Category Archives: Transhuman News

Weve long been fascinated with the ideas of immortality and eternal youth. Around 220 BCE, Emperor Shihuangdi searched for the elixir of life. Juan Ponce de Len searched for the Fountain of Youth in the 1500s, and in 1890, Oscar Wildes Dorian Gray sold his soul for a perpetually pretty face. The Methuselah Mouse Prize, an award granted to teams that engineer older and healthier mice, took the fantasy out of our myths and put it into our laboratories.

Recently, a controversial $8,000 blood transfusion treatment shows that its also moved into our clinics.

Anti-aging technology isnt limited to groundbreaking medicine.

The provider, Jesse Karmazin, based the idea on a study that suggested aging in mice could be reversed, after old mice that were given blood from young ones for four weeks showed changes in hallmark signs of getting older. Participants can pay for an infusion of young peoples blood and plasma in the hopes itll rejuvenate their own systems.The study itself is unreliable, the treatment unproven, and the cost toclients is astronomical. Karmazin himself isnt a medical professional, but an entrepreneur who sees anti-aging research as a market opportunity. The business has the potential to garner $4.8 million.

Anti-aging technology isnt limited to groundbreaking medicine. It lines pharmacies and makeup counters. Wrinkle creams, skin repair formulas, vitamins, Viagra; these are small but concrete examples of the money poured into researching, packaging, and selling youth.Our aversion to aging has enabled the commercialization of immortality, despite its impossibility.

Given our current enthusiasm for staving it off, we may not realize age didnt always terrify us, perhaps because we didnt live long enough for it to.

Senectitude in 1481 originally meant old age; senescence was used in 1695 to mean growing old; and senile was used in 1661 to signify what was suited to old age. The term senility was used in 1791 to mean a state of being old or infirm due to old age. But by 1848 senile meant weakness, and by the late nineteenth century it indicated a pathological state. The term has taken on greater medical negative connotations ever since.

As our lives have grown longer, life span and health span have become crucially different. Although age brings benefitsfamilies, wisdom, stabilitythe accompanying physical degeneration, and its correlating limitations, make us hyperfocused on old ageas the signpost for the approaching end of life.

The fixation on defeating death has had the sideeffect of vilifying age. John A. Vincent writes, science as culture misdirects the way in which old age is understood. Rather than valuing life in all its diversity, including its final phase, it leads to misguided devotion of resources to solving the problem of death. The focus on biological failure sets up a cultural construction of old age which leads to the low esteem in which it is currently held.

Our desire for youth isnt just a fear of dying; its the desire to keep a life worth living, and for us, that means immortality is not merely living to 150. It means living to 150, perpetually age 30.

By: John A. Vincent

Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (AUGUST 2006), pp. 681-698

Sage Publications, Ltd.

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Marketing Immortality - JSTOR Daily

Helen was 82. She'd survived both breast cancer and outlived her husband.

One summer day she began bleeding from her colon and was admitted to the hospital. We assumed the worst another cancer. But after she endured a series of scans and being poked with scopes, we figured out that she had an abnormal jumble of blood vessels called an arteriovenous malformation in the wall of her colon.

The finding surprised us, but the solution was clear: Surgery to remove that part of her colon should stop the bleeding once and for all. The operation went well. But afterward Helen's lungs filled with fluid from congestive heart failure. Then she caught pneumonia and had to be put on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.

Her medical problems and our treatments had simply stressed her aging organs beyond their capability.

On morning rounds I took inventory: Helen had a breathing tube in her throat connected to the ventilator; a large IV in her neck; a wire inserted into her wrist artery to measure her blood pressure; a surgical wound drain and a bladder catheter to collect her urine.

Helen was tethered to our ICU, with no clear sign of when or even if she would leave. Helen's only daughter was distraughtboth about her mother's condition and because she had never discussed what her mother would want in such a situation.

Helen was living out the fate of millions of Americans who don't clearly state their medical wishes with an advance directive. Only about a quarter of American adults have an advance directive, according to a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

I found myself wishing we could just stop our full-court press on Helen. The humane thing to do, it seemed to me, would be to stop aggressive medical treatment and let nature take its course. After nearly two weeks of intensive care with no improvement in her condition, Helen's daughter instructed us to stop the mechanical ventilator. She died an hour later.

Stories like Helen's occur in ICUs all over the country every day, unfortunately. Often these situations are flashpoints of tension between the hopes and expectations of families and the realities seen by the medical team. But it doesn't have to be this way. If we lessen the stigma around death as an unmentionable topic by forcing ourselves to talk to our loved ones about what we want at the end of life, we can vastly diminish the amount of energy and suffering that come with trying to prolong life when nature tells us otherwise.

Many of us in the medical profession who have seen the futility of cases like Helen's take steps to avoid spending our dying days in a hospital that way (or in a hospital at all). As Dr. Ken Murray wrote in a 2011 essay, doctors die differently, often forgoing invasive and expensive treatment. This approach is different than the one taken by most Americans, but shouldn't be, he argued.

We know that Medicare typically spends a lot on people near the end of life. Medicare spending on inpatient hospital services in 2014 was seven times higher for people who died ('decedents') that year than those who survived.

I'll admit that this is a bit of a tautology, because people sick enough to die from chronic illnesses and complications related to aging are much more likely to make ample use of their health insurance.

But in my view, the crux of the problem is the wide mismatch between what people say they want (to die at home) and where they wind up (still dying mostly in hospitals and nursing homes). As a result too many American deaths are still overly medicalized, robbing us of our chance at a peaceful passage.

The trend is moving in the right direction, however, as more of us express our care goals and die at home or in hospice.

One strategy is to imagine a point in your life when fighting to stay alive would be counterproductive. Would it be when you had advanced dementia and couldn't recognize your family? What if you lost your ability to feed yourself? Work backward from there, and remember that when it comes to medical care, less is often more.

At that key point, your directive could limit your health care to seeking comfort rather than an attempted cure. You'll have to be decisive about foregoing life-sustaining treatment, because of the inertia of the health care system and reluctance from our loved ones. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, famously offered this viewpoint in a 2014 article titled, "Why I Hope to Die at 75."

Emanuel's argument led to pushback. Many people, like my parents, were offended at the idea of giving up on life at 75.

But that's not what Emanuel was actually arguing. He didn't write the story's headline, which more accurately would have been something like, "Why I Plan to Stop Screening Tests at Age 75 Because They're More Likely to Hurt Me Than Help Me."

I checked with Emanuel, now 59, to see if he'd had any change of opinion.

"The article reflects my view," he replied by email. "I am stopping ... colonoscopies and other screening tests at age 75. I am stopping statins and other medications where the rationale is to extend my life." He said he's not trying to provoke. "It is my view. It is provocative only because other people find it so."

Having cared for many patients like Helen, who wind up in a vortex of intense medical care, I find what Murray and Emanuel have suggested to be highly appealing.

That said, it's important for those of us looking to de-medicalize death to remember that is our choice. Many people opt instead to do everything to stave off death.

The message is simple: Think deeply about what you want beforehand. Then tell your family. Share it with your doctor. We truly want to honor your wishes.

John Henning Schumann is an internal medicine doctor and serves as president of the University of Oklahoma's Tulsa campus. He also hosts Studio Tulsa: Medical Monday on KWGS Public Radio Tulsa. You can follow him on Twitter: @GlassHospital.

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Have Your Wishes For Care Known Before A Health Crisis Strikes ... - NPR

On Jan. 11, while hurtling around Earth at gravity-defying speed, astronauts aboard the International Space Station did something that could revolutionize extraterrestrial health care: using a desktop-sized 3D printer, they made their own medical supplies, using blueprints downloaded direct from Toronto.

3D4MD, the company behind the historic feat, created the digital files, which can be printed out in three dimensions wherever needed. Its really not that different from a Microsoft Word file, says Julielynn Wong, founder of 3D4MD and its partner group, Medical Makers. And the library is similar to iTunes. The immediate benefits are clear: instead of taking up valuable room on spacecraft, astronauts can attend to medical emergencies by making custom supplies to order. The crowdsourced library of tools already includes finger splints and prosthetic hands and according to Wong, the best is yet to come.

Growing up in Ontario, Wong was always fascinated with space. As a child, she joined the Girl Guides and quickly accumulated achievement badges including an astronomy badge, which shes kept ever since. She joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets at 13 and got her glider-pilots licence three years later. Today she owns at least six drones, and races them for fun. One of the great things about racing drones, she says, is breaking them. Because then you have to fix them. Once you understand how technology works, then you can build it, and then you can teach others how to as well.

Her foray into 3D printing is only a first step in the burgeoning field of galactic medical care. Raffi Kuyumjian, a flight surgeon with the Canadian Space Agency, explains that getting regular medical tools to the ISS is simple enough although saving any shelf room on board is useful. But what gets Kuyumjian excited is the possibility of future innovations. Getting equipment to low-orbit is one thing, he says, but that becomes much more difficult on a deep-space mission for example, to a Martian colony. He continues: if we could get to a point where we could print medicine in space, so it would have a longer shelf-life, that could be critical. Right now, thats just science fiction.

Tell that to Wong. I have had discussions about that, she says, adding that last March the U.S Food and Drug Administration approved a 3D-printed pill. Printing pills in the solar system, she believes, is doable. It would have many benefits: you could customize doses and would only have to print what you need, she says. These solutions will outlive us. A future colonist could download that file and bring it to Mars. Its a form of immortality, if you think about it.

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Wong calls her 3D printers Star Trek replicators, and her dream is to turn science fiction into reality. Still, she says, the really exciting possibilities are here on Earth.

One in seven Canadians lives with a disability, she says, statistics memorized. Nearly a billionpeople live on less than $2 a day, and 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity. These people are her target market. She envisions a future where any Canadian can go to a public library and print out a finger splint for $2 and meanwhile, in developing countries, medical supplies can be printed and drone-delivered to those in need. My dad is a physician, and he makes house calls, with his bag, she says. I like to think the 3D printer is the doctors bag of the future.

There are hurdles to clear: among other things, approval from regulatory boards (she still needs the FDA to clear her finger splints for terrestrial use) and, of course, cost. To date, 3D4MD is funded by ancillary income fees from keynote speeches, exhibitions, and corporate workshops. Wong is trying to tap new revenue sources, including corporate donors and a newmodel for the file library (wherethe basics are cheapbut customization costs extra).

At the very least, Wong already has a place in the medical and celestial history books. Were building a legacy to benefit humanity, says. Which is kind of nice.

Nathaniel Basen is a Toronto-based freelance journalist.

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How a Toronto doctor made medical and astronautical history - TVO