The National Institute for Aging in the United States has concluded that resveratrol does not extend lifespan. Ouch.

Check out this article from Bad Astronomer: How many habitable planets are there in the galaxy?

By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass.

This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!

His conclusion: There are over 2.5 billion habitable planets in our Galaxy. Whoa, my mind just melted.

Read more.

Anders Sandeberg, one of my favorite transhumanists and ETI theorists, has finally chimed in on the Active SETI debate (i.e. deliberate attempts to contact extraterrestrial intelligences to let them know about our existence). Active SETI has its fair share of detractors, most notably futurist, science fiction author (and occasional Sentient Developments contributor) David Brin who best articulated his concerns in the piece, Shouting at the cosmos: Or how SETI has taken a worrisome turn into dangerous territory. On the other side of the debate are thinkers like Dr. Alexander Zaitsev who believes we should in fact reach out and touch an alien someone.

Not surprisingly, Sandberg's contribution to the debate is unique and provocative. In his article, Inviting invasion: deep space advertisments and planetary security, Sandberg admits that it's hard to assess the risk, but that we might not like the answers:

There are two aspects to extraterrestrial risks: the probability that the signals will be received by somebody, and that we would (afterwards) wish the aliens did not receive them. Stephen Hawking argued that we should be cautious: to him the probability of aliens was relatively high, but he also thought the probability of them being risky was high...This risk might not be a direct invasion threat, but simply dangerous cultural transmissions: in the past some human societies have fared badly when in contact with more advanced societies. Even a radio signal might consist of an information hazard, for example containing infectious ideas or software. The aliens do not even have to be deliberately malicious: many humans would jump at the chance of converting non-believers to their favourite belief system, thinking they do them a great service.

While optimists about SETI tend to think communications would be benign, it is hard to assign a probability to it. The only thing we can say is that we have not seen any alien communications or even signs of them, which suggests that aliens either do not exist, we are not receiving anything from them (e.g. they are too far away or we are listening on the wrong wavelengths) or they are keeping quiet.

From a species survival perspective we should generally prefer the middle answer. Why? If we are the only ones it means that either intelligent life is exceedingly improbable and we are lucky, or that intelligent life is not so uncommon but something wipes it out before it starts to spam the universe. Bad news. If there are aliens and they keep quiet, then they must have a very good and consistent reason. This could again be something positive or neutral (e.g. they are too alien to communicate, they all do not wish to interfere with us) or something bad (e.g. civilizations that remain obvious fall prey to self-replicating weapons). Only the boring middle answer - that we simply cannot communicate for technical or distance reasons - implies safety.

Ouch. And I'm sure Sandberg would agree that the boring answer is also very likely the most improbable answer--particularly given all the recent evidence indicating that the Galaxy may be teaming with Earth-like planets.

AI theorist Ben Goertzel has posted an article in which he declares his rejection of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence's claim that "progressing toward advanced AGI without a design for "provably non-dangerous AGI"...is highly likely to lead to an involuntary end for the human race." Goertzel calls this their "Scary Idea" and attempts to show that the fear is largely overstated.

He breaks the SIAI argument down to four primary points:

1. If one pulled a random mind from the space of all possible minds, the odds of it being friendly to humans (as opposed to, e.g., utterly ignoring us, and being willing to repurpose our molecules for its own ends) are very low
2. Human value is fragile as well as complex, so if you create an AGI with a roughly-human-like value system, then this may not be good enough, and it is likely to rapidly diverge into something with little or no respect for human values
3. "Hard takeoffs" (in which AGIs recursively self-improve and massively increase their intelligence) are fairly likely once AGI reaches a certain level of intelligence; and humans will have little hope of stopping these events
4. A hard takeoff, unless it starts from an AGI designed in a "provably Friendly" way, is highly likely to lead to an AGI system that doesn't respect the rights of humans to exist

Taking these points into consideration, Goertzel pieces together what he feels is the SIAI's argument:

If someone builds an advanced AGI without a provably Friendly architecture, probably it will have a hard takeoff, and then probably this will lead to a superhuman AGI system with an architecture drawn from the vast majority of mind-architectures that are not sufficiently harmonious with the complex, fragile human value system to make humans happy and keep humans around.

Goertzel then expresses his particular concerns with this argument, including SIAI's Eliezer Yudkowsky's suggestion that we can get human values into an AGI system, what he calls Coherent Extrapolated Volition:

...I think this is a very science-fictional and incredibly infeasible idea (though a great SF notion). I've discussed it and proposed some possibly more realistic alternatives in a previous blog post (e.g. a notion called Coherent Aggregated Volition). But my proposed alternatives aren't guaranteed-to-succeed nor neatly formalized.

But setting those worries aside, is the computation-theoretic version of provably safe AI even possible? Could one design an AGI system and prove in advance that, given certain reasonable assumptions about physics and its environment, it would never veer too far from its initial goal (e.g. a formalized version of the goal of treating humans safely, or whatever)?

I very much doubt one can do so, except via designing a fictitious AGI that can't really be implemented because it uses infeasibly much computational resources. My GOLEM design, sketched in this article, seems to me a possible path to a provably safe AGI -- but it's too computationally wasteful to be practically feasible.

Oooh, it looks like we have the makings of a great debate, here. I'll be interested to see if the SIAI retorts and how they address Goertzel's concerns.

Major news: The federal government in the United States has declared that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. This is a reversal of a rather longstanding policy; the new position will have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The ruling is likely to draw protests from some biotechnology companies that say such patents are vital to the development of diagnostic tests, drugs and the emerging field of personalized medicine, in which drugs are tailored for individual patients based on their genes.

Opponents, on the other hand, say that genes are products of nature, not inventions, and should be the common heritage of humanity. They feel that locking up basic genetic information in patents actually impedes medical progress. Proponents, however, say genes isolated from the body are chemicals that are different from those found in the body and therefore are eligible for patents.

But the government disagrees: It now contends that the mere isolation of a gene, without further alteration or manipulation, does not change its nature. "The chemical structure of native human genes is a product of nature, and it is no less a product of nature when that structure is 'isolated' from its natural environment than are cotton fibers that have been separated from cotton seeds or coal that has been extracted from the earth," the Department of Justice brief said. Moreover, the government suggested that such a change would have limited impact on the biotechnology industry because man-made manipulations of DNA, like methods to create genetically modified crops or gene therapies, could still be patented.

I'm pleased with this ruling, but admittedly concerned. I think the DoJ's reasoning is a bit flawed and will likely be overruled in short order. I'm also concerned that such a restriction will in fact inhibit innovation in these areas, particularly as far as the health sciences are concerned. But where I'm happy is in the suggestion that our genes, whether they be native or synthetic, remain under our own personal ownership. The idea of having a corporation own a patent for a genetic sequence in your DNA is a bit distasteful and potentially problematic to say the least.

Image credit: Robyn Twomey/Redux

Disturbing, revealing and even somewhat unsurprising, The Atlantic has published a piece on how medical researchers are consistently coming up with conclusions that are misleading, exaggerated and even flat-out long. In the article, titled Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, the work of meta-researcher Dr. John Ioannidis is explored; he has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their questionable science. And just as importantly, he asks the question: Why are so many doctors still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice?

One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

Read more.

Good news: Studies are increasingly showing that the rate of physical decline caused by aging can be advantageously tweaked by a variety of interventions, and it often doesn't matter whether you're 50 or 90 when you start tweaking. You just have to get started—something I noted in my recent article, Get Stronger, Live Longer. And as Dr. Mark Lachs notes, author of the book, Treat Me, Not My Age, "The embers of disability begin smoldering long before you’re handed a walker."

For more along these lines, check out the recent NYT article, What to do now to feel better at 100:

Muscle strength also declines with age, even in the absence of a muscular disease. Most people (bodybuilders excluded) achieve peak muscle strength between 20 and 30, with variations depending on the muscle group. After that, strength slowly declines, eventually resulting in telling symptoms of muscle weakness, like falling, and difficulty with essential daily tasks, like getting up from a chair or in and out of the tub.

Most otherwise healthy people do not become incapacitated by lost muscle strength until they are 80 or 90. But thanks to advances in medicine and overall living conditions, many more people are reaching those ages, Dr. Lachs writes: “Today millions of people have survived long enough to keep a date with immobility.”

The good news is that the age of immobility can be modified. As life expectancy rises and more people live to celebrate their 100th birthday, postponing the time when physical independence can no longer be maintained is a goal worth striving for.

The idea of a single general-purpose "computation" device is fading into the same historical background as having a single steam engine to power a whole factory, or a single electric motor to power every appliance in a house. As it fades, designers and developers have to learn to design smart things that serve the interests, abilities, and needs of people. We must create a practice of ubiquitous computing user experience design.

This isn't really surprising when you think about it, but the fact that the data is in is exciting: Personal genomics tests prompt lifestyle changes. From New Scientist:

David Kaufman of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC quizzed 1048 customers who had ordered genome scans from Decode Genetics of Reykjavik, Iceland, 23andMe of Mountain View, California, or Navigenics, based in Foster City, California.

Asked about changes in their behaviour between two and six months after receiving the results, 34 per cent of respondents said they were being more careful about their diet, 14 per cent said they were doing more exercise, and 16 per cent had changed their medications or dietary supplements.

"I was surprised at the number of people who said they'd made changes already," says Kaufman, who revealed the results this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) in Washington DC.

That's impressive because getting people to adopt more healthy lifestyles is notoriously difficult – even when family history shows a high risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart attacks.

There's obviously a selectional effect at play here. People who have gone about personalized genomics are already primed to act on that data, otherwise they wouldn't have gone about it in the first place. A bigger question would be: How would a random sampling of individuals respond to the acquisition of personal genomic data and a listing of their potential risks?

My guess is that the figure would be a bit lower than that of the early adopters used in the study. Denial can be a pretty powerful de-motivational factor; people in the pre-contemplative phase of behavior change overtly ignore or dismiss information, even when it's overwhelmingly evident that their lifestyle choices have to change.

That said, these results are very encouraging; it points to a future in which behavior modification can be facilitated through the dissemination of highly personalized genetic information.

Anthony Russo

Along the same lines of my recent article about why life extensionists need to be concerned about neurological diseases, the New York Times has published an OpEd about how we're entering the Age of Alzheimer's. The authors, Sandra Day O'Connor, Stanley Prusiner, and Ken Dychtwald, don't mince words about the pending crisis and what needs to be done about it:

Our government is ignoring what is likely to become the single greatest threat to the health of Americans: Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is 100 percent incurable and 100 percent fatal. It attacks rich and poor, white-collar and blue, and women and men, without regard to party. A degenerative disease, it steadily robs its victims of memory, judgment and dignity, leaves them unable to care for themselves and destroys their brain and their identity — often depleting their caregivers and families both emotionally and financially.

Starting on Jan. 1, our 79-million-strong baby boom generation will be turning 65 at the rate of one every eight seconds. That means more than 10,000 people per day, or more than four million per year, for the next 19 years facing an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. Although the symptoms of this disease and other forms of dementia seldom appear before middle age, the likelihood of their appearance doubles every five years after age 65. Among people over 85 (the fastest-growing segment of the American population), dementia afflicts one in two. It is estimated that 13.5 million Americans will be stricken with Alzheimer’s by 2050 — up from five million today.

Just as President John F. Kennedy, in 1961, dedicated the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, we must now set a goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2020. We must deploy sufficient resources, scientific talent and problem-solving technologies to save our collective future.

-------------------

A breakthrough is possible by 2020, leading Alzheimer’s scientists agree, with a well-designed and adequately financed national strategic plan. Congress has before it legislation that would raise the annual federal investment in Alzheimer’s research to $2 billion, and require that the president designate an official whose sole job would be to develop and execute a strategy against Alzheimer’s. If lawmakers could pass this legislation in their coming lame-duck session, they would take a serious first step toward meeting the 2020 goal.

Read more.

Lots of fuss these days over Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), particularly as it pertains to women's health. The disorder, which used to be called Inhibited Sexual Desire Disorder, is in the DSM-III-R and is characterized as a lack or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity for some period of time. It's important to note that, for this to be regarded as a disorder, it must cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulties and not be better accounted for by another mental disorder (i.e. depression), a drug (legal or illegal), or some other medical condition.

But not everyone agrees that it's a genuine disorder. Part of the problem is that it's open to a wide interpretation, and no one really knows what's causing it. That said, a recent study suggests that women with persistently low sex drives have significant differences in brain activity, indicating that the problem is indeed neurologically based.

Regardless, some critics say that HSDD is yet another example of the medicalization of sexuality by the medical profession to define normal sexuality, including the pathologization of asexuality. Others point out that there are significant differences between male and female sexuality; level of desire is highly variable among women and there are some who are considered sexually functional who have no active desire for sex, but they can erotically respond well in contexts they find acceptable (what has been termed "responsive desire" as opposed to spontaneous desire). There are also relationships to consider; the focus on physiological factors may ignore the relationship context of sexuality despite the fact that these are often the cause of sexual problems. Lastly, there are yet others who contend that HSDD is an invention of Big Pharma who are now ready to cash in with the (potential) release of a female Viagra-like pill.

Undeniably, these criticisms address some valid concerns—but they're largely missing the point. If a woman feels that her libido is low, and she has the means with which to achieve a desired level of sexual responsiveness (i.e. she wants to 'function' in a particular way), then it can be genuinely classified as a disorder.

Admittedly, "disorder" may be too strong a term, but it's a good example of how an enhancement eventually becomes a therapy. Let's suppose for a moment that HSDD is pure fiction and that female sexuality is largely operating within normal bounds. Now, thanks to the marvels of modern medical science, we can tweak libido such that a more desirable state is achieved. Once such an intervention hits the market and becomes normalized across groups, then its absence can be characterized, for all intents and purposes, as the cause of a dysfunction. It has become a pathology.

That's how enhancement works, and that's why the whole therapy versus enhancement debate is mostly useless. What we consider normal human functioning today is not necessarily what we'll consider normal in the future.

One last point, and one that speaks to the title of this post: If your body is not functioning in the way you believe it should, or in the way you want, you are experiencing a "disorder" of sorts. This becomes all the more cogent when there's a way to overcome the limitation, namely through some sort of medical intervention. The argument can be made that a condition becomes a condition once we have the means to overcome it.

So ladies, don't believe the negative hype. You know your own mind and body best, and if you believe that taking a pill can and will enhance your sex life, go for it.

About 99% of medicinal molecules don't reach their targets and subsequently stay in the body of patients. Some of these molecules can be very toxic—particularly in the case of those designed to target cancers. Consequently, research is being undertaken to find more effective ways of safely transporting and delivering drugs. This is where medical nanotechnology may be able to help.

Researchers are hoping to create a device which can carry a drug payload to its target, be monitored throughout its journey, and deliver—and all without being attacked and destroyed by the body's natural defences. This calls for a rather complex system and, among other things, possesses stealth design characteristics. Such a schema is described in this video:

As noted in the previous article, the Methuselah Foundation recently launched the NewOrgan Prize which will be awarded to the first scientist to produce and successfully transplant an organ using regenerative medicine. The contest is meant to speed up the research process and bring the promise of regenerative medicine to reality. As the US Department of Health & Human Services has stated, "Regenerative medicine will be the standard of care for replacing organ systems in the body." The trick is to make it happen.

When it comes to reconstructing a new organ, "new organ engineering" will require the development of all tissues that build the organ including muscle, nerves, arteries and veins. The challenges and limitations of the current system for organ replacement are well documented, including the agony of waiting for a donor to die, lifelong limitations from immunosuppressant drugs, and possible organ rejection. And the sad reality is that many die without receiving a new organ or even qualifying to be considered.

From the Methuselah Foundation website:

We envision a world where everyone who needs an organ gets an organ. And, in the Methuselah Foundation quest for everyone to live a long healthy life, we advocate a system that provides new organs and long-term health. We call that system NewOrganomics.

The promise of NewOrganomics is to provide a new organ to any patient in need, not from a donor or from the black market but rather built from their own cells. NewOrgan Prize was created to reach this ambitious goal. We need your support to make it happen. Be Organomical, donate today.

Wired has posted an excellent interview with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. The discussion covers a lot of ground, including recent advancements in the field, the NewOrgan Prize, funding issues, the media and insights into Aubrey's personal life. Here are some highlights:

Wired.com: So you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into messaging. Yet, you say your ideas are often misconstrued and misrepresented.

de Grey: I’ve found it frustrating the media, especially, are pretty much fixated on the longevity aspects and not on the health aspects. It wouldn’t annoy me so much if it was not so overdone. But even the most highbrow write-ups, like one in The Economist a couple of years ago for example, every single one has the word “immortality” or “living forever” in the title of the article. It does wind me up a little bit.

Wired.com: Why do you suppose they do that?

de Grey: Sells papers. You don’t have to ask me, you’re the journalist.

Wired.com: Press also helps get funding, no?

de Grey: No, rather the opposite. It makes it sound like entertainment. It sounds like science fiction and not real science. It really actively detracts from my ability to get funding.

Wired.com: You’ve said that when these treatments become a reality, they should be free and available to all.

de Grey: It’s not a matter of should. I’m not making a political opinion here. I’m saying it’s inevitable they will be.

Wired.com: Right. Governments would minimize the costs of taking care of the elderly by investing money up front.

de Grey: Right. The developing world is more fragile, but certainly within the industrialized world — and that of course will include China and India at that point — I think we can be absolutely certain the ability to pay will not be an issue.

Wired.com: Do you think people who engage in risk-heavy behavior — say, smoking — should be given rejuvenation treatments regardless?

de Grey: Absolutely. But the reason I can say that so confidently is simply because risks like smoking or overeating will simply not be so risky anymore. It’s possible those therapies will need to be applied somewhat more frequently to such people than to other people. But still we’re talking there about something that’s happening to everybody. So it’s something that won’t be the subject of insurance, it will be something preventative that will be provided routinely.

Wired.com: It’s difficult to imagine a time where people who have more money won’t have access first.

de Grey: Oh yeah. The question is what will the interval be. Remember, these are going to be experimental treatments. If I was Bill Gates I wouldn’t want to be first, right? There are going to be risks. Things are going to go wrong early on. And as far as I’m concerned, the more goes wrong the better, in the sense I sure as fuck don’t want all of these treatments to be made restricted to only people in clinical trials until Phase III is over.

You’ve had what you consider huge breakthroughs in hotels in California, a pub in Italy, a hotel in Dresden. How does being away from home and hanging out in pubs inform your thinking?

de Grey: It is important both in terms of how I think and also especially in terms of how I actually do my work; how I actually get the idea out and so on. I’ve given a talk on How To Be a Successful Heretic. It’s a 10-point plan. And one of them is “Be everywhere (a pint is worth 1,000 words).” You know, beer just works for me. I’m just lucky that way.

Wired.com: What do you mean?

de Grey: It just helps me to think. I just communicate well in the context of alcohol, somehow as well as thinking. Also, it’s a bit of a role model thing. As I mentioned, the Methuselah Foundation had a bit of a problem with looking a bit too much like a fan club. But one could go too far the other way. I think having a bit of a personality cult around what I do works well. I have to obviously give a positive impression at many levels. I have to know my stuff, but you don’t do that in superficial interviews. You do that in the literature.

So I think it is important to show I enjoy my life. [Jason] Pontin in Technology Review tried to basically say I was this very circumscribed individual, and I looked as though I wasn’t enjoying my life, drinking too much beer. Outrageous. That pissed me off a lot. [laughs]

Wired.com: That you drink too much beer?

de Grey: Yeah, I mean how would they know how much is too much?

Wired.com: Yeah, especially since you’re basically a 30-year-old on the inside.

de Grey: Quite. It works. I drink exactly the right amount of beer evidently. [laughs] It’s ridiculous, really. Yet, I have to show I’m enjoying my life. It’s public knowledge I am polyamorous as well. That’s something that goes down not so well with some of my more politically sensitive friends and colleagues. But it goes quite well with some other people. [laughs]

Wired has published an article about the seminal work being done by Chris Calhoun in the burgeoning biotechnological field of tissue engineering. Calhoun and his team are using stem cells—specifically stem-cell-enriched adipose (fat) tissue—to enhance, heal, and rebuild injured or damaged organs. Interestingly, it is through their work on reconstructing breasts damaged by cancer and mastectomies that they were able to make their breakthrough.

And just as profoundly, it is yet another example of how a therapeutic intervention can also be used for cosmetic or enhancement purposes.

"It’s the first practical cell therapy," says Calhoun "And it’s breasts." Which means cancer victims with breasts mutilated by surgery—as well as women who are simply unhappy with their natural assets—can now grow a new and improved pair, with raw materials harvested from their own body fat.

Yet that's only part of the story; there is massive potential here for a revolution in regenerative medicine and in the ways in which it can be used and delivered:

But breast augmentation is just one development (so to speak) in the company’s more ambitious plan: to introduce stem cell medicine to the mass market—and not using the ethically fraught kind of stem cells from human embryos. Instead, based on almost a decade of trials that Cytori and its academic partners have performed on cell cultures, lab rodents, and now humans, they believe their engineered flab cells can treat more organs than you find in a French butcher shop. Chronic heart disease? Check: In human studies released in May, the cells improved patients’ aerobic capacity and shrank the size of the infarct (tissue killed by lack of blood). Heart attack? Check: A human clinical trial, also reported in May, found that the cells increased both the blood supply to damaged heart muscle and the volume of blood that the heart pumped. Kidney injury as a result of cancer therapy? Check: In recent rat studies, the cells improved kidney function. Incontinence after prostatectomy? Check: Another recent study reported that, by 12 weeks after injection, the cells had decreased the amount of urine male volunteers were leaking by 89 percent. If Calhoun and his scientists succeed, they won’t just create more cleavage. They’ll make practical a whole new field, one that medical visionaries have dreamed of for decades: regenerative medicine.

More.

This is one of the most important and thought-provoking articles I've read in the New York Times in quite some time: The Meat Eaters by Rutgers philosopher Jeff McMahan.

In the article, McMahan asks the question, "Would the controlled extinction of carnivorous species be a good thing?" His conclusion is yes:

The conflict, therefore, must be between preventing suffering and respecting the alleged sacredness — or, as I would phrase it, the impersonal value — of carnivorous species. Again, the claim that suffering is bad for those who experience it and thus ought in general to be prevented when possible cannot be seriously doubted. Yet the idea that individual animal species have value in themselves is less obvious. What, after all, are species? According to Darwin, they “are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.” They are collections of individuals distinguished by biologists that shade into one another over time and sometimes blur together even among contemporaneous individuals, as in the case of ring species. There are no universally agreed criteria for their individuation. In practice, the most commonly invoked criterion is the capacity for interbreeding, yet this is well known to be imperfect and to entail intransitivities of classification when applied to ring species. Nor has it ever been satisfactorily explained why a special sort of value should inhere in a collection of individuals simply by virtue of their ability to produce fertile offspring. If it is good, as I think it is, that animal life should continue, then it is instrumentally good that some animals can breed with one another. But I can see no reason to suppose that donkeys, as a group, have a special impersonal value that mules lack.

Even if animal species did have impersonal value, it would not follow that they were irreplaceable. Since animals first appeared on earth, an indefinite number of species have become extinct while an indefinite number of new species have arisen. If the appearance of new species cannot make up for the extinction of others, and if the earth could not simultaneously sustain all the species that have ever existed, it seems that it would have been better if the earliest species had never become extinct, with the consequence that the later ones would never have existed. But few of us, with our high regard for our own species, are likely to embrace that implication.

Here, then, is where matters stand thus far. It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation. The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.

It's worth noting that McMahan, like a number of abolitionist transhumanists, have advocated something like this for quite some time now—a group of thinkers that includes myself, David Pearce, Pablo Stafforini, Michael Anissimov and others. David Pearce's contribution to the discussion is the most significant, and it would have been nice to have seen McMahan make mention of it.

As for me, I've argued for something even more extreme and sweeping than selective extinction or the reprogramming of predators; I've made the case that we are morally obligated to uplift the entire animal kingdom so that they may join posthumanity in postbiological existence.

With McMahan's contribution hitting the mainstream, however, I am excited beyond words. The meme is out there; now let's see where we take it.

Check out IEET senior fellow Jamais Cascio on the CBC's Surviving the Future:

Surviving the Future: Jamais Cascio excerpts from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

There's an article over at BrainBlogger that has reaffirmed something I've suspected for quite some time now: Physical strength predicts mortality. Makes sense when you think about it. Building up physical strength and pocketing it for our later years seems like a smart life extension strategy—and clinical research is now indicating that this idea works.

Frailty inexorably leads to increased vulnerability, decreased tolerance for internal and external stressors, and an inability to maintain physiologic and psychosocial equilibrium. And as s a clinical syndrome, frailty is characterized by low physical activity, low muscle strength, increased fatigue, slowness of gait, and weight loss, and it is associated with adverse health outcomes, including dependency, disability, hospitalization, institutionalization, and mortality. Weaker elderly people experience a significantly higher risk of falls, decreased mobility, disability, hospitalization, and death.

So the message is clear: get going on your strength work and get going now—and the younger you start, the better. Cognitive and physical markers of physical performance and frailty are evident as early as childhood. Research shows that men and women with the highest cognitive performance and slowest memory decline throughout life perform better on tests of standing balance and chair rising speed. Additionally, children who performed better at milestone attainment in childhood, cognitive ability, and motor coordination showed better physical performance and muscular strength later in life.

It would appear, therefore, that healthy living in later life begins in childhood.

New Scientist recently published a special series called Morality Put to the Test. Among the more interesting and provocative articles is the one by Fiery Cushman, a moral psychologist at Harvard University. In his article, titled Morality: Don't be afraid – science can make us better, Cushman argues that we should embrace rather than fear the knowledge science brings as it unravels morality's muddles:

We have long thought of moral laws as fixed points of reality, self-evident truths rooted in divine command or in some Platonic realm of absolute rights and wrongs. But new research is offering an alternative, explaining moral attitudes in the context of evolution, culture and the neural architecture of our brains. This apparent reduction of morality to a scientific specimen can seem threatening, but it needn't. Rather, by unmasking our minds as the authors of morality, we may be better able to bend its narrative arc towards a happy end.

He continues,

...moral rules are born in human minds. For many, this is deeply threatening. Moral rules must be immutable and eternal, they say, like the speed of light or the mass of a proton. Otherwise, why should we obey them?

As we come to a scientific understanding of morality, society is not going to descend into anarchy. Instead, we may be able to shape our moral thinking towards nobler ends. Which norms of fairness foster economic prosperity? What are the appropriate limits on assisting a patient's end-of-life decisions? By recognising morality as a property of the mind, we gain a magical power of control over its future.

Entire article.

I'm having a hard time getting excited these days about apparent advances in longevity medicine. Don't get me wrong, many of these breakthroughs are truly fantastic, such as a potential pill to mimic the effects of caloric restriction, or the ability to reverse aging of human muscle tissue. What troubles me, however, is that many of these advances don't address the single most important aging related problem we face today: neurological diseases. Until we can meaningfully treat age-related cognitive decline, many of these other life extending advances are a moot point; what we're in danger of doing right now is extending lifespan, but not necessarily healthy life span.

The human brain degrades quickly with advanced age and, as a result, represents the weakest link in the life extension chain; as far as I'm concerned it's full stop until we can meaningfully fix the cognitive problems associated with aging.

Yes, age-associated diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease are clearly bad, but the most devastating of these involve the nervous system—diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. These diseases take a brutal toll on individuals and their families, often virtually killing the person well before they die.

That we are facing a looming epidemic of neurological diseases shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. But what is surprising is that very few people are actively doing anything about it. And it's not that the writing isn't on the wall—it is. The time to act is now.

The problem

In 40 years a significant proportion of the world population will be 65 and over, a combination of surviving Baby Boomers and Generation X'ers. Collectively, this demographic might outnumber the remaining population, meaning that elderly persons will make up the majority. That's rather astounding when you think about it, not to mention precedent setting.

The reasons for this trend are well documented. Average lifespan has more than doubled since 1840 and is steadily increasing at a rate of five hours every day. We are healthier, safer and more vibrant over the course of our lives than ever before—a factor that is leading to increased longevity. And not only are we staying physically healthier for longer periods, we are also remaining mentally sharper into our eldery years; a recent study showed that 70-year-olds are smarter than they used to be.

But the double-edged sword that is extended life is not without its limits.

The chances of acquiring a neurological disease like Alzheimer's increases exponentially after the age of 65, and it is estimated that within the next 50 years approximately 30% of the population will be aged 65 years or older. Of those between 75 and 84 years of age, 6 million will exhibit some form of Alzheimer's symptoms, and of those older than 85 years, over 12 million will have some form of dementia associated with it. Disturbingly, many cognitive changes occur even in the absence of specific age-related neurodegenerative diseases. Common components thought to contribute to the manifestation of these disorders and normal age-related declines in brain performance are increased susceptibility to long-term effects of oxidative stress and inflammatory insults. Should we fail to reduce these age-related decrements in neuronal function, health care costs will continue to rise exponentially, as will the amount of human suffering.

Solutions

There is currently no cure or (meaningful) prevention for most of these diseases. At least not yet.

Age-associated cognitive decline is currently costing the healthcare system a third of a trillion dollars per year. It is estimated that by 2050 this figure will exceed a trillion. As it stands, the largest benefactors to these lines of research are philanthropies. Governments, on the other hand, have largely ignored the issue. This has obviously got to change.

In terms of research, there are a number of teams tackling this problem from different angles, including Gregory Petsko, professor of biochemistry and chemistry at Oxford University. He is working to untangle misfolded proteins responsible for neurological decline. He is trying to develop a kind of "molecular scotch tape" to help proteins keep their shape and prevent tangles.

It's these tangles of misfolded proteins that Petsko believes is responsible for not just Alzheimer's, but possibly all age-associated cognitive decline. If true, then finding a treatment for any of them should help in treating all of them.

Other possible approaches include the use of phytochemicals to improve age-related neurological dysfunction, or, in the case of Parkinson's, coaxing dormant neurons to take on the dopamine-producing role of damaged neurons and to restore the brain's control of movement. There are obviously many more approaches, and there's no telling which line of inquiry will prove to be the most effective, but it's early days. The prevention and curing of cognitive decline will likely involve a host of treatments as it's likely caused by a multiplicity of factors.

Solutions for today

In the meantime there are things you can do today. For Parkinson's prevention, be sure to ingest caffeine and avoid head injuries. For those at risk of Alzheimer's, be sure to eat lots of fish oil, keep your blood pressure down (as it appears to be the single most important risk factor), and keep yourself mentally stimulated (use it or lose it, as they say).

And lastly, do what you can to either fund or promote research that works to reduce or eliminate the effects of age-associated neurological diseases. Your future mental health will likely depend on it.