Category Archives: Transhuman News

San Diego start-ups raised a solid amount of venture capital in the second quarter this year compared with a year earlier signaling a good but not great fundraising environment for local entrepreneurs.

Two reports out this week the PitchBook/National Venture Capital Association Venture Monitor study and the PricewaterhouseCoopers/CB Insights MoneyTree report showed that more San Diego County start-ups raised money in the second quarter than in same quarter the prior year.

But even though more firms took in capital, the overall amount raised locally fell short of totals from the second quarter of 2016.

The PitchBook report found 61 local companies raised $406 million, compared with 42 companies netting $411 million a year earlier.

MoneyTree pegged a similar trend, with 24 companies raising $287 million in the second quarter, compared with 22 firms pulling in $389 million a year ago.

San Diego venture capital climate last quarter bucked the nationwide trend of not only fewer deals but also less dollars for start-ups compared with 2016.

I think it is encouraging to see the number of deals at a reasonable level. Thats a good sign, said Ryan Spencer, a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers in San Diego. In terms of dollars, when you are comparing year over year, we had a couple of mega-deals in the first half of 2016 that we havent seen this year.

In the second quarter last year, genomics biotech Human Longevity raised $220 million.

In San Diego, there is a growing convergence between the regions traditional biotech/pharmaceutical industries and its software/technology firms, said Spencer.

Edico Genome, for example, is a technology company that makes a high speed computer processing platform. But its product is tailored to speed up delivery of gene sequencing data in healthcare.

There are three companies in the top 10 deals that we think are best classified as software or internet, but those companies are related in some way to life sciences, said Spencer.

The PitchBook/NVCA Venture Monitor and MoneyTree reports contain differences for several reasons, including that PitchBook captures money raised by start-ups from angel investors.

There is plenty of capital available for start-ups, as venture capital funds have raised $130 billion since 2014, according to PitchBook.

The story over the last couple of years has been deal flow continued to decline, said Nizar Tarhuni, analytics manager for Seattle-based PitchBook. The bulk of that decline has been isolated at the angel and seed level, where we have seen those rounds fall off. But across Series A and up to later stage rounds, it has actually remained fairly steady.

For some angel backed start-ups, it has been difficult to make the jump from individual investors to their first round of institutional venture capital, said Tarhuni.

That has resulted in angel investors being a bit more careful in how they deploy capital (in companies) to make sure they make the cut in a very competitive market looking for investment at the Series A or Series B level.

Nationwide, PitchBooks Venture Monitor had 1,958 companies raising $21.78 billion in the second quarter. Thats down from 2,162 companies raising $23 billion in the same quarter last year.

In the quarter, mega-deals for more established companies led the way, according to PitchBook. Thirty-four companies raised at least $100 million in the quarter. None were based in San Diego.

The MoneyTree report found 1,152 companies raised $18.4 billion in the quarter nationwide again down from 1,495 firms taking in $21 billion a year earlier.

One of the strongest industries this quarter nationally was digital health, which recorded 113 deals for $2.7 billion, according to the MoneyTree report. Six digital health companies rung up six mega-rounds of $100 million or more in the quarter.

mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973

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San Diego start-ups navigate mixed venture capital landscape in ... - The San Diego Union-Tribune

So few people have exceeded that age, in fact, that a group of researchers published an analysisin the journal Nature last year arguing that the human species' lifespan plateaus around 115.

FILE: An elderly resident from the Cape Peninsula Organisation for the Aged holds her ID before casting her special vote on 17 May 2011. Picture: EWN

Jeanne Calment, the French woman who holds the record for the longest verified lifespan, died in 1997 at 122-years-old.

Few people, of course, ever become supercentenarians, 110-years-old or older, and even fewer hit 115.

So few people have exceeded that age, in fact, that a group of researchers published an analysis in the journal Nature last year arguing that the human species' lifespan plateaus around 115.

But a number of scientists are now rebutting that analysis with five separate commentaries published in Nature on 28 June.

The authors of these pieces argue that the original analysis relied on statistics that were incomplete or analysed in a way that led to a false conclusion. They suggest two alternatives: We either don't have enough data to know if the human lifespan has a limit, or the plateau is closer to 125 than 115.

"The available data are limited, there aren't that many supercentenarians," Maarten Pieter Rozing, a professor at the University of Copenhagen who co-authored one commentary, told The Scientist. "And I think there are no strong arguments that show there is a decline [in the rate at which lifespans are increasing]."

WHY SOME THINK LIFE ENDS AT 115

Life expectancy has crept up fairly steadily over the past 150 years or so. But Xiao Dong, Brandon Milholland, and Jan Vijg, the authors of the original analysis, argue that comparing the life expectancy of supercentenarians to the age at which they died can reveal the natural limit of the human lifespan.

The scientists used data on maximum reported age at death split into two sets based on supercentenarians from the US, UK, Japan, and France. The first set covered deaths from 1968 to 1994 - a period when the maximum age was inching up. But by the time covered in the next dataset, from 1995 to 2006, the age seemed to plateau or even slightly be on the decline (exceptions like Calment aside).

Life expectancy, however, rose throughout both time periods. The scientists, therefore, concluded that because humans' maximum age didn't keep rising with life expectancy, it appeared a limit had been reached.

Even if we were to cure various diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's, those scientists still claimed that humans would probably be unlikely to live past 115. And they put the chances of a person live past 125 at less than 1 in 10,000.

LIMIT OR ILLUSION?

The authors of the recent rebuttals say that because there are so few supercentenarians out there, the number of deaths for this age group between 1995 and 2006 is too small to yield reliable conclusions. There just haven't been enough supercentenarians to really pinpoint a maximum age.

As people live longer, it's likely that more will push past that supposed limit, the authors of the rebuttals argue - it'll just take time to get there.

"[T]he idea of a set limit to human longevity is not strongly supported by what is being discovered about the biology of ageing," Rozing and his co-authors wrote in their commentary.

"The continuing increase in human life expectancy that has occurred over recent decades was unforeseen. It provides evidence for greater malleability of human ageing than was originally thought."

Over the span of human history, many of the lifespan increases we've seen would have been unimaginable at some point. Those living 200 years ago, for example, would have thought it was crazy that people could regularly live to be 80. Yet here we are.

Rozing told The Scientist that there's an easy way to find out whose hypothesis is correct about the maximum lifespan.

"[W]e can just wait and see who's right," he said.

Written by Kevin Loria.

This article was republished courtesy of the World Economic Forum.

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Want to live forever? Science thinks that might be possible - Eyewitness News

Ever feel as if motherhood literally sucked the life out of you? Well, theres some science to back that up. A recent study in the journalPLOS One reported that the more children a woman gave birth to, the faster she aged.

Poke around in the literature and you will find as many articles describing the protective effects of childbearing as those that suggest it is utterly depleting.

Thestudy, which looked at DNA in 100 postmenopausal women, found that those whod experienced more pregnancies and births had increased levels of oxidative damage an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants that is an indication of accelerated cellular aging. The authors declared their findings the first evidence for oxidative stress as a possible cost of reproductive effort in humans.

But wait: Maybe having children revitalizes you, keeps you young. Because the week before that study was published, another had come out in the same journal showing that the more children a woman gave birth to, the more slowly she aged.

Thatstudy, on 94 women with an average age of about 40, found that over the course of 13 years, those who gave birth to more children had longer telomeres, the protective casings at the end of a DNA strand. Like a candle that burns down every time you light it, telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides. The authors suggest that elevated estrogen levels in pregnancy may protect DNA from the damaging effects of oxidative stress.

Individually, such studies make for irresistible headlines, but few news stories acknowledge the persistently contradictory nature of findings in this area. We want the answer to be simple, but it just isnt. Poke around in the literature and you will find as many articles describing the protective effects of childbearing as those that refer to it as utterly depleting.

How could having kids affect health and longevity in such disparate ways? Why cant we definitively say how pregnancy will affect any human body?

I dont think there is a simple answer, says Grazyna Jasienska, head of the Human Reproductive and Evolutionary Ecology group in Poland and a co-author of the study showing accelerated aging in mothers. Its interesting because its complicated.

Nearly 15 years ago, Jasienska established the Mogielica Human Ecology Study Site, which collects data on the inhabitants of five villages in the mountains of southern Poland. Its a rural population in which women still perform a lot of manual labor on small farms. She was attracted to the populations broad fertility rate: from zero to 16 children.

Were comparing women with five kids with women with 12 kids. This makes it possible to really look at the costs of reproduction, Jasienska says.

Life-history theory asserts that since the body has a finite amount of energy to work with, energy put toward reproduction is energy not spent on self-maintenance. Its maternal martyrdom at the cellular level. In most species, increased reproduction is linked to decreased lifespan. This is the theory researchers expect to confirm when studying how childbearing affects longevity in humans, but apparently, it isnt quite that cut and dried.

Although the relationship between womens fertility and their post-reproductive longevity has been extensively studied, the nature of this relationship remains unclear, the authors of yetanotherPLOS Onearticledeclared in December 2015. A meta-analysis of 31 studies on this topic did not show a consistent pattern. The relationship can be negative, positive, or absent.

I was very puzzled, said Pablo Nepomnaschy, about his findings on cellular health among Mayan women in Santa Cruz La Laguna, in the highlands of Guatemala.

Visual by David Samson

Childbearing comes with a vast array of variables: maternal nutrition, disease risk, time between pregnancies, breastfeeding duration, number of pregnancies, even the babys gender. Boys tend to grow faster in utero, to weigh more at birth, and to make higher lactational demands, so having sons may be more energetically expensive for mothers than having daughters, Jasienska explains in The Arc of Life.

And breastfeeding is even more energetically expensive than pregnancy. Women who exclusively breastfeed their babies need to eat an extra 640 calories a day; only 300 additional calories per day are needed during the last two trimesters of pregnancy. Its a factor that tends to be neglected by research into the relationship between fertility and longevity.

The [overall] costs are not the same for someone who eats well compared to someone whose food intake cant cover the excess energy needs of pregnancy and lactation, Jasienska says. [In] well-off women who have many children, we see increases in longevity. For someone in an economically developing country, for example, the costs of reproduction are much more intensely received by the organism.

Childbearing has been shown to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis, Jasienska noted. Conversely, the hormones involved in pregnancy and lactation can reduce the risk of pancreatic and reproductive cancers. So a womans lifestyle habits and baseline risks for these diseases will all play a part in the ultimate effects of childbearing. Did having kids end your drinking and smoking days, or do your children drive you to drink? According to Jasienska, this is why some studies see no effect: because everything evens out.

Moreover, she says, having a child every year is much different from having, say, one child every four years.The question is: is the damage reversible? For women who have children close together, is [the body] only repairing itself a little, but accumulating damage that leads to problems at an older age?

Not all studies account for all of these variables, but that doesnt mean their findings arent valid, just that we should understand the limits of their broader applicability. To study all of what reproduction does and how Im not sure if a perfect study is possible at all, Jasienska says.

Half a world away, in the highlands of Guatemala, Pablo Nepomnaschy found a population to study with similarly wide-ranging fertility rate: between one and 10 children. Nepomnaschy is the director of the Maternal and Child Health Lab at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and co-author of the study that linked childbearing with longer telomeres. He began collecting data on a group of indigenous Kaqchikel Mayan women in 2000, expecting his findings to support life-history theory. Instead, he found the opposite.

I was very puzzled, says Nepomnaschy, speaking from the field in Guatemala. So I had my team redo the results, but they kept coming out the same way I soon discovered we were not the only ones to find these results, but nobody had a good explanation of why.

He says he then happened upon a study in which researchers in Israel found that both mice and humans exhibited faster tissue rejuvenation after pregnancy. The fetal cells that mingle in the mothers organs and bloodstream, the authors suggested, may act like an injection of youth.

I was blown away by [these results] reproduction is costly, but maybe its associated with biological mechanisms that slow down aging, Nepomnaschy said. On average, women live longer than men. So there may be something built into female DNA, or into the process of reproduction, that helps maternal cells recover from being temporarily neglected.

Perhaps its that theres an optimum number of human offspring. A recentanalysis of 18 cohort studies, seven of which included men,uncovered a J-shaped association between number of children and risk of mortality from all causes: Parents of one to five children had a reduced risk of death compared with those who had either no children or at least six. For both men and women, the greatest reduction was for parents of three to four children. Other large studies cite the magic number as two.

Since youd have to start young and have relatively short periods between pregnancies to give birth to six kids, this assessment is in line with Jasienskas concern about the bodys ability to withstand such demands. Another possibility is that the genes linked to increased fertility are also associated with increased levels of oxidative stress, as well as increased susceptibility to infectious diseases.

Pregnancy is one thing: parenting is another. Do social support systems after birth or lack thereof affect a mothers recuperation? Surely decreased sleep and increased stress play roles here, too.

Pregnancy is one thing: parenting is another. Do social support systems affect a mothers recuperation? Surely decreased sleep and increased stress play roles, too.

Nepomnaschy says that as with childbearing, the biological costs and benefits of childrearing may vary by population and counteract each other. Jasienska explains that on one hand, if parents have limited resources and must share them with many kids, this is not going to be good for their health. On the other hand, children help their parents and also take care of aging parents. Our study showed that women with high fertility have shorter life span, but in men, number of daughters is related to longer life span.

Its likely that no study will ever separate out all of the factors to definitively say how pregnancy and parenting affect the body. Especially not if what were looking for is a simple answer an irresistible headline that purports to be applicable to anyone.

Olivia Campbell, a science journalist and essayist, is a regular contributor atNew YorkMagazine. Her work has also appeared in The WashingtonPost, Scientific American, Quartz, VICE,Pacific Standard,and STAT News.

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The Curious Case of Motherhood and Longevity - Undark Magazine

At 11am on a Sunday morning, I slip into a row of seats in front of a podium with flower bouquets on each side. I'm here to listen to an aging white man talk about the afterlife. A woman in a fancy hat arranges a potluck lunch on a back table. Other attendees, mostly gray-haired, pass around a wicker basket and toss in $20 bills and personal checks.

We aren't in church. This is godless Silicon Valley.

The Humanist Society has welcomed Ralph Merkle, a Livermore native, to explain cryonicsthe process of freezing a recently dead body in "liquid goo," like Austin Powersto the weekly Sunday Forum. We all want to know about being re-awoken, or reborn, in the future.

Merkle, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford and invented what's called "public key cryptology" in the '70s, makes his pitch to the audience: hand over $80,000, plus yearly dues, to Alcor, and the Scottsdale, Arizonabased company will freeze your brain, encased in its skull, so that you and your memories can wait out the years until medical nanotechnology is advanced enough to both bring you back from a frozen state as well as fix the ills that brought on your death in the first place.

"You get to make a decision if you want to join the experimental group or the control group," Merkle says. "The outcome for the control group is known."

Alcor gained infamy in 2002, when the body of baseball legend Ted Williams was flown to the company's Arizona headquarters, where his head was then severed, frozen and, according to some reports, mistreated.

The Humanist Society is an ideal audience for Merkle's presentation, as its congregants aren't held back by the tricky business of believing in a soul. Debbie Allen, the perfectly coiffed executive director and secretary of the national board of the American Humanist Association, considers cryonics a practical tool. "Religion has directed the conversation for thousands of years," she says. Allen prefers to focus on ethics, and whether cryonics "advances the well-being of the individual or the community."

"Science-fiction," someone whispers behind me, as Merkle talks about nanorobots of the future. He also notes how respirocytes and microbivores can be "programmed to run around inside a cell and do medically useful things like make you healthy."

As one might expect in a room full of humanists, skepticism runs high during the Q&A portion of the meeting. People are wondering exactly what kind of animals the scientists have used to test the cryonics process (answer: nematodes); when Alcor freezes bodies (after one's heart stops, if a DNR, or do not resuscitate, order is requested); whether a frozen brain is any good if the rest of the body deteriorates ("Toss it," Merkle says. "Replacement of everything will be feasible."); and what happens if Alcor goes bankrupt.

"We take that very seriously," the doctor says.

Lunch is served.

"Why would he want to preserve somebody like Adolf Trump?" asks Bob Wallace, 93, who ate salad and cubed cheese with his partner, Marge Ottenberg, 91, whom he met at a Humanist Society event.

"Obviously, the worst possible people are most likely to want to live forever," says Arthur Jackson, 86, a retired junior high school teacher.

Ottenberg seems more open to the idea of coming back from the dead than her golden-year counterparts. "Whatever works," she says.

Silicon Valley is the sort of place where people dream about nanorobots fixing our medical disorders. It's the sort of place where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent chasing that dream.

The last five years have seen an investment boom in what's called "life extension" research. Some of it is straight-up science, such as the Stanford lab researching blood transfusions in mice to cure Alzheimer's. Scientists are in a race against time to help as many people as possible, as fast as possible. They're battling a disease that saw an 89 percent increase in diagnoses between 2000 and 2014; and Alzheimer's or other dementia is currently the sixth leading cause of death. There are also nontraditional sources of cash flowing into biotech, which was once considered a risky investment.

But death itself is the biggest social ill Silicon Valley is trying to solve.

We can build apps to keep track of diabetics' blood glucose levels, to measure how soundly we're sleeping and to access medical records in an instant, but none of this stops the body from wearing out. Alongside the scientists laying the medical foundation to get us to the nanorobots envisioned by Merkle, techie utopians are looking at other ways to cheat death. A cluster of tech companies are attracting far more funding from Silicon Valley than academia, shifting the research landscape with infusions of cash.

Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur who sold his online payment company to PayPal for $800 million, was the first investor in Craig Venter's Human Longevity Inc., which aims to create a database of a million human genome sequences, including people who are over 100 years old, by 2020. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who once said "Death makes me very angry" and is one of the oldest of the life-extension investors at 72, has also invested in Human Longevity. Johnson infused even more cash into the biotech field, investing another $100 million of his own money into the OS Fund in 2014, to "support inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by rewriting the operating systems of life."

Such projects are examples of Silicon Valley's extreme confidence in its own ability to improve the world. In an email, Johnson describes his work in grandly optimistic terms.

"Humanity's greatest masterpieces have happened when anchored in hope and aspiration, not drowning in fear," he says.

It takes some serious chutzpah to say you'll extend the human lifespan, and for Johnson, he and his colleagues are venturing where no one has gone before.

"Building good technology is an act of exploration, and that it is very difficult for us to imagine the good that might come from any new technology," Johnson says. "We proceed, as explorers, nonetheless."

Johnson's lofty goals are similar in scale to other giant anti-aging investments in Silicon Valley. In 2013, Google created an anti-aging lab called Calico (for "California Life Company"), hiring top scientist Cynthia Kenyon, known for altering DNA in worms to make them live twice as long as they usually do. Calico is not your local university research lab; it has $1.5 billion in the bank and has remained close-lipped about its progress, like a Manhattan Project for life extension.

For Google co-founder Sergey Brin, 43, Calico may be another way to attack a more personal health concern: Brin carries a gene that increases his likelihood of contracting Parkinson's disease and has already invested $50 million in genetic Parkinson's research, conducted by his ex-wife's company, 23andMe. Brin said in 2009 that he hoped medicine could "catch up" to cure Parkinson's before he's old enough to develop it.

That hope is a common thread among health-obsessed tech investors like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, 49. A libertarian and Trump adviser, Thiel is trying to avoid both death and taxes. His foundation hired a medical director, Jason Camm, whose professional goals include increasing his clients' "prospects for Optimal Health and significant Lifespan Extension." Like Brin, who swims and drinks green tea to prevent Parkinson's, Thiel has changed his daily habits to live longer. He's aiming for 120, so he avoids refined sugar, follows the Paleo diet, drinks red wine and takes human growth hormone, which he believes will keep bones strong and prevent arthritis.

Thiel has also expressed personal interest in a company called Ambrosia in Monterey, where Dr. Jesse Karmazin is conducting medical trials for a procedure called parabiosis, which gives older people blood plasma transfusions from people between 16 and 25. Karmazin has enrolled more than 70 participants so far, each of whom pays $8,000 for the treatment. Much has been made of Thiel harvesting and receiving injections of young people's blood, though Karmazin recently denied that Thiel was a client of his.

Karmazin doesn't call himself a utopian, but he does note that his work requires some faith. "There's always uncertainty about whether it's going to stand the test of time, whether it'll work at all," he says. "That's especially true in technology, and you have to believe in it."

At the same time, the dystopians of Silicon Valley are preparing for the apocalypse. Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, told the New Yorker that he guesses up to 50 percent of tech executives have property in New Zealand, the hot new hub for the end of the world. Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, bought multiple motorcycles so he can weave through highway traffic if there's a natural disaster and he needs to escape. He also got laser eye surgery so he wouldn't have to rely on glasses or contacts in a survival scenario.

Among the dystopians is Elon Musk, whose brand-new Neuralink company is investigating what Musk calls "neural lace," a digital layer on top of the brain's cortex that connects us to computers. Such inventions could eventually lead us to what Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil calls "technological singularity," or the time when ever more powerful artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, around 2045.

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Eternity 2.0 - North Bay Bohemian