, who will have access to them? Will inequality deepen even further in a post-aging world? And what about the additional resources required to support humans living 200 or 300 or 500 years? The planet is stretched as it is with 7 billion people living roughly 70 years on average (women tend to live three to five years longer than men) and is already facing serious stresses around food, water, and global warming going forward.

Grey, to his credit, has thought through these problems. Im not sure hes alive to the political implications of this technology, specifically the levels of state coercion it might demand.

But when pressed, he defends his project forcefully.

Is there a simple way to describe theoretically what the anti-aging therapies youre working on will look like what theyll do to or for the body?

Oh, much more than theoretically. The only reason why this whole approach has legs is because 15 or 17 or so years ago, I was actually able to go out and enumerate and classify the types of damage. We've been studying it for a long time, so when I started out in this field in the mid-90s so I could learn about things, I was gratified to see that actually aging was pretty well understood.

Scientists love to say that aging is not well understood because the purpose of scientists is to find things, out so they have to constantly tell people that nothing is understood, but it's actually bullshit. The fact is, aging is pretty well understood, and the best of it is that not only can we enumerate the various types of damage the body does to itself throughout our lives, we can also categorize them, classify them into a variable number of categories

So I just talked about seven categories of damage, and my claim that underpins everything that we do is that this classification is exhaustive. We know how people age; we understand the mechanics of it. There is no eighth category that were overlooking. More importantly, for each category there is a generic approach to fixing it, to actually performing the maintenance approach that I'm describing, repairing the damage.

Can you give me an example of one of these categories and what the approach to fixing it looks like?

One example is cell loss. Cell loss simply means cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells, so that happens progressively in a few tissues in the body and it definitely drives certain aspects of aging. Let's take Parkinson's disease. That's driven by the progressive loss of a particular type of neuron, the dopaminergic neuron, in a particular part of the brain.

And what's the generic fix for cell loss? Obviously it's stem cell therapy. That's what we do. We preprogram cells in the laboratory into a state where you can inject them into the body and they will divide and differentiate to replace themselves that the body is not replacing on its own. And stem cell therapy for Parkinson's disease is looking very promising right now.

Is it best to think of aging as a kind of engineering problem that can be reversed or stalled?

Absolutely. It's a part of technology. The whole of medicine is a branch of technology. It's a way of manipulating what would otherwise happen, so this is just one part of medicine.

But you're not trying to solve the problem of death or even aging, really. Its more about undoing the damage associated with aging.

Certainly the goal is to undo the damage that accumulates during life, and whether you call that solving aging is up to you.

What would you say is your most promising line of research right now?

The great news is that we have this divide-and-conquer strategy that allows us to split the problem into seven subproblems and address each of them individually. That means we're constantly making progress on all of them. We pursue them all in parallel. We actually don't pursue stem cell therapy very much, simply because so many other people are doing it and basically everything really important is being done by somebody else, so it's not a good use of our money.

We're a very small organization. We only have $4 million a year to spend, so we're spread very thin. We're certainly making progress. Over the past year we've published really quite high-profile papers relating to a number of main research programs, so there's no really one thing that stands out.

What do you say to those who see this as a quixotic quest for immortality, just the latest example of humanity trying to transcend its condition?

Sympathy, mainly. I understand it takes a certain amount of guts to aim high, to actually try to do things that nobody can do, that nobody's done before. Especially things that people have been trying to do for a long time. I understand most people don't have that kind of courage, and I don't hate them for that. I pity them.

Of course, the problem is that they do get in my way, because I need to bring money in the door and actually get all this done. Luckily, there are some people out there who do have courage and money, and so we're making progress.

Ultimately, the fact is aging has been the number one problem of humanity since the dawn of time, and it is something that, until I came along, we have not had any coherent idea how to address, which means the only option available to us has been to find some way to put it out of our minds and find a way to get on with our miserably short lives and make the best of it, rather than being perpetually preoccupied with this ghastly thing that's going to happen to us in the relatively distant future. That makes perfect sense. I don't object to that.

The problem is that suddenly we are in a different world where we are in striking distance of actually implementing a coherent plan that will really work, and now that defeatism, that fatalism, that resignation, has become a huge part of the problem, because once you've made your peace with some terrible thing you know, it's very hard to reengage.

Are there any ethical questions or reservations that give you pause at all?

Not at all. Once one comes to the realization that this is just medicine, then one can address the entire universe of potential so-called ethical objections in one gut. Are you in favor of medicine or not? In order to have any so-called ethical objection to the work we do, the position that one has to take is the position that medicine for the elderly is only a good thing so long as it doesn't work very well, and thats a position no one wants to take.

Ive no doubt youve been asked this question before, but I think its too important to gloss over. You talk enthusiastically about transitioning to a post-aging world, but there are many people who worry about what it means to increase the humans time on earth. We dont necessarily have an overpopulation problem, but we certainly have an inequality problem, and we seem to need more resources than we have. If 90 percent of people die from aging now, and suddenly people are living for 200 or 300 years, how will we be able to sustain this kind of growth?

First of all, thank you for prefacing the question with the thought that I've probably heard this question a lot, because of course I have. But you'd be astonished at how many people have presented this question to me starting with, "Have you ever thought of the possibility that..." as if they genuinely had a new idea.

But yes, overpopulation is the single biggest concern that people raise, and I have basically three levels of answers to these questions. First, the answer is specific to the individual question. So in the case of overpopulation, essentially I point to the fact that fertility rates are already plummeting in many areas. And people often forget: Overpopulation is not a matter of how many people there are on the planet but rather the difference between the number of people on the planet and the number of people that can be on the planet with an acceptable level of environmental impact, and that second number is of course not a constant; it's something that is determined by other technologies.

So as we move forward with renewable energy and other things like desalinization to reduce the amount of pollution the average person commits, we are increasing the carrying capacity of the planet, and the amount of increase that we can expect over the next, say, 20 years in that regard far exceeds what we could expect in terms of the trajectory of rise in population resulting from the elimination of death from aging. So that's my main answer.

The second level of answer is at the level of sense of proportion. Technology happens or doesn't happen, whatever the case may be, and maybe the worst-case scenario is that we will end up with a worse overpopulation problem than what we have today.

What does that actually mean? It means we're faced with a choice in a post-aging world, in a world where the technology exists a choice between either, on the one hand, using these technologies and having more people and having fewer kids than we would like or, on the other hand, letting stuff go on the way it is today, which involves not using technology that will keep people healthy in old age and therefore alive.

Ask yourself, which of those two things would you choose? Would you choose to have your mother get Alzheimer's disease or to have fewer kids? It's a pretty easy choice, and people just don't do this.

The third level is perhaps the strongest of all, which is that it's about who has the right to choose. Essentially if we say, Oh, dear, overpopulation, let's not go there. Let's not develop these technologies, then what we are doing as of today is we are delaying the arrival of our technology. Of course it will happen eventually. The question is how soon? That depends on how hard we try.

If we know that, then what we're doing is we're delaying the arrival of the technology and thus condemning a whole cohort of people of humanity of the future to the same kind of death and disease and misery that we have today in old age, when in fact we might have relieved that suffering had we developed the therapies in time.

I dont want to be responsible for condemning a vast number of people to death. I dont want to be in that position. I think theres a strong argument that we should get on developing these technologies has quickly as we can.

I take your points there, but those questions are far easier to answer in theory than they are to solve in practice. For instance, we cant simply decide that people will have fewer children without potentially dangerous levels of state coercion. The politics of this is complicated at best, dystopian at worst.

In any event, let me at least raise one more concern. What is your sense of the cost and the accessibility of these therapies should they become available? People concerned with bioengineering, for example, worry that technologies like this, if they arent equally distributed, will produce inequalities of the sort weve never seen before and cant sustain.

Its a valid concern. It needs to be addressed, but luckily, like the overpopulation one, it's a really easy one to address. Today what we see with high-tech medicine is that it is even in countries with a single-payer system it's pretty much limited by the pay because there's only so much resources available.

But part of the problem now is that our current therapies for elderly people dont work well. It postpones the ill health of old age by a very small amount if we're lucky, and then people get sick anyway, and we spend all the money that we would have spent in absence of the medicine just keeping the person alive for a little longer in a miserable state.

Now compare that with the situation where the medicine actually does work, where the person actually stays healthy. Yes, they live a lot longer, and sure enough, it may be that we have to supply these therapies multiple times because they are inherently periodic therapies, so we could be talking about a substantial amount of money. But the thing is these people would be healthy, so we would not be spending the money on the medicine for the sick people that we have today.

Plus, on top of that, there would be massive indirect savings. The kids of the elderly would be more productive because they wouldn't have to spend time looking after their sick parents. The elderly themselves would still be in an able-bodied state and able to actually contribute wealth to society rather than just consuming wealth.

Of course, there are lots and lots of big uncertainties in these kinds of calculations, but there is absolutely no way to do such a calculation that does not come to the absolutely clear conclusion that the medicines would pay for themselves many times over, really quickly.

So what that means, from the point of view of government setting aside the fact that it would be politically impossible not to support this is that it would be suicidal from a purely mercenary economic point of view not to do this. The country will go bankrupt because other countries will be making sure their workforce is able-bodied. The world will be frontloading their investments to ensure that everybody who is old enough to need them will get these therapies.

When will the therapies youre developing be ready for human experimentation?

That will happen incrementally over the next 20 years. Each component of the SENS panel will have standalone value in addressing one or another disease of old age, and some of them are already in clinical trials. Some of them are a lot harder, and the full benefit will only be seen when we can combine them all, which is a long way out.

How confident are you that someone alive today will not die of aging?

It's looking very good. Of course this is primary technology, so we can only speculate. It's very speculative what the time frame is going to be, but I think we have a 50-50 chance of getting to work on longevity escape velocity, the point where we are postponing the problem of aging faster than time is passing and people are staying one step ahead of the problem. I think we have a 50-50 chance of reaching that point within 20 years of now, subject only to improved funding on the early-stage research that's happening at the moment.

Escape velocity is an interesting analogy. The idea is to keep filling up the biological gas tank before it runs out, staying a step ahead of the aging process?

Right. The point is that these are rejuvenation therapies, which means they are therapies that genuinely turn back the clock. They put the body into a state that is analogous or similar to how it was at an earlier [stage] rather than just stopping or slowing down the clock. Every time you do this, you buy time, but the problem gets harder because the types of damage that the therapy reverses will catch up, and those imperfections just need to be progressively partially eliminated. The idea, then, is that you asymptotically approach the 100 percent repair situation but you never need to get there. You just need to keep the overall level of damage below a certain tolerable threshold.

For more about de Grey's work, visit the SENS website.

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