Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

ARIANA EUNJUNG CHA

Last updatedSun Apr 05 17:00:00 UTC 2015

FRED PROUSER

Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city's soaring skyline, Peter Thiel was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical.

It was 2004, and Thiel had recently made a tidy fortune selling PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay. He had spent what he wanted on himself - a posh penthouse suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and a silver Ferrari - and was now soliciting ideas to do good with his money.

Among the guests was Cynthia Kenyon, a molecular biologist and biogerontologist who had garnered attention for doubling the life span of a roundworm by disabling a single gene. Aubrey de Grey, a British computer scientist turned theoretician who prophesied that medical advances would stop aging. And Larry Page, co-founder of an Internet search darling called Google that had big ideas to improve health through the terabytes of user data it was collecting.

The chatter at the dinner party meandered from the value of chocolate in one's diet to the toll of disease on the U.S. economy to the merits of uploading people's memories to a computer versus cryofreezing their bodies. Yet the focus kept returning to one subject: Was death an inevitability - or a solvable problem?

A number of guests were skeptical about achieving immortality. But could science and technology help us live longer, to, say, 150 years? Now that, they agreed, was a worthy goal.

Within a few months, Thiel had written checks to Kenyon and de Grey to accelerate their work. Since then he has doled out millions to other researchers with what he calls "breakout" ideas that defy conventional wisdom.

"If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental, then you'll work only on very incremental things. It's self-fulfilling,"

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PayPal creator Peter Thiel and tech titans search for immortality

The founding director of the Harvard Business Schools Life Sciences Project, Juan Enriquez, posed a question at a TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, in April 2012. Enriquezs question was one that he had been enthralling audiences with a lot. He spoke about the history of life, tracing it from the Big Bang, to the birth of the stars, to the perimeter of the galaxy, to parts played by the sun, earth, and man, a history that spanned 14 billion years, involved trillions of stars, and then he asked the audience one question: What was the purpose of all this? He moved on to the next PowerPoint slide to provide the answer: A photo of Pamela Anderson and then Michael Jacksonthe point being that man is the almighty purpose, the be all and end all of life, after which, he claimed, evolution flatlines to the end. His next question was Wouldnt that be slightly arrogant? There has been something like twenty-five human species; why couldnt there be another?

Indeed, why couldnt there, particularly if we were entering a mass extinction? Many scientists believe that natural selection operates mainly on the frontiers of change.

Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a human sat in a limestone cave in Africa on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean, cooled by a sea breeze and warmed by a small fire. He picked up a sharp rock and made a crosshatch design on a piece of reddish brown stone that scientists claim is the oldest known example of an intricate design made by a human being. It demonstrates the ability of man to communicate symbolically, which scientists believe sets Homo sapiens apart from other hominids on earth at that time.

This symbolic communicator with his stone tools and weapons had a competitive advantage as he moved out of Africa on the Great Migration into territory occupied by other species of the Homo genus. Homo sapiens first traveled to Asia eighty thousand to sixty thousand years ago. By forty-five thousand years ago this new hominid had settled Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia.

Keep in mind that by this point there may have been four different species on the planet: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, the last a potential new human species described from a finger bone fragment found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. But Homo sapiens eventually won outthe actual last man standing.

Harpending and Cochran think there has been significant evolution in the past fifty thousand years between human populations separated by great distance and geographical barriers. No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn. There have been substantial changes in the genetic makeup of humans since man spread out of Africa, and those changes have taken on significant characteristics in different populations, they wrote in The 10,000 Year Explosion.

Robert Fogel, a University of Chicago economist, while studying the effects of American slavery, discovered that over the past few centuriesparticularly in the last fifty yearsAmericans in general have been growing taller, living longer, and getting thicker. In 1850, the average American male was five feet seven inches tall and weighed about 146 pounds. By 1980 he stood five feet ten inches and weighed 174 pounds. A team of economists extended the statistical search worldwide and found the trend was global.

It turns out that advances in medicine, better nutrition, better working conditions, cleaner water, and a general reduction in pollution have netted humans a biological advantage. Its most dramatic when you consider age. When Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, the average life expectancy was twenty years. By the year 1900 it had become forty-four years. Today it is closer to eighty years, almost doubling in only a hundred years. And these are heritable trends passed on from parents to children, generated by improvements in health and medicine.

So is there another species in the wings?

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What would happen if women could order Brad Pitts sperm?

At just 40 years old, Bill Maris is on a mission to save the world with his investments. Bloomberg recently highlighted Mariss quest to improve the quality and longevity of human life. This quest is evident in Google Ventures growing biotech portfolio, which now includes36 percent health and life science investments.

Maris, who is a managing partner at Google Ventures, has gone from sitting next to Anne Wojcicki at a Swedish investment bank to Kevin Systrom as a Noogler to managing one of the worlds most capitalized corporate funds to even a brief stint on tour with his wife, singer songwriter Tristan Prettyman.

And now hes trying to win at life. Literally. Part of it is that it is better to live than to die, he told Bloombergs Katrina Brooker.

Maris will be joining us at Disrupt NY to talk about his search for startups that will bring us one step closer to living until 500 startups like Foundation Medicine and Flatiron Health. Well also be asking him tough questions like, Is Google working on its own self-driving car app? (Uber is a Google Ventures investment), What does Calico, Googles surreptitious anti-aging initiative, actually do?, and Why are health-focused investments all the rage these days?

So come. You might learn how to live longer.

The show runs May 4-6 at the historic Manhattan Center. Tickets are available at an early-bird discount rate until April 11.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact sponsors@techcrunch.com.

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Bill Maris To Talk Immortality At Disrupt NY

By Robert Bazell March 27 at 3:01 PM

Robert Bazellis adjunct professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale. For 38 years he was chief science correspondent for NBC News.

SPRING CHICKEN

Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying)

By Bill Gifford

Grand Central. 366 pp. $27

Tom Perls, an amiable, boyish-looking professor at Boston University, has earned a respectable place in the hierarchy of academic medicine. But measured by media attention, Perls is a contender for the top echelons. Hes given hundreds of interviews to newspapers, magazines and television I conducted a dozen myself. Perls studies aging, a subject few editors can resist. Since 1995, hes located hundreds of people who stayed healthy beyond their 100th birthday

Perls searched for common behaviors in the healthy centenarians. Some smoked and drank, others didnt. Some had been fat, some skinny. No pattern emerged. At one point he suggested dental flossing as a common denominator. He turned to genetics and in a 2011 paper identified slight changes in 130 genes that may help people live longer and healthier. Thats far too much complexity for any individual or drug company seeking a ticket to the fountain of youth.

Perls appears briefly in Bill Giffords Spring Chicken. So do other scientists well-regarded by their peers, along with a parade of hucksters. Gifford starts with Charles Edouard Brown-Squard, who at age 72 in 1889 told the Socit de Biologie in Paris that he had regained much of his vigorous youth with injections of the mashed testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs. Almost overnight, entrepreneurs were selling Squards Elixir of Life. The fad died along with Brown-Squard five years later.

Gifford, a journalist in his late 40s, wrote the book to hang on to his youth, or what was left of it, for as long as possible. Spoiler alert: He didnt find the elixir. Still, his survey of those who study aging and those who claim they can slow it down or stop it makes for a great read, even if other books, notably Stephen Halls Merchants of Immortality (2003), have covered much of the same material more thoroughly.

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Review: Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford

Melbourne-based independent communications consultancy Three Wise Men has targeted the illegal rhino horn trade in a print campaign running in Vietnamese publications which aim to educate wealthy Vietnamese on the dangers of using rhino horn as medicine.

The campaign features images of dead rhinos set beside images of Vietnamese using the horn material as a medicine, with long copy detailing how rhino horn is poisonous if ingested.

The campaign was translated into Vietnamese to appear in local publications and, according to the agency, has created widespread discussion on using rhino horn as medicine.

Three Wise Men launched in August last year and was founded by former Grey Melbourne general manager Randal Glennon and creative director Nigel Dawson.

The illegal trade in rhino horn to feed the egos of wealthy Vietnamese is decimating the rhino population in Africa. Poachers killed 83 rhinos in 2008; by 2014 that number had escalated to 1215. Vietnamese businessmen give rhino horn to impress; mothers use it in the erroneous belief that it has medicinal value.

Three Wise Mens campaign was translated into Vietnamese to appear in local publications. It has created widespread comment and caused many people to rethink their behaviour.

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Three Wise Men target illegal rhino horn trade in Vietnam with print campaign

Radical heritage David Graeber. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

A few years ago David Graebers mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone whos ever been embroiled in bureaucratic procedures.

At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down his given name as Daid; at another, because someone at Verizon had spelled his surname Grueber. Graeber made matters worse by printing his name on the line clearly marked signature on one of the forms. Steeped in Kafka, Catch-22 and David Foster Wallaces The Pale King, Graeber was alive to all the hellish ironies of the situation but that didnt make it any easier to bear. We spend so much of our time filling in forms, he says. The average American waits six months of her life waiting for the lights to change. If so, how many years of our life do we spend doing paperwork?

The matter became academic, because Graebers mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like? writes the 53-year-old professor of anthropology in his new book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?

I like to think Im actually a smart person. Most people seem to agree with that, Graeber says, in a restaurant near his London School of Economics office. OK, I was emotionally distraught, but I was doing things that were really dumb. How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? Theres something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.

But Graebers book doesnt just present human idiocy in its bureaucratic form. Its main purpose is to free us from a rightwing misconception about bureaucracy. Ever since Ronald Reagan said: The most terrifying words in the English language are: Im from the government and Im here to help, it has been commonplace to assume that bureaucracy means government. Wrong, Graeber argues. If you go to the Mac store and somebody says: Im sorry, its obvious that what needs to happen here is you need a new screen, but youre still going to have to wait a week to speak to the expert, you dont say Oh damn bureaucrats, even though thats what it is classic bureaucratic procedure. Weve been propagandised into believing that bureaucracy means civil servants. Capitalism isnt supposed to create meaningless positions. The last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they dont really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

Graebers argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US wed be on 15-hour weeks. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didnt happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Which jobs are bullshit? A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But its not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. He concedes that some might argue that his own work is meaningless. There can be no objective measure of social value, he says emolliently.

In The Utopia of Rules, Graeber goes further in his analysis of what went wrong. Technological advance was supposed to result in us teleporting to new planets, wasnt it? He lists some of the other predicted technological wonders hes disappointed dont exist: flying cars, suspended animation, immortality drugs, androids, colonies on Mars. Speaking as someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I have clear memories of calculating that I would be 39 years of age in the magic year 2000, and wondering what the world around me would be like. Did I honestly expect I would be living in a world of such wonders? Of course. Do I feel cheated now? Absolutely.

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graebers theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that My God, if its bad now with the hippies, imagine what itll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed. You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities. Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. Cancer? No, thats still here. Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac all of which, Graeber writes, are tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands dont drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.

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David Graeber: So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary

Medicinal mushrooms have been part of traditional medicine for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians associated mushrooms with immortality, and it was a food for kings and queens. The Chinese have promoted mushrooms for longevity and health since early research showed anticancer properties in a wild mushroom found growing in southern China.

Maitake and reishi mushrooms are best noted for their beta glucans or glycoproteins, which enhance immune function and help ward off infectious diseases from bacteria, viruses and fungi or mold. Maitake mushrooms have the highest vitamin D levels (ergosterols or vitamin D-2) of the most commonly consumed mushrooms. Shiitake and reishi are noted for liver protection, which is important for people who take medications with acetaminophen. Cordyceps have antiaging qualities and increase energy production, according to researchers in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology.

Chemotherapy patients get improved antitumor benefits from mushrooms because mushrooms increase natural killer cells or lymphocytes, cancer immunologist Dr. Kebin Liu of Georgia Health Sciences University reported in Cancer Research. Because mushrooms are easy to add to the diet and very interchangeable, even patients who are fatigued from treatment can add them using these suggestions: shiitake = meaty (great in stir-fry); morels = a smoky and woodsy flavor; and lobster = a bright reddish-orange color with neutral taste.

For the best nutrition for the money, choose the mushroom varieties mentioned above over the white button or field mushrooms found in most supermarkets. People with intestinal yeast overgrowth or yeast sensitivities might have a crossover reaction to the fungi family, so they should consume mushrooms cautiously.

Safety and quality should be the first things to consider when adding mushrooms to your diet. Mushrooms can have health risks because, as a fungus, they absorb environmental pollutants like heavy metals, pesticides and radioactivity. Eating organically grown mushrooms is the best way to be safe. Mushroom cultivation goes back centuries. When I visited a mushroom farm in China, rice chaff was used to cultivate shiitakes. Today, growers have domesticated many varieties, including portobellos.

The part of the mushroom we eat is the fruit of the fungi that lives underground as a network of microscopic filaments. Wash mushrooms just before adding them to a stir-fry, broth or salad. Many supermarkets like to wrap portobellos. Unwrap them as soon as possible to preserve freshness. My favorite way to make a quick lunch or supper is Grilled Portobello Mushroom Delight.

Betty Wedman-St Louis is a licensed nutritionist and environmental health specialist in Pinellas County who has written numerous books on health and nutrition. Visit her website at betty-wedman-stlouis.com.

Grilled Portobello Mushroom Delight

1 fresh portobello mushroom

1 egg

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Mushrooms: Great as a meal or medicine

Friday might be the first day of spring on the calendar, but it seems the only things green in my life outside of salads aremy houseplants.

Though I have a few varieties including jade, spider plants, and even a small fig tree, there is one plant that outshines and outgrows the rest.

It is the aloe plants that soar and thrive. Theymake me feel like I have a green thumb and have become my verdant companions. And I mean plants, plural. Over a dozen aloe plants fill my home, all from the same mother plant.

The mother plant came to me early in my time here on the Island and has followed me through a few homes. I inherited a small, dying aloe plant in 2000 when I moved into a studio apartment. Along with some books, it was left by the houses former inhabitant who had passed away somewhat untimely.

It became my mission to nurse this plant back to health. And it thrived, Im glad to say, providing babies to split off and share with others.

Aloe has been a valued household plant for, well, forever. Ancient Greek physician Dioscoradis was an early believer in the values of aloe. He thought that the juices of the plant had the power of binding, inducing sleep, loosening the belly, and cleansing the stomach. In addition, he recommended that the sap be used to treat boils, hemorrhoids, bruises and mouth irritation, and was a good medicine for the eyes. It could also stop the bleeding of wounds.

Dioscoradis was on to something, since aloe is still used today both topically and internally. Two components of this plant have been used medicinally and cosmetically.

The gel is what most of us are familiar with, and is used for relief from sunburns and other burns. It is also good for other skin issues, including psoriasis, cold sores and frostbite. The gel can also be ingested and has been used to sooth the pains of osteoarthritis, bowel disease, ulcers, diabetes and asthma. The Bible makes reference to an application of aloeto Jesuss wounds, and Queen Cleopatra used this gel as a daily beauty treatment.

The other part of the plant that may not be as familiar is the latex, found just under the surface of the leafs skin. The latex is yellow compared to the clear gel. Its use, however, has been controversial: in the early 2000s, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned it, required it be removed from laxatives and all over-the-counter medicines.

If you are not sure about using this plant for medicine, consider its other benefits. Congolese hunters coated themselves in it to obscure their scent when hunting. In other parts of Africa, aloe was hung over a homes door to bring luck and drive away evil. Inside the house, it is thought to prevent household accidents, especially burns. And best of all, according to ancient Egyptians, who called aloe the plant of immortality, is its ability to provide eternal youth. This promise was made, ironically, after a persons death, since the plant was included in funeral offerings.

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It's All About Amazing Aloe

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on spirituality and healing ever!, June 22, 2012

This review is from: Healing Into Immortality: A New Spiritual Medicine of Healing Stories and Imagery (Paperback)

I first read Healing Into Immortality 12 years ago and I keep going back to it, it's like a manual on life. Gerald Epstein gives it to you straight; it's not a popularized version of new age spirituality. He has an impressive lineage. His teacher was Colette Aboulker-Muscat of Jerusalem and these teachings go back thousands of years. Among the highlights of the book, an exploration of the ten commandments unlike any other, for example - the 6th commandment, thou shall not kill includes a discussion on depression as "self murder". In addition, Epstein gives the remedy - mental imagery exercises to reverse depression. Other highlights: the seven keys to healing, how we become sick, how we become well, and a step-by-step guide to mental imagery including a section of exercises. Luckily, Amazon allows you to read the first pages of the book, and the first pages of this book are packed with examples of his unique and uncompromising perspective. Check out the table of contents, too. I always come back to this book - after all the years since I first read it, it still rings true. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in spirituality and healing, I've never come across another book like it. In fact my copy is so beat up, at this point I think I'm due for a new one!

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book on Imagination and Healing, March 9, 2011

This review is from: Healing Into Immortality: A New Spiritual Medicine of Healing Stories and Imagery (Paperback)

Highly Recommended!

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Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) byBill Gifford (Grand Central Publishing)

Someone alive today will live to celebrate a 1,000th birthday or so says gerontology theorist Aubrey de Grey, who has been snickered off many podiums during his controversial career.

His theory, which he calls SENSS, or Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence, contends that one day we will be able to engineer aging out of cells. Once we can implement de Greys idea to clean our cells of aging garbage, a kind of cellular housekeeping, then lifespan could even become infinite.

De Grey has a hopeful admirer in journalist Bill Gifford, author of the new book, Spring Chicken. In it, Gifford points out that MIT and the Technology Review have offered scientists $20,000 to try and refute de Greys theories. So far, three teams of scientists have tried. None, Gifford writes, has succeeded.

If the idea of exponentially increasing human lifespan sounds like the stuff of science fiction, consider this: Scientists have already doubled the lifespans of other species in the lab, including mice, worms and flies.

British theoretician Aubrey de GreyPhoto: Wikipedia

Researchers have also sequenced the genome of the naked mole rat, an animal that doesnt develop cancer, never suffers through menopause and lives 10 times longer than regular old subway rats.

Researchers believe that the longevity of mole rats comes down to the limited oxygen of its subterranean habitat. As such, its metabolic rates are abnormally slow and a proliferation of repair mechanisms keep their cells astonishingly youthful.

This is key, Gifford writes, pointing out that healthspan is far more important than lifespan. The real problem with aging isnt that we eventually die, its that we break down.

Aging is thought by some to begin while we are still in the womb. It speeds up after we finish growing, at about 20 years old, then accelerates after that.

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Do mole rats hold the key to immortality?