stem cell

273 results back to index

Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes by Richard C. Francis

agricultural Revolution, autism spectrum disorder, cellular automata, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, meta-analysis, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

According to this view, cancer cells are actually derived from somatic stem cells gone bad.12 On this stem cell theory of cancer, the reason cancer cells resemble stem cells is that their mother cells were stem cells. After their birth, they took a wrong turn, converting from normal somatic stem cells to cancer stem cells. Actually, only a minority of the cancer cells retain stem cell properties. Like normal stem cells, these cancer stem cells undergo asymmetric cell division, resulting in one cancer stem cell and one more differentiated cancer cell. The more-differentiated cancer cells then undergo the symmetrical form of cell division typical of all non–stem cells. The net result is a tumor that consists of a small number of cancer stem cells, and a large number of cancer cells that are—to varying degrees—more differentiated.

…

Embryonic stem cells could help those who have been paralyzed for years to walk again—just one of countless potential applications. Somatic stem cells can be utilized in some of the same ways. For example, neural stem cells might be able to do the job for spinal cord injuries. That would be a great boon because somatic stem cells are much easier to come by than embryonic stem cells. Until very recently, embryonic stem cells could only be harvested from blastula-stage embryos, a practice opposed by many on religious grounds. But we retain reservoirs of somatic stem cells even into adulthood, which is why somatic stem cells are often misguidedly referred to as adult stem cells (a misnomer since somatic stem cells are present in all but the earliest stages of embryonic development).

…

(Somatic stem cells are often misleadingly referred to as “adult stem cells” in the media.) Somatic stem cells have lost much of that potential possessed by the embryonic stem cells, but they still retain a large amount of potential, compared with cone cells or heart muscle cells. They are said to be multipotent, which means, roughly, the capacity to become multiple cell types—in contrast to both no potential (for example, cone cells) and almost total potential (as in embryonic stem cells). There are a number of types of somatic stem cells, including neural stem cells and blood stem cells. A schematic diagram of cellular differentiation from zygote to terminal differentiation of cone cells.

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

DOI: 10.1016/j.trci.2016.06.004 ageless.link/kkt6m9 Chapter 6: In with the new Stem cell therapy A good general primer on stem cell biology and therapies is Jonathan Slack, Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) ageless.link/rc4udv The term ‘stem cell’ is thrown around by charlatans … A good resource for evaluating claims about stem cell treatments, as well as general information about stem cells, is A closer look at stem cells (International Society for Stem Cell Research) ageless.link/miqgch … over one million HSC transplants … Alois Gratwohl et al., ‘One million haemopoietic stem-cell transplants: A retrospective observational study’, Lancet Haematol. 2, e91–100 (2015).

…

The definition of a stem cell is a cell which has a choice when it divides: it can either do what most cells do when they divide, and form two of the same kind of cell (which in this case would be two stem cells, used for replenishing the stem cell population), it can divide into a stem cell and another kind of cell (thus not depleting the stem cell population, and adding a fresh, new cell to wherever it finds itself, from the skin to the lining of the intestines), or it can turn into two non-stem cells (to maximise tissue replenishment at the expense of the stem cell population). The process of turning from a stem cell to a specific type of body cell is known as ‘differentiation’. It’s easiest to think about these abilities in the context of a developing embryo.

…

The irony is that all of these changes actually increase the number of HSCs overall – in part because these factors bias them slightly towards dividing to make two stem cells, thus increasing their own population, rather than into a stem cell and a blood cell precursor. As well as producing too many stem cells and not enough of the type of cells they’re meant to top up, stem cells can produce the wrong ratio of cell types with age, too. One example of this is mesenchymal stem cells (another mouthful – let’s call them MSCs). These are a group of stem cells whose progeny include bone-building osteoblast cells, tissue-joining cartilage cells, muscle cells and a type of fat cell found in bone marrow.

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Let’s take a look at four approaches in more detail: stem cell therapy, organ regeneration, human augmentation, and future “young blood” therapies. BACK TO THE FUTURE: STEM CELL THERAPY Stem cells are the “master cells” from which all of our cells, tissues, and organs were initially produced as we were growing in the womb. Each stem cell has the potential to become a duplicate stem cell, or to differentiate into skin cells, brain cells, bone cells, muscle cells, or virtually any other type of cell in the body. Your body contains hundreds of thousands of stem cells—in your fat, bone marrow, blood, muscle, and even in your teeth.

…

Until fairly recently, research and treatment using stem cells were things to be debated about but not to be done. Previously, only embryonic stem cells (stem cells taken from embryos) were used in the procedure. Many readers will recall the passionate debates that took place a decade or so ago regarding the ethics of harvesting embryonic stem cells from unused embryos prepared for IVF fertilization procedures. This quandary held back research in stem cell therapies for years. Then, when Shinya Yamanaka discovered how to reprogram cells back into their original, pluripotent state, the need for embryonic stem cells was eliminated, and stem cell research stepped into the spotlight.

…

Medical research leaders like the Mayo Clinic and the Stanford Medical Center are conducting studies on the use of stem cells to regenerate spinal cords in patients with traumatic injuries and to regenerate cartilage in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. There are thousands more clinical trials using stem cells currently underway in the United States alone.3 And at the time of writing, a search for the subjects stem cell and stem cell therapy on start-up investment site Crunchbase lists more than four hundred companies that are working on this. Slowly but surely, stem cell research is beginning to bear fruit. Take the case of Chris Barr, a middle-aged California man whose neck was broken in seven places in a surfing accident in 2017.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

Because the cells in the Petri dish in front of him, suspended in the pinkish medium, were not stem cells. Though the placental tissue that his friend from Chicago had provided them had indeed been fresh, they had been unable to generate workable stem cells from the material, no matter how much they harvested. A quick search of the literature told them that they were not alone in this failure: It turned out that nobody had successfully generated and manipulated elephant stem cells yet. Mouse stem cells, pig stem cells, even human stem cells had been used in genetic engineering experiments, but never elephant stem cells. Luhan had a theory about that. It was widely known that elephants did not get cancer.

…

“And when that succeeds—when we’ve proven our ability to insert a Woolly Mammoth gene into an elephant cell—we shift our work to the stem cells.” Stem cells are the undifferentiated cells within every living thing that can give rise to the diversity of other cells that make up the living whole. Most cells are specialized and don’t change that specialty—the cells making up an ear or a hair remain that of an ear or hair. But stem cells can differentiate to become anything: ears, hair, heart, lungs, hemoglobin, tusks. A genetically changed stem cell could give rise to all the different traits of a Woolly Mammoth. And those traits would then be inheritable and inherited.

…

“Well, we don’t need the whole elephant,” she said. “What do you mean?” Margo asked. “Our eventual goal is stem cells, right?” In order to implant a genetic change—Mammoth DNA—into the elephant species DNA, they needed a stem cell. Originally, that was going to be something they would seek after they’d experimented on living elephant cells. “Sure,” Bobby said. “But it’s hard enough getting live elephant samples. Where do we find elephant stem cells?” “Elephant placenta,” Luhan responded. Mammalian placenta is rich in stem cells, and placental cells were as young as fetal cells, thus easier to reprogram than adult somatic cells (any biological cell that forms an animal’s body).

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The second method is parthenogenesis, the Greek word for virgin birth, in which an unfertilized egg is tricked into cell division and then mined for stem cells. The third idea is hybridization, or using existing stem cell lines (meaning cell lines that researchers have already isolated) to create new cell lines via genetic manipulation. And while both of these notions are exciting, no one really knows if either will work. So, for now, both are off the radar. In the remaining two methods, fetal stem cells are culled from aborted fetuses or embryonic stem cells are removed from unused embryos taken from in vitro fertilization clinics. And it is these final two methods that have put stem cells into the middle of America’s reproductive rights debate.

…

But to get this information, he needs stem cells. Currently, much of Goldstein’s work involves nonhuman-derived stem cells, which are not technically a point of contention. “But five years from now,” he says, “if I want to actually cure these diseases, I’ll need access to human embryonic stem cells, and I want to make sure they’re available.” The issue of stem-cell availability is another front in this battle. In the summer of 2001, just after his first State of the Union, President Bush issued an executive order restricting federal research money to seventy-eight previously harvested lines of stem cells. These lines were cultivated between 1998, when human embryonic stem cells were first isolated, and that 2001 moment further research was nixed.

…

The group has gathered to celebrate an announcement made the day prior at Stanford, when the institution declared its plans to capitalize on $12 million of anonymously donated seed money and build a $120 million Institute for Stem Cell Biology to be headed up by Weissman. In other words, in the war over stem cells, Stanford just declared itself the Western Front. And make no mistake, the research they plan to do there is much needed. Building on Weissman’s previous work with blood-forming stem cells, the Stanford institute will initially focus on discovering the stem cells that become the other major organs of the body — that way, if these organs become cancerous, they’ll have new ways to fight the disease.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

There was talk among the triumvirate—Hariri, Venter, and Diamandis—that it might be best to split off the stem cell work to create an entirely new business. It wasn’t that there was any ill will among the three. But Venter, as CEO, had pretty much focused HLI on genomics and Health Nucleus. Hariri’s investigations of stem cell therapy were undeniably interesting, and related to longevity and health span, but were a little out of the orbit of HLI’s current plans. For his part, Hariri really wanted to focus on placental stem cells, and felt he was making serious progress. Sure enough, in early 2017, the stem cell side of HLI split off, and Hariri and Diamandis, with a fresh supply of Silicon Valley investors, formed a new company called Celularity, designed exclusively “to turn stem cells into medicine.”

…

In fact, it provided everything an embryo needed to develop into a healthy, living, breathing child: It brimmed with pluripotent stem cells, life’s purest form of cell, capable of morphing into whatever the body required—liver, muscle, even neurons. This was how living things were made as they developed. Some pluripotent stem cells transformed into skin. Others became bones or hearts or kidneys—all the cellular matter that made a human possible. This also made placentas magnificent stem cell factories. Yet every day nearly all of them were tossed in the rubbish! A discovery like this might have prompted a lot of scientists to write a paper extolling their findings in a peer-reviewed journal; Hariri had done it himself plenty of times.

…

But what if you had access to medicines created by placental stem cells? Those, at least theoretically, could solve all three problems: regenerating body, mind, and appearance. This was not an entirely new idea. Before Diamandis and Hariri had begun brainstorming their longevity play, scientists outside the United States had undertaken stem cell research more aggressively than the FDA in the United States. Among them was the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, unequivocally regarded as one of Europe’s best medical establishments. At Karolinska, scientists had injected stem cells into patients with blood, brain, eye, bone, and liver disorders, including cancer.

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

Many human tissues contain cells known as stem cells. These are responsible for producing replacement cells when needed. When new cells are needed, a stem cell will copy its DNA and then split it between two daughter cells. Typically, one of these daughter cells will develop into a fully fledged replacement cell. The other will become a new stem cell, which can continue to create replacements in the same way. One of the ‘busiest’ cell types in the human body is the type of stem cell that gives rise to all the blood cells,f including red blood cells and those that we rely on to fight infection. These stem cells proliferate at an incredible rate.

…

The smallRNAs bind to the messenger RNAs that carry the code for these proteins, and less protein is produced. The brakes are taken off the stem cells and they convert into mature muscle.15,16 Figure 18.2 When a stem cell divides it can create either another stem cell, which can also keep dividing, or a differentiated cell that will not create more stem cells. A similar effect can be seen in the heart. The adult cardiac muscle does contain some stem cells, although they aren’t huge in number and they are hard to convert into mature heart tissue. This is one of the reasons why heart attacks are so damaging.

…

All three of these tissues produce cells required for fighting infection and were expected to have a large population of stem cells. This finding was consistent with the smallRNA systems having a role in stem cell control. The mice all died, but this was due to a massive deterioration of their intestinal tracts. This is also consistent with a role in stem cells. Our intestines are constantly losing cells that are sloughed off during the continuing activity of the digestive system. These cells have to be replaced every day so we would expect there to be a very active stem cell population.13 However, it wasn’t clear exactly how the loss of the scissors enzyme resulted in dramatic damage to the intestines, although it may have been related to abnormalities in the way the mice processed fats in their diet.

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

This is because in most adult animals the only genuinely pluripotent stem cells are the tightly controlled cells of the germline which give rise to eggs or sperm. But active pluripotent stem cells are a completely normal part of a plant. In plants these pluripotent stem cells are found at the tips of stems and the tips of roots. Under the right conditions, these stem cells can keep dividing to allow the plant to grow. But under other conditions, the stem cells will differentiate into specific cell types, such as flowers. Once such a cell has become committed to becoming part of a petal, for example, it can’t change back into a stem cell. Even plant cells roll down Waddington’s epigenetic landscape eventually.

…

Just like the Lin28 protein, these miRNAs also improve reprogramming of somatic cells into iPS cells27. When we compare stem cells with their differentiated descendants, we find that they express very different populations of mRNA molecules. This seems reasonable, as the stem and differentiated cells express different proteins. But some mRNAs can take a long time to break down in a cell. This means that when a stem cell starts to differentiate, there will be a period when it still contains many of the stem cell mRNAs. Happily, when the stem cell starts differentiating, it switches on a new set of miRNAs. These target the residual stem cell mRNAs and accelerate their destruction.

…

It’s the one that’s a mixture of black and ginger splodges, sometimes on a white background. The colour of each hair in a cat’s coat is caused by cells called melanocytes that produce pigment. Melanocytes are found in the skin, and develop from special stem cells. When melanocyte stem cells divide, the daughter cells stay close to each other, forming a little patch of clonal cells from the same parent stem cell. Now, here’s an amazing thing: if a cat’s colour is tortoiseshell, it’s a female. There is a gene for coat colour that encodes either black pigment or orange pigment. This gene is carried on the X chromosome. A cat may receive the black version of the gene on the X chromosome inherited from her mother and the orange version on the X chromosome inherited from her father (or vice versa).

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health by David B. Agus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, autism spectrum disorder, butterfly effect, clean water, cognitive dissonance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Marc Benioff, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, nocebo, parabiotic, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, publish or perish, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Salesforce, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

But in all the years of debating the topic, we’ve forgotten one important part of the equation: the male versus female stem cell. Because one of the hallmarks of aging is the decline of stem cells’ functionality, we must ask whether the aging of stem cells differs between men and women, and whether this has consequences for disease and life span. Studies thus far have shown that some stem-cell populations in females are superior to those in males thanks to estrogen, the female sex hormone. Stem cells destined to be blood cells, for example, are more abundant in female mice than in male mice, an effect that is dependent on estrogen signaling. A similar paradigm has been described in neural stem cells where estrogen increases the proliferation of these cells in a transient manner that fluctuates throughout the menstrual cycle.

…

That observation motivated Tomasetti and Vogelstein to dig a little deeper and try to understand why, for example, the lifetime risk for cancer in the large intestine is 24 times higher than in the small intestine. What they found is that the large intestine houses more stem cells than the small intestine. Moreover, the large intestine’s stem cells divide four times more frequently than do the stem cells in the small intestine. This relationship between rates of stem-cell division and risk of cancer was also seen in many other tissues. Unfortunately, their analysis didn’t include two of the most common types of cancer—breast and prostate—because there wasn’t enough information on rates of stem-cell division in those tissues, an omission that was criticized by others upon their reporting.

…

A similar paradigm has been described in neural stem cells where estrogen increases the proliferation of these cells in a transient manner that fluctuates throughout the menstrual cycle. Estrogen signaling is not the sole contributor to differences in stem-cell regulation between the sexes. Other studies have shown that females also exhibit increased capacity for rapid wound healing and liver regeneration, processes that are likely dependent on resident stem-cell populations. So females tend to show increased stem-cell self-renewal, regeneration potential, and in some cases, proliferation. But the big question remains: Does this tendency toward increased self-renewal in females alter the capacity of stem cells to regenerate tissues throughout aging? Does it actually influence longevity?

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

The entire procedure is a prolonged and complicated process, involving a series of unstable, transient culture steps: an initial culture of human skin cells known as fibroblasts, made by dicing a small chunk of skin no bigger than a pea and leaving it in nutrient broth (a liquid containing essential nutrients and amino acids) for around six weeks; another fibroblast culture in which the four reprogramming genes, called Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4–collectively known as Yamanaka factors–are subsequently added; a three-month-long pluripotent stem cell culture, where individual fibroblasts begin to form colonies of stem cells; a neuronal precursor cell culture, composed of infant neurons which develop once the stem cells have been submerged in a special, neuron-promoting nutrient broth; and a 100-day-long period of neuronal maturation known as corticogenesis, where the neurons make synapses, fire electrical impulses, and release neurotransmitter–in this case glutamate–to finally assume a culture of adult, human, cortical glutamatergic neurons.

…

Using primate models of Parkinson’s, Hallett’s team has shown that auto-SCT of iPS cells taken from the skin can partially rebuild the substantia nigra, the brain region destroyed by Parkinson’s disease. This improved the animals’ movement symptoms for up to two years. Other data suggests that stem cells needn’t engraft at all. Rather, their mere presence may help by providing restorative, ‘neurotrophic’ support to diseased brain regions. That was illustrated in 2009 at the University of California, Irvine, when Frank LaFerla injected stem cells into the brain of Alzheimer’s transgenic mice.11 Within a month the animals’ memory improved. And yet, the stem cells didn’t turn into neurons. Or have any impact on plaques and tangles. Instead, they were quietly churning out the protein BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), which alone was enough to boost synapse density in the hippocampus by 67 per cent.

…

Chapter 14: Regeneration 1. Yamanaka, Lasker Lecture at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQNoyDwCPzM 2. Thomson, Itskovitz-Eldor, et al., ‘Embryonic stem cell lines derived from human blastocysts’. 3. Takahashi and Yamanaka, ‘Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors’. 4. Takahashi, Tanabe, et al., ‘Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors’. 5. Van der Worp, Howells, et al., ‘Can animal models of disease reliably inform human studies?’. 6. Warren, Tompkins, et al., ‘Mice are not men’. 7.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

Unlike organs transplanted from donors, such cloned body parts will be almost genetically identical to cells in the body into which they are placed, and so presumably free from the kinds of immune reactions that lead to transplant rejection. Stem cell research represents one of the great frontiers of contemporary biomedical research. It is also hugely controversial as a result of its use of embryos as sources of stem cells—embryos which must be destroyed in the process.9 The embryos usually come from the extra embryos “banked” by in vitro fertilization clinics. (Once created, stem cell “lines” can be replicated almost indefinitely.) Out of concern that stem cell research would encourage abortion or lead to the deliberate destruction of human embryos, the U.S.

…

., “Gene Expression Profile of Aging and Its Retardation by Caloric Restriction,” Science 285 (1999): 1390–1393. 8 Kirkwood (1999), p. 166. 9 For a sample of the discussion on stem cells, see Eric Juengst and Michael Fossel, “The Ethics of Embryonic Stem Cells—Now and Forever, Cells without End,” Journal of the American Medical Association 284 (2000): 3180–3184; Juan de Dios Vial Correa and S. E. Mons. Elio Sgreccia, Declaration on the Production and the Scientific and Therapeutic Use of Human Embryonic Stem Cells (Rome: Pontifical Academy for Life, 2000); and M. J. Friedrich, “Debating Pros and Cons of Stem Cell Research,” Journal of the American Medical Association 284, no. 6 (2000): 681–684. 10 Gabriel S.

…

Other gerontologists, such as Tom Kirkwood, assert flatly that aging is the result of a complex series of processes at the level of cells, organs, and the body as a whole, and that there is therefore no single, simple mechanism that controls aging and death.8 If a genetic shortcut to immortality exists, the race is already on within the biotech industry to find it. The Geron Corporation has already cloned and patented the human gene for telomerase and, along with Advanced Cell Technology, has an active research program into embryonic stem cells. The latter are cells that make up an embryo at the earliest stages of development, before there has been any differentiation into different types of tissue and organs. Stem cells have the potential to become any cell or tissue in the body, and hence hold the promise of generating entirely new body parts to replace ones worn out through the aging process. Unlike organs transplanted from donors, such cloned body parts will be almost genetically identical to cells in the body into which they are placed, and so presumably free from the kinds of immune reactions that lead to transplant rejection.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

“In the Flesh: The Embedded Dangers of Untested Stem Cell Cosmetics,” Scientific American, 17 December 2012 <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stem-cell-cosmetics/> 48 Aldhous, Peter. “An Experiment That Blinded Three Women Unearths the Murky World of Stem Cell Clinics,” BuzzFeed News, 21 March 2017 <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/stem-cell-tragedy-in-florida> 49 Coghlan, Andy. “How ‘stem cell’ clinics became a Wild West for dodgy treatments,” New Scientist, 17 January 2018 <https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731610-100-how-stem-cell-clinics-became-a-wild-west-for-dodgy-treatments/> 50 Feng J.

…

Preliminary work by Sarah Sundelacruz—a former protégé of Levin who was immediately snapped up into private industry—suggests you could tweak stem cells’ bioelectrical parameters to influence their eventual identity. More recently, Sundelacruz showed that you could even analyze stem cells’ bioelectric profiles to determine if they were any good at keeping their shape, or if they would revert into a kind of cell you didn’t want—perhaps staving off the fate of the lady with the clicking eyes. This approach can even be used to guide stem cells into the specific physical locations where they are needed: Min Zhao’s team have used electrical stimulation to guide stem cells to grow into replacement neurons in brain-damaged areas, which has been nearly impossible before.50 But what happens when the bioelectric signals that shape cellular identity go wrong?

…

“Regenerative medicine” is an umbrella term that was only invented about thirty years ago to cover the wide variety of ways people have tried to replace what has been lost to trauma or age.2 The discipline was stitched together, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, from a disparate collection of other subdisciplines that included implant and transplant medicine, prosthetics, and tissue engineering. What united them all into a coherent framework was the discovery, and the galvanizing promise, of stem cells. The reason you’re always hearing about stem cells is because of their unique ability to turn into many other kinds of cells. They’re a bit like kids: initially infinitely malleable, but as they mature and grow into their eventual vocation, they specialize into specific adult roles like muscle or nerve or bone. When you were a three-to-five-day-old blastocyst, you were all stem cells (about 150 of them, in fact). By the time you’re an adult, you don’t have many of them left, and what few you have are mostly generated in your bone marrow.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Earlier in this book we mentioned neurosurgeon and entrepreneur Bob Hariri, who helped pioneer the field of cellular medicine with his year 2000 discovery that the human placenta houses an abundant supply of stem cells—providing a noncontroversial supply of this potential treatment option. After Hariri’s company was acquired by pharma giant Celgene, he led a team of over a hundred scientists and engineers in an effort to turn placental stem cells into real medicines. Along the way, they made two other critical discoveries. First, as people age, their supply of stem cells rapidly diminishes, a process known as “stem cell exhaustion” (that we’ll explore in depth in our next chapter). Second, the placenta doesn’t just contain stem cells, but also houses immunological cells such as natural killer cells and T-cells, both of which are critical in the body’s natural ability to fight cancer—as long as they recognize the danger.

…

While germline engineering remains controversial—now think Gattaca—it could mean ridding families of scourges like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, making it a medical advance as potentially important to this century as vaccines were to the last. There’s also stem cells to consider. One of the body’s main repair mechanisms, stem cells have the remarkable ability to turn into any other type of cell, which is why the body uses them to repair worn-out tissue. Stem cell therapy works the same way. Currently, there are only a handful of approved stem cell therapies in the United States, but this doesn’t account for the incredible amount of work being done in labs all over the globe. Researchers are pioneering treatments for cancer, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, macular degeneration, skeletal tissue repair, pain management, neurological diseases, auto-immune conditions, burns and other skin diseases, blindness, and much more.

…

When injected into older mice, GDF11 has been able to regenerate their hearts, brains, muscles, lungs, and kidneys. Stem cells, our third approach, are showing the most promise. Samumed, LLC, for example, is targeting the signaling pathways that regulate the self-renewal and differentiation of adult stem cells. If successful, their patented molecules should be able to regrow cartilage, heal tendons, remove wrinkles, and, by the way, stop cancer. This also explains why Samumed, a company still in stealth mode, has a $13 billion valuation. A different approach is being pioneered by Celularity, a company founded by stem cell pioneer Bob Hariri (Peter is also a cofounder).

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

., “Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell Transplants Remyelinate and Restore Locomotion After Spinal Cord Injury,” Journal of Neuroscience, May 11, 2005, http://neuro.cjb.net/cgi/content/abstract/25/19/4694. 42 See two of the informative videos here: http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/02/gerons-embryonic-stem-cell-clinical-trials-for-spinal-cord-injury-have-returned/ . 43 David Wright and Dan Childs, “Medical Milestone: Genetics Company Begins First Embryonic Stem-Cell Treatment on Patient,” ABC News, October 11, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=11853497. See also Geron, “Geron Initiates Clinical Trial of Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Based Therapy,” October 11, 2010, www.geron.com/media/pressview.aspx?id=1235. 44 National Institutes of Health, “Stem Cells and Diseases,” http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/health.asp. 45 Paolo Rama, M.D., Stanislav Matuska, M.D. et al., “Limbal Stem-Cell Therapy and Long-Term Corneal Regeneration,” New England Journal of Medicine , July 8, 2010, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0905955. 46 See www.tcacellulartherapy.com/fda_clinical_trials.html; and www.cytori.com/Innovations/ClinicalTrials/HeartDisease.aspx. 47 See www.regenexx.com/. 48 Regenexx, “Regenerative-Science FAQ,” www.regenexx.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Regenerative-Science-FAQs-8.21.10.pdf (last accessed January 11, 2011). 49 “Jarvis Green Gets Contract with Houston Texans, Attributes It to Regenexx Stem Cell Injections,” Regenerative Sciences, December 15, 2010, www.regenexx.com/2010/12/jarvis-green-gets-contract-with-houston-texans-attributes-it-to-regenexx-stem-cell-injections/ . 50 Phone conversation with Jarvis Green.

…

Another FDA-approved trial is being conducted by Santa Monica–based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) and is focused on treating patients with an eye disease called Stargardt’s macular dystrophy, which causes blindness, usually among youths.44 As we know, not all stem cell applications require embryonic cells. Dr. Bhatia’s cells were created from adult skin cells but have yet to reach the trial phase. Other researchers, however, are already testing adult stem cells to treat a number of diseases. In Italy, for example, researchers were able to cure blindness in humans resulting from burns. They took stem cells from the limbus in the patient’s own eye, cultured the cells, and then grafted them onto the eye. Seventy-seven percent of their patients were either cured or experienced partially restored sight.

…

This work, which was conducted over ten years, was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2010.45 Other trials that have been FDA approved in the United States include using adult stem cells to treat heart disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and limb ischemia.46 For those with little patience, it is frustrating to see all of this great work being conducted but not yet being made widely available to the general public. FDA trials typically take years, and as of this writing, the FDA has not approved any stem cell treatments in the United States. That, however, hasn’t stopped some doctors from forging ahead in some areas. At the Centeno-Schultz Clinic in Broomfield, Colorado, doctors are using stem cell therapy to treat knee and hip pain as well as for other types of joint repair.47 The therapy involves taking bone marrow stem cells from the patient’s hip with a needle, as well as some blood.

CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Mitinori Saitou and Hidetaka Miyauchi, “Gametogenesis from Pluripotent Stem Cells,” Cell Stem Cell 18, no. 6 (2016): 721–735, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2016.05.001; Chika Yamashiro, Kotaro Sasaki, Yukihiro Yabuta, et al., “Generation of Human Oogonia from Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells in Vitro,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): 356–360, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat1674. See also I. Glenn Cohen and Alex Pearlman, “Creating Eggs and Sperm from Stem Cells: The Next Big Thing in Assisted Reproduction?,” STAT, June 5, 2019, https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/05/creating-eggs-sperm-stem-cells. 9. Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 10.

…

Even California, a state very friendly to medical research, banned such payments until a bill passed in October 2019—and that bill imposes specific consent and approval requirements on such paid donations as well as limiting them to compensation for the donor’s time, discomfort, and inconvenience.6 (The recent California law repealed a prohibition on paying women for eggs for research—but not for egg “donations” for reproduction—that had passed in 2006 as a result of pro-life groups and feminist groups concerned about the possible exploitation of poor women.7) But rather than soliciting the egg donations, with or without compensation, as mentioned in passing in chapter 13, researchers might be able to make eggs. The process of making gametes from stem cells is sometimes referred to as “in vitro gametogenesis” (IVG). This method, using either embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells, has already been done successfully in mice, and work is proceeding on making this available for people.8 My 2016 book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, is based in large part on the assumption that this will become safe, effective, and widely available for humans in the next 20 to 40 years (or earlier).9 The use of IVG to provide eggs (plenty of cheap sperm will, no doubt, be available through more traditional methods) could answer the problem of a possible egg (and hence embryo) shortage, but it would raise the question whether embryos made from these IVG eggs were identical (or close enough to identical) to naturally occurring embryos to be good comparisons.

…

The Nature article reporting the London patient specifically discusses that “one reported case,” the so-called “Essen patient”: The only other case of an HIV-infected patient transplanted with CCR5Δ32/Δ32 cells who interrupted ART [antiretroviral therapy] was the ‘Essen Patient’. In this case in which ART was interrupted one week before allo-HSCT [transplantation of blood-forming stem cells from another person], a rapid viral rebound of a pre-existing minority HIV-1 variant able to infect cells via the alternative CXCR4 co-receptor was observed three weeks later.38 The Essen patient later died from a recurrence of the lymphoma that had required the stem cell transplant.39 As the wording of the quotation from the Nature article implies, other HIV-infected cancer patients have received CCR5∆32 transplants and survived, but they have continued on their antiretroviral therapy, so it is not known whether the drugs or the transplant has kept their HIV levels low.

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

If plastic is the favored raw printing material in industry, stem cells will be the favored raw material of bioprinting. The more regenerative medicine advances, the more it comes back to nature. The future of tissue engineering lies in 3D printing stem cells into precise configurations and letting them do the work growing the living tissue. Stem cells are the raw clay of the human body and are much more skillful at making body parts than we are. Stems cells are unspecialized, meaning they have not yet committed to a particular career path in terms of which sort of bodily cell they will grow into. Since stem cells can be pushed to differentiate into any one of the approximately 210 cell types found in the human body, stem cells are pure gold, medically speaking.

…

Much of Jonathan’s focus is on defining the optimal shape for the deposit of bioprinted stem cells. Since cells on a heart valve must be densely packed in a particular placement to function, cell placement is critical. Stem cells are like hard-working, self-directed employees that just need the right kind of work environment. “Think of a stem cell as a worker bee,” explained Jonathan. “If you can find a way to print certain types of stem cells into exactly the right location on the engineered tissue, it’s like having a stem cell walk into an empty office and start to look for work to do.” As researchers like Jonathan continue to unwrap the mysteries of 3D printed living tissue, hopefully the risks of organ transplants will someday diminish.

…

Since stem cells can be pushed to differentiate into any one of the approximately 210 cell types found in the human body, stem cells are pure gold, medically speaking. The first stem cells identified in the 1980s were extracted from the tissue of unborn human fetuses, triggering emotional debates about medical ethics. Since then, researchers continue to uncover more stem cells, including some scattered around different parts of the adult human body called “somatic” or “adult” stem cells. More recently, some differentiated cells have been shown even to be able to revert back to their pre-differentiated state. Columbia professor Jeremy Mao 3D printed new hip bones in lab rabbits and seeded them with stem cells.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

And it can renew itself—i.e., give rise to more stem cells, which can, in turn, differentiate to form the functional cells of an organ. A stem cell is somewhat akin to a grandfather that continues to produce children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, generation upon generation, without ever losing his own reproductive fecundity. It is the ultimate reservoir of regeneration for a tissue or an organ. Most stem cells reside in particular organs and tissues and give rise to a limited repertoire of cells. Stem cells in the bone marrow, for instance, only produce blood cells. There are stem cells in the crypts of the intestine that are dedicated to the production of intestinal cells.

…

Perhaps predictably, the RAC rejected the protocol outright, citing the poor animal data, the barely detectable level of gene delivery into stem cells, and the lack of a detailed experimental rationale, while noting that gene transfer into a human body had never been attempted before. Anderson and Blaese returned to the lab to revamp their protocol. Begrudgingly, they admitted that the RAC’s decision was correct. The barely detectable infection rate of bone marrow stem cells by the gene-carrying virus was clearly a problem, and the animal data was far from exhilarating. But if stem cells could not be used, how could gene therapy hope to succeed? Stem cells are the only cells in the body that can renew themselves and therefore provide a long-term solution to a gene deficiency.

…

Thwarted by these original studies, the field of gene therapy stagnated for another decade or so, until biologists stumbled on a critical discovery: embryonic stem cells, or ES cells. To understand the future of gene therapy in humans, we need to reckon with ES cells. Consider an organ such as the brain, or the skin. As an animal ages, cells on the surface of its skin grow, die, and slough off. This wave of cell death might even be catastrophic—after a burn, or a massive wound, for instance. To replace these dead cells, most organs must possess methods to regenerate their own cells. Stem cells fulfill this function, especially after catastrophic cell loss. A stem cell is a unique type of cell that is defined by two properties.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

In Kim’s body, though, chromothripsis turned out to have quite another effect. Not only did the mutated cell grow normally, but—because it was now rid of the diseased copy of CXCR4—the cell was free of the gene causing WHIM syndrome. But Kim’s blind luck had not ended there. The NIH scientists determined that the fortunate cell must have been a hematopoietic stem cell, a type of stem cell from which every kind of blood cell in the body originates and that has an almost unlimited potential to proliferate and self-renew. That cell had passed along its rearranged chromosome to all its daughter cells, eventually repopulating Kim’s entire immune system with healthy new white blood cells that were free of the CXCR4 mutation.

…

Gene editing via homologous recombination By the time I completed my PhD at the end of the 1980s, gene targeting had been widely used to edit DNA in cultured mouse and human cells and even in live mice. Seminal work in Martin Evans’s lab demonstrated that by targeting genes in mouse embryonic stem cells and then injecting those modified stem cells back into mouse embryos, scientists could create live mice with designer changes. The breakthroughs by Capecchi, Smithies, and Evans were eventually recognized with the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Despite its earth-shaking implications, however, gene editing in its early days had far more appeal for basic research than it did for human therapeutic applications.

…

The sources of these molecular defects are DNA mutations in the beta-globin gene, which encodes one of the two unique protein chains that make up the hemoglobin molecule. Sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia can actually both be cured by bone marrow transplantation. When physicians transplant the bone marrow from a healthy individual into a sick patient, the abundant blood stem cells in the marrow produce healthy new red blood cells for the rest of the patient’s life. The problem with this sort of stem cell transplantation, however, is that there aren’t nearly enough donors who both match the recipient immunologically and are willing to undergo the invasive procedure. Even when a matching donor is found and the patient’s body accepts the transplanted cells, the procedure is still risky; many patients develop graft-versus-host disease, a sort of reverse immunological reaction, which can be fatal.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

Incidentally, the process of making induced pluripotent stem cells hadn’t been discovered back in 2004–2005, hence Hwang’s focus on creating stem cells from embryos. 55.  Nobel Media, ‘The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012’ (Oct. 2012); https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2012/summary/ 56.  According to the Japan Times, kappogi sales shot up following Obokata’s rise to fame. Rowan Hooper, ‘Stem-Cell Leap Defied Japanese Norms’, Japan Times, 14 Feb. 2014; https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/02/15/national/science-health/stem-cell-leap-defied-japanese-norms/ 57.  Shunsuke Ishii et al., ‘Report on STAP Cell Research Paper Investigation’ (31 March 2014); http://www3.riken.jp/stap/e/f1document1.pdf 58.  

…

The next year, in the same journal, he reported that he’d produced, from those embryos, the first cloned human stem cell lines. What gives stem cells their potential, beyond the fact that they can keep multiplying indefinitely, is that they’re ‘pluripotent’, meaning they can be transformed in the lab, Swiss-Army-knife-like, into many different types of tissues (neurons, liver cells, blood cells, and so on). Cloned cell lines – eleven of them had been produced for Hwang’s paper – might have allowed the production of personalised stem cell treatments, and thus the repair of damaged tissues and the regeneration of injured or diseased organs.

…

This is where the tampering comes in. A decade after Hwang’s ‘discoveries’, in 2014, scientists at Japan’s RIKEN institute published two papers in Nature reporting new results on induced pluripotent stem cells.53 Unlike the stem cells that were part of Hwang-gate, induced pluripotent cells can be produced from mature adult cells, reducing the need to use cells from embryos.54 The trouble is that the standard process for creating this kind of stem cell, which won its inventors a Nobel Prize in 2012, is laborious and inefficient, taking several weeks and producing a lot of waste.55 The RIKEN group, though, claimed to have found another way to produce the cells: a technique called STAP, for ‘Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency’.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Meanwhile, studies by Merlin Crossley’s group in Sydney are developing an approach he calls “organic gene therapy,” using CRISPR-Cas9 to recapitulate specific HPFH mutations to boost HbF levels.6 Stanford’s Matthew Porteus has been on a quest to use genome editing in the clinic since the early 2000s.7 Using CRISPR-Cas9 to break the DNA before fixing the sequence, Porteus says, is like fixing the headlight on someone’s car by first busting the headlight with a hammer before repairing it. The goal is to ensure that about 20 percent of the stem cells repopulating the bone marrow are genetically fixed. That means harvesting some 500 million stem cells from any given patient. In a specialized facility, those cells are mixed with Cas9 and the AAV vector. The modified cells will be transplanted back into patients, after they have recovered from chemotherapy to make room for the modified stem cells. The biggest hurdle is to improve the efficiency of delivering the Cas nuclease into the appropriate cells. “We’ll cure people who have sickle-cell disease, not because they have a genetic defect but because they’re human beings and deserve all the rights, responsibilities, and value we should confer on any human being,” Porteus says.8 He calls genome editing “an anti-eugenics program.”

…

Matthew Herper, “This protein could change biotech forever,” Forbes, March 19, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/03/19/the-protein-that-could-change-biotech-forever/. 34. K. Karczewski, “Progress in genomics according to bingo: 2013 edition,” Genome Biology 14, (2013): 143, https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb4148. 35. Q. Ding et al., “Enhanced Efficiency of Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Genome Editing through Replacing TALENs with CRISPRs,” Cell Stem Cell 12, (2013): 393–394, https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(13)00101-X 36. T. J. Cradick, online interview, June 30, 2020. 37. Jon Cohen, “The Birth of CRISPR Inc.,” Science 355, (2017): 680–684, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6326/680.summary. 38. R. Coontz, “Science’s top ten breakthroughs of 2013,” Science, December 19, 2013, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/12/sciences-top-10-breakthroughs-2013. 39.

…

See also SPIDR Spacers, 22, 22–25, 35–43, 50, 50–56, 63, 181 Spark Therapeutics, 150, 163, 164, 172 Spectator, xii Specter, Michael, 253, 257 Spencer, Helen, 163 SPIDR, 35, 41–42 Spielberg, Steven, 76 Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), 151, 158–159 “Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems,” 207 Stadler, Lewis, 303 Stanchi, Giovanni, 305 Stanford University, 11, 21, 50, 76, 78, 86, 114, 128, 158, 168, 177, 196, 202, 208–209, 219–220, 228, 245, 251–254, 329, 366 Staphylococcus epidermis, 56 Star is Born, A, 166 Star Trek, 76, 129, 350 Star Wars, 113 Stargardt, Karl, 151 Stark, Tony, 325 Starter cultures, 39–45, 54–57 STAT, 20, 335 Stein, Rob, 170 Steinberg, Jeffrey, 340 Steinman, Ralph, 97 Stem cells allogeneic, 168 cloning and, 223 CRISPR and, 73–74 embryonic stem cells, 107, 355 ethics of, 238 funding, 204 gene therapy and, 119, 136, 144, 181 genome editing and, 84, 116 harvesting, 12 hematopoietic stem cell, 157–158, 168 regulation of, 267–269 Stephenson, Jennelle, 155–156 Steptoe, Patrick, 216–217 Stern, Curt, 123 Sternberg, Samuel, 95, 102 Steve Jobs, 279 Strathdee, Tom, 163 Streptococcus pneumoniae, 60 Streptococcus pyogenes, 26, 59–64, 83, 99 Streptococcus thermophilus, 40–44, 54–57, 69, 82 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The, 95 Sturtevant, A.

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine by Gregory Zuckerman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Boris Johnson, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Jenner, future of work, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WeWork

As the lab leader, he got his way—the paper was submitted to Cell. It took just a few days for the journal’s editors to reject it, just as Warren had feared. Cell suggested that Rossi send the paper to its sister journal, Cell Stem Cell, a specialized journal but still the most prestigious in the stem-cell world. Rossi was hopeful even as Warren stewed. Months later, an editor for Cell Stem Cell named Deborah Sweet called Rossi. Reviewers had raised a series of unexpected and thorny questions about the paper. To Rossi and his colleagues, some of the objections seemed excessive, even suspicious. He pushed back on some of the requests but acceded to taking the time to answer others, viewing them as part of the sometimes messy process of getting a paper published.

…

Soon Warren had packed up and moved back to California. He was no longer on speaking terms with Rossi and had begun a new leg of his career, consulting in the stem-cell world and then going on to own companies that produced induced pluripotent stem-cell lines for clients. “I regret that the situation deteriorated,” says Warren, who eventually profited from his work. * * * • • • The importance of Warren and Rossi’s work was instantly understood. They had reprogrammed ordinary cells into pluripotent stem cells simply by injecting them with synthetic mRNA, developing a technology that had “broad applicability for basic research, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine,” they argued in their paper.

…

Rossi and Warren began an audacious project, with the goal of improving on landmark work by a future Nobel laureate. A year earlier, Shinya Yamanaka, a stem-cell researcher at Japan’s Kyoto University, and one of his graduate students had astonished the scientific world by placing genes in retroviruses—viruses that invade host cells and integrate their genomes into the DNA of those cells—to reprogram adult cells. Yamanaka had used this technique to create “pluripotent” forms of the cells, which act much like embryonic stem cells. Yamanaka had, in effect, reverted the cells to their primitive state, turning the clock back on time. The discovery changed the way scientists viewed cell identity and how fixed it truly was.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

When the religious right came out against embryonic stem cell research, however, it created "this reflexive response to that religious point of view. What's happened is fascinating." The opposition of the religious right and President George W. Bush turned stem cell research into a Democratic bugle call, but the sides could have been reversed. After all, without the opposition of the religious right, isn't it possible that the $3 billion California stem cell initiative would have been couched as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry and Frankenstein research? Instead, the stem cell initiative became a surrogate for the presidential contest between Bush and Kerry.

…

"Conservatives, for their part, are now citing the constitutional views of government centralizers they once despised."44 After the federal government allowed only limited kinds of stem cell research and Congress was unable to resolve the dispute between researchers and the religious right, the states stepped in. California voted $3 billion for stem cell research, and other blue states—Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, and Connecticut—provided funding, too. Stem cell research is now clearly a Democratic cause, but that seems more a consequence of divided politics than of either ideology or biomedical research. After all, the first town to place limits on DNA research was Cambridge, Massachusetts.

…

In 2003, liberals created ALICE, the anti-ALEC American Legislative Issue Campaign Exchange; now every state legislator could meet with lawmakers from other states and be ideologically "at home." Liberals created think tanks in states to match white papers with think tanks established by the conservative State Policy Network. Pro—stem cell research groups battled anti—stem cell groups. The National Center for Science Education, founded in 1981, set out to defend "the teaching of evolution in public schools." Its conservative doppelganger was the Discovery Institute, founded in 1990 to promote the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution.* Republican lawyers had the Federalist Society; Democrats had the American Constitution Society.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Bianchi developed a tag that would mark only the stem cells that give rise to red and white blood cells. In adults, these stem cells are locked away in bone marrow and never slip into circulation. Any stem cells in a pregnant woman’s blood would almost certainly have been shed by her fetus. Bianchi crafted a new set of molecular tags, which she successfully used to fish out fetal stem cells. She was delighted with her success—until some of the pregnant women she had studied started giving birth. From some of the women, Bianchi had drawn out stem cells with Y chromosomes. This was to be expected from women who were pregnant with boys.

…

The lymphoid cells have a different tree: They develop into T cells, which can command infected cells to commit suicide, and B cells, which make antibodies that can precisely attack certain pathogens. The stem cells lurking in the stomach lining rebuild it as old cells slough off. The same renewal happens in our skin. Some stem cells generate new tissue only in an emergency. So-called satellite cells, nestled in our muscles, will produce new muscle cells to help repair damage. If you cut your hand, stem cells lurking in hair follicles will make new skin cells that crawl to the wound and heal it over. Stem cells need to hide in their refuges to cling to their special nature. There they can swim in a pool of chemical signals, ensuring that the right network of genes stays turned on.

…

There they can swim in a pool of chemical signals, ensuring that the right network of genes stays turned on. In these refuges, the stem cells perform the same magic trick over and over again. They divide in two: One daughter cell goes on dividing to become mature types of cells, while the other is yet another stem cell. The cells manage this feat by manipulating the way their daughter cells inherit their molecules. Stem cells don’t simply split up their molecules fifty-fifty. They move certain proteins and RNA molecules to one side but not the other. When they split in two, one of the new cells inherits a combination of molecules that allow it to stay a stem cell. The other cell flips its network to a new wiring and takes on its new identity.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

When cells can no longer renew themselves, the body tissues they supply will start to age and function poorly. Cells in our tissues originate from stem cells, which have the amazing ability to become many different types of specialized cells. They live in stem cell niches, which are a kind of VIP lounge where stem cells are protected and lie dormant until they are needed. The niches are usually in or near the tissues that the stem cells will replace. Stem cells for skin live under the hair follicles, some stem cells for the heart live in the right ventricular wall, and muscle stem cells live deep in the fiber of the muscle. If all is well, the stem cells remain in their niche. But when there is a need to replenish tissues, the stem cell appears on deck.

…

If you go jogging and tear your calf muscle, some of your muscle stem cells will divide, each stem cell creating two new cells. One of those cells replaces the original stem cell and remains comfortably in its niche; the other can become a muscle cell and help replenish the damaged tissue. Having a good supply of stem cells that are able to renew themselves is key to staying healthy and to recovering from sickness and injury. But when a cell’s telomeres become too short, they send out signals that put the cell’s cycle of division and replication under arrest. An arrested cell stops in its tracks. The cell can no longer renew itself. It becomes old; it becomes senescent.

…

But when there is a need to replenish tissues, the stem cell appears on deck. It divides and produces proliferative cells—sometimes called progenitor cells—and some of their progeny cells transform into whatever specialized cell is needed. If you get sick and need more immune cells (white blood cells), freshly divided stem cells for blood that were hiding out in the bone marrow will enter the bloodstream. Your gut lining is constantly being worn down by normal digestive processes, and your skin is being sloughed off, and stem cells keep these body tissues replenished. If you go jogging and tear your calf muscle, some of your muscle stem cells will divide, each stem cell creating two new cells.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

On the other hand, a few scientists have proposed that cancer actually begins with epigenetic disruptions, setting the stage for more wrenching transformations. Even more unsettling is a contentious idea called the cancer stem cell theory. In a developing embryo, stem cells are those with the ability to renew themselves indefinitely—they are essentially immortal—dividing and dividing while remaining in an undifferentiated state. They are agents of pure potentiality. When a certain type of tissue is needed, genes are activated in a specific pattern and the stem cells give rise to specialized cells with fixed identities. Once the embryo has grown into a creature, adult stem cells play a similar role, standing ready to differentiate and replace cells that have been damaged or reached the end of their life.

…

Imagine if instead the growth and spread of a cancer is driven by a fraction of special cells, those that have somehow become endowed with an intrinsic quality called “stemness.” Just as normal stem cells generate skin, bone, and other tissues, the cancer stem cells would generate the variety of cells that form the rest of a tumor. But only the cancer stem cells would have the ability to replicate endlessly, metastasize, and seed another malignancy. How much easier that might make things for oncologists. Maybe chemotherapies fail because they spare the cancer stem cells. Remove these linchpins and the malignancy would collapse. It is a promising possibility, but the further I ventured into the subject, the more confusing it seemed.

…

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14732866] 7. a contentious idea called the cancer stem cell theory: Piyush B. Gupta, Christine L. Chaffer, and Robert A. Weinberg, “Cancer Stem Cells: Mirage or Reality?” Nature Medicine 15, no. 9 (2009): 1010–12; [http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v15/n9/full/nm0909-1010.html] Jerry M. Adams and Andreas Strasser, “Is Tumor Growth Sustained by Rare Cancer Stem Cells or Dominant Clones?” Cancer Research 68, no. 11 (June 1, 2008): 4018–21; [http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/68/11/4018.abstract] and Peter Dirks, “Cancer Stem Cells: Invitation to a Second Round,” Nature 466, no. 7302 (July 1, 2010): 40–41.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Take stem cells, which have the potential to develop into many other kinds of cells: if we can keep these undifferentiated cells from tiring out, they can continue to generate all the differentiated cells necessary to heal damaged tissues and battle all kinds of diseases. Meanwhile, we’re improving the rates of acceptance of bone marrow transplants, which are the most common form of stem cell therapy, and using stem cells for the treatment of arthritic joints, type 1 diabetes, loss of vision, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. These stem cell–based interventions are adding years to people’s lives. Or take senescent cells, which have reached the end of their ability to divide but refuse to die, continuing to spit out panic signals that inflame surrounding cells: if we can kill off senescent cells or keep them from accumulating in the first place, we can keep our tissues much healthier for longer.

…

SOMATIC CELLS: All the cells in a multicellular organism except for germ cells (eggs or sperm). Mutations or changes to the DNA in the soma will not be inherited by subsequent generations unless cloning takes place. STEM CELLS: Cells with the potential to turn into a specialized type of cell or divide to make more stem cells. Most cells in your body are differentiated; that is, their fate has already been decided and they cannot morph into a different kind of cell. For example, a cell in your brain cannot suddenly transform into a skin cell. Adult stem cells replenish the body as it becomes damaged over time. STRAND: A string of connected nucleotides; can be DNA or RNA. Two strands of DNA can zip together when complementary; bases match up to form base pairs.

…

In this more nuanced view, aging and the diseases that come with it are the result of multiple “hallmarks” of aging: • Genomic instability caused by DNA damage • Attrition of the protective chromosomal endcaps, the telomeres • Alterations to the epigenome that controls which genes are turned on and off • Loss of healthy protein maintenance, known as proteostasis • Deregulated nutrient sensing caused by metabolic changes • Mitochondrial dysfunction • Accumulation of senescent zombielike cells that inflame healthy cells • Exhaustion of stem cells • Altered intercellular communication and the production of inflammatory molecules Researchers began to cautiously agree: address these hallmarks, and you can slow down aging. Slow down aging, and you can forestall disease. Forestall disease, and you can push back death. Take stem cells, which have the potential to develop into many other kinds of cells: if we can keep these undifferentiated cells from tiring out, they can continue to generate all the differentiated cells necessary to heal damaged tissues and battle all kinds of diseases.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

But because the brain is “plastic”—that is, it constantly rewires itself after it learns a new task—it might be able to integrate these new neurons so that they fire correctly. STEM CELLS One step beyond this is to apply stem cell technology. So far, the human organs were grown using cells that were not stem cells but were cells specially treated to proliferate inside molds. In the near future, it should be possible to use stem cells directly. Stem cells are the “mother of all cells,” and have the ability to change into any type of cell of the body. Each cell in our body has the complete genetic code necessary to create our entire body.

…

For example, although a skin cell may have the genes to turn into blood, these genes are turned off when an embryonic cell becomes an adult skin cell. But embryonic stem cells retain this ability to regrow any type of cell throughout their life. Although embryonic stem cells are more highly prized by scientists, they are also more controversial, since an embryo has to be sacrificed in order to extract these cells, raising ethical issues. (However, Lanza and his colleagues have spearheaded ways in which to take adult stem cells, which have already turned into one type of cell, and then turn them into embryonic stem cells.) Stem cells have the potential to cure a host of diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, even cancer.

…

Davies says, “By using the right astrocytes to repair spinal cord injuries, we have all the gains without the pain, while these other types of appear to provide the opposite—pain but no gain.” Moreover, the same techniques he is pioneering with stem cells will also work on victims of strokes and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, he believes. Since virtually every cell of the body can be created by altering embryonic stem cells, the possibilities are endless. However, Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota, cautions that much work has yet to be done. “Embryonic stem cells represent the good, the bad, and the ugly. When they are good, they can be grown to large numbers in the lab and used to give rise to tissues, organs, or body parts.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

These reduce your body’s desire to reject the new part, but at the same time can severely hamper its ability to combat infection. Instead, aged thirty, Castillo became a pioneer for ‘stem cell’ therapy – one of the most rapidly advancing areas of medical science. Stem cells are cells that are yet to pick a career – or to put it another way they are ‘blank’ cells, which can ultimately be ‘programmed to perform particular tasks.’ This is why human embryos naturally have a ready supply and is where researchers have often got them from (leading to all that controversy). But adults also carry around their own supply of ‘tissue-specific’ stem cells. These cells are also still waiting to be ‘programmed’ but have a smaller palette of career choices, based on their tissue of origin.

…

It’s now possible, however, to take ordinary cells (say, from the skin on your hand) and ‘re-boot’ them back to their earlier stem cell selves, doing away with many ethical concerns altogether. But even that may not be necessary. Early in 2010, scientists at Stanford University in California announced they had managed to convert mouse skin cells directly into mouse brain cells (with no intermediate stem cell phase). A few months later a team from Harvard declared they could convert human blood cells to stem cells that may have the ability to grow into any kind of tissue. Castillo received a donated trachea that had been stripped of cells from the donor (leaving just a collagen pipe).

…

Castillo received a donated trachea that had been stripped of cells from the donor (leaving just a collagen pipe). This was then ‘seeded’ with stem cells harvested from her own body (and nurtured by a team at the University of Bristol) that grew into tissue. The result? Her body accepted the new windpipe as its own and medical history was made. It sounds like science fiction, but the patient is out dancing.* Castillo isn’t the only person wandering around with a stem cell-grown body part. Kaitlyne McNamara’s doctors isolated healthy adult stem cells from the diseased bladder she was born with and used them to grow an entire, fully functioning (and healthy) replacement, which they then implanted.

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

Using a 3D printer, Professor Alex Seifalian and his team created an exact replica of his patient’s windpipe made from a special scaffold material they had developed, one that was tailor-made to accommodate the patient’s stem cells. The role of adult stem cells is to renew our tissues, and each type of cell has an equivalent stem cell to produce it. The stem cells that produce bone cells are called mesenchymal stem cells. Having built the scaffold, Professor Seifalian’s team implanted it with mesenchymal stem cells taken from the patient’s bone marrow and placed the whole object into the bioreactor. These stem cells then turned into a range of different cells that started to build cartilage and other structures, creating a living, self-sustaining cellular environment, while at the same time dissolving the scaffold around them.

…

(Collagen is a molecular cousin of gelatin and the most common protein molecule in the human body, responsible for giving skin and other tissues their elastic firmness—which is why anti-wrinkle creams often mention the inclusion of collagen in their formulations.) Unlike a gel, though, within this skeleton there are living cells, which are responsible for creating and maintaining it. These cells are called chondroblast cells. It is now possible to grow chondroblast cells from a patient’s own stem cells. However, simply injecting these into an existing joint doesn’t result in the repair of the cartilage, partly because the cells cannot survive outside their homemade habitat, their collagen skeleton. In the absence of this habitat, they die. It would be like trying to start the human race again by landing Londoners on the Moon: without the infrastructure of an existing city they are mostly helpless.

…

These stem cells then turned into a range of different cells that started to build cartilage and other structures, creating a living, self-sustaining cellular environment, while at the same time dissolving the scaffold around them. Eventually, all that was left was a new windpipe. The windpipe scaffold, developed by Professor Seifalian’s team, with stem cells incorporated before transplantation. One of the major advantages of this technique is that the implant is made of the patient’s own cells, and once implanted becomes part of his body. The patient therefore does not need to take any immunosuppressant drugs, which have significant side effects, to stop the body from rejecting the transplant. (Suppressing the immune system in order to protect the implant can make the patient much more vulnerable to infections of all kinds, as well as to parasites.)

Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan M. D.

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, disinformation, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Firefox, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, impulse control, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral panic, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Simon Singh, smart cities, stem cell, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, upwardly mobile, wikimedia commons

Unlike genes, which function as a relatively static repository of encoded data, the so-called junk DNA (more properly called non-coding DNA) seems designed for change, both over the short term—within our lifetimes—and over periods of several generations, and longer. It appears that junk DNA assists biology in making key decisions, like turning one stem cell (an undifferentiated cell that can mature into any type of cell) into part of an eye, and another stem cell with identical DNA into, say, part of your liver. These decisions seem to be made based on environmental influences. We know this because when you take a stem cell and place it into an animal’s liver, it becomes a liver cell. If you took that same stem cell and placed it into an animal’s brain, it would become a nerve cell.20 Junk DNA does all this by using the chemical information floating around it to determine which genes should get turned on when, and in what quantity.

…

It also explains why those who have the toughest time losing weight often have kitchens full of fat-free products. STEP 3: LEARN WHERE FAT COMES FROM—AND WHERE IT GOES Fat Grows from Stem Cells You’ve probably heard of stem cells, immature cells derived from embryos with the potential to grow replacement parts for any organ. These are the cells you’ve seen researchers use to grow ears on the backs of mice. Many believe stem cells hold the cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and a host of other currently incurable diseases—and some day they may. But if you want to reshape your body, harnessing stem cell versatility can help you achieve that goal today. One of the most frustrating things about fat is its ability to seemingly appear from nowhere.

…

Draining fat cells requires building new nerves to blood vessels that will assist in more efficient export of the fat.542 New muscle and reinforced bone and tendon to support the more intense force generation all require new infrastructure, too. And the technology to build all this is encapsulated in every stem cell in our bodies. What’s even more remarkable than stem cell versatility is the fact that grown-up fat cells seem capable of changing their identity almost as readily as stem cells can. That means you don’t need to starve to get rid of all that flab; it can be transformed into the healthy tissues of a brand-new beautiful you. Fat Can Transform Back into Stem Cells and Other Types of Cells You might find this hard to believe, but fat cells require constant attention to maintain their girth.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

fear of failure, ghettoisation, global village, light touch regulation, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the medium is the message, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

I am staring down a microscope in the most advanced lab I have ever visited, at the Salk Laboratories in La Jolla, California, looking at living, human neuronal stem cells in a petri dish in the lab of Frederick “Rusty” Gage. He and Peter Eriksson of Sweden discovered these cells in 1998, in the hippocampus. The neuronal stem cells I see are vibrating with life. They are called “neuronal” stem cells because they can divide and differentiate to become neurons or glial cells, which support neurons in the brain. The ones I am looking at have yet to differentiate into either neurons or glia and have yet to “specialize,” so they all look identical. Yet what stem cells lack in personality, they make up for in immortality. For stem cells don’t have to specialize but can continue to divide, producing exact replicas of themselves, and they can go on doing this endlessly without any signs of aging.

…

Thus we learned from these dying patients that living neurons form in us until the very end of our lives. The search continues for neuronal stem cells in other parts of the human brain. So far they’ve also been found active in the olfactory bulb (a processing area for smell) and dormant and inactive in the septum (which processes emotion), the striatum (which processes movement), and the spinal cord. Gage and others are working on treatments that might activate dormant stem cells with drugs and be useful if an area where they are dormant suffers damage. They are also trying to find out whether stem cells can be transplanted into injured brain areas, or even induced to move to those areas.

…

Studying the mice, the team found that learning how to use the other toys, balls, and tubes didn’t make new neurons, but it did cause the new neurons in the area to live longer. Elizabeth Gould also found that learning, even in a nonenriched environment, enhances survival of stem cells. Thus physical exercise and learning work in complementary ways: the first to make new stem cells, the second to prolong their survival. Though the discovery of neuronal stem cells was momentous, it is only one of the ways the aging brain can rejuvenate and improve itself. Paradoxically, sometimes losing neurons can improve brain function, as happens in the massive “pruning back” that occurs during adolescence when synaptic connections and neurons that have not been extensively used die off, in perhaps the most dramatic case of use it or lose it.

P53: The Gene That Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong

Asilomar, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Kickstarter, mouse model, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell, trade route

Researchers interested in the gene’s role in ageing believe that both apoptosis and senescence are significant to the process – senescence for all the reasons discussed above, and apoptosis because it gradually depletes the pool of stem cells our bodies need for repair and maintenance. ‘The simplest model would be that you’re born with a limited number of stem cells,’ explained David Lane. ‘Those stem cells are very easily killed off by DNA damage, so they’re the ones most tightly controlled by p53. If you set a stress-response threshold where they’re too easily killed, then you don’t get cancer but you run out of stem cells more quickly. If you set the threshold such that they’re hard to kill, then you could live a long time, but you’re more likely to get cancer.’

…

Imagine for a minute what would happen if, in the normal course of events, our biological clocks could go backwards in time; if our mature cells could revert to their original undifferentiated state as stem cells, complete with the potential to develop afresh into something new. It’s a nightmare scenario in which your liver cells might morph spontaneously into bone cells, gut into teeth, blood into kidney, and no bodies would be stable. It is p53’s job to ensure that such de-differentiation doesn’t happen; that biological time moves inexorably forward and that our bodily development cannot unravel (except, that is, in the deranged environment of cancer). Scientists creating what are known as ‘induced pluripotent stem cells’ (IPSs) – stem cells with the potential to become any kind of specialised cells that have been engineered in the lab from already differentiated body cells – are frustrating a fundamental law of nature, and they must overcome p53’s defences to do so.

…

‘But if a kid can be born with cancer it’s about as simple as it can get. That was my thinking.’ Retinoblastoma met this criterion; it was the ideal topic for research. A rare tumour of the retina, or light-detecting cells of the eye, retinoblastoma affects children almost exclusively below the age of five, because it starts in the stem cells of the developing retina that, like the stem cells of all organs of the body, experience an explosion of division and growth during gestation and the early years of life. An early sign of the disease is a milky-white appearance to the pupil of the eye which, left undiagnosed and untreated, as it often is in the developing world, will grow into a grotesque spongy-looking mass of red and white flesh that distorts the child’s whole face and will eventually kill.

Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love and Relationships by Camilla Pang

autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, driverless car, frictionless, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Nash equilibrium, neurotypical, phenotype, random walk, self-driving car, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

It’s their ability to split, re-form and renew that makes them the essential building blocks of humanity, and such an important part of medical treatments for blood and immune system disorders – helping to rebuild the body they created in the first place. A stem cell is the foundation for every human, and it’s also the ideal lens through which to better understand empathy in human relationships. Like a stem cell, every relationship essentially begins as a generic, unspecialized entity: two people seeing if they might like each other. Over time, where the stem cell divides into endless daughter cells with their own very specific uses, a relationship also becomes more defined and complex: an intricate web of shared experiences, understandings, language and unspoken meaning. Just like the stem cell, our relationships keep on specializing and differentiating over time – undergoing more mitosis (division) to meet newly encountered needs.

…

Yet despite these numerous contrasts, we once all started as essentially the same thing: an embryonic stem cell, one that endlessly divided and divided to create the skin, organs, bones and blood that hold us together. Stem cells are the ultimate in evolutionary wonder: single entities that can divide and specialize into any of the cells needed in the human body (multi- or pluripotent, if you want the fancy word). For example, all of the blood cells in our bodies have ultimately diverged from a common stem cell, via a process called haematopoiesis (one of my favourite words). This is something that’s going on in your body right now, as we are topped up daily with the right balance of red blood cells to transport oxygen, and white blood cells to constantly update our immune system.

…

All relationships depend on an ability to read between the lines – to judge when it matters even if someone says it doesn’t, or when something might not seem important but really is. To make these precise judgements, we need to fine-tune our understanding of evolutionary biology, acknowledging where our differences stem from, and how a relationship between people will evolve over time, just as our bodies did from a single stem cell. We need to harness probability theory to help us decide what is and isn’t relevant evidence. And we can benefit from fuzzy logic (yes, that’s the technical term), as a framework for judging a decision when there is no black-and-white, yes-or-no answer; and for managing the inevitable conflicts that crop up in any human relationship.

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

., “The SARS-CoV-2 Receptor, ACE-2, Is Expressed on Many Different Cell Types: Implications for ACE-Inhibitor- and Angiotensin II Receptor Blocker-Based Cardiovascular Therapies,” Internal and Emergency Medicine 15, no. 5 (August 2020): 759–66, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11739-020-02364-6. 8 It’s big business: Research and Markets, “Global Stem Cell Therapy Market Report 2021–2030: Allogeneic Stem Cell & Therapy Autologous Stem Cell Therapy/Adult Stem Cells, Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, & Embryonic Stem Cells,” news release, May 19, 2021, accessed February 16, 2022, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-stem-cell-therapy-market-report-2021-2030-allogeneic-stem-cell--therapy-autologous-stem-cell-therapy--adult-stem-cells-induced-pluripotent-stem-cells--embryonic-stem-cells-301294924.html. 9 In fact, a 2018 journal article by: Michael J. Hayes et al., “Most Medical Practices Are Not Parachutes: A Citation Analysis of Practices Felt by Biomedical Authors to Be Analogous to Parachutes,” CMAJ Open 6, no. 1 (March 2018): E31, https://doi.org/10.9778/cmajo.20170088. 10 There is plenty of research showing: Mahesh Chandra et al., “The Free Radical System in Ischemic Heart Disease,” International Journal of Cardiology 43, no. 2 (February 1, 1994): 121–25, https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-5273(94)90001-9; Aaron J.

…

Over the past few years, for example, stem cell therapy clinics have sprung up all over the country, offering treatment for a variety of ailments, ranging from arthritis pain to thinning hair. The clinics take a sample of your blood and put it through a machine to separate out stem cells (cells that have the capacity to grow and divide into a variety of tissue types). The theory goes that injecting such cells into an arthritic joint, for example, might promote the formation of cartilage, reducing pain. Is this theory biologically plausible? Sure. One stem cell clinic’s website proudly states that it will “harness your body’s natural healing ability.”

…

And though it took time, what I figured out will shine a light on why doctors have lost touch with their patients, why patients have lost faith in their doctors, and how we can get back to that therapeutic alliance that we all need in order to be truly healthy. That is what this book is all about. It turns out the most powerful force in Medicine is not an antibiotic. It isn’t stem cell therapy, genetic engineering, or robotic surgery. The most powerful force in Medicine is trust. It is the trust that lives between a patient and a physician, and it goes both ways. I trust you to tell me the truth about how you feel and what you want. You trust me to give you the best advice I can possibly give.

The Fast Diet Revised and Updated by Michael Mosley, Mimi Spencer

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Easter island, life extension, meta-analysis, mouse model, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

One of the things that calorie restriction does, for example, is switch on a process called autophagy.7 Autophagy, meaning ‘self eat’, is a process by which the body breaks down and recycles old and tired cells; just as with a car, it is important to get rid of damaged or ageing parts if you are going to keep things in good working order. Intermittent fasting and stem cell regeneration Fasting not only helps clear out damaged old cells but can also spark the production of new ones. In a particularly fascinating study published in June 2014, Valter and his colleagues showed, for the first time, that fasting can switch on stem cells and regenerate the immune system.8 Stem cells are cells that, when activated, can grow into almost any other cell. They can become brain, liver, heart tissue, whatever. The study findings are exciting because as we age our immune system tends to get weaker.

…

It seems that fasting not only clears out the old, damaged white blood cells and lowers levels of IGF-1, but also reduces the activity of a gene called PKA. PKA produces an enzyme that normally acts like a brake on regeneration. ‘PKA is the key gene that needs to be shut down in order for stem cells to switch into regenerative mode,’ Valter says. Intermittent fasting seems to give the ‘okay’ for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating. This research certainly suggests that if your immune system is not as effective as it was (either because you are older or because you have had a medical treatment such as chemotherapy), then periods of intermittent fasting may help regenerate it.

…

Bergamini, E, Cavallini, G, Donati, A and Gori, Z, Pisa, Italy. ‘The role of autophagy in aging: its essential part in the anti-aging mechanism of caloric restriction’. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, October 2007 8. Longo, Valter D et al. ‘Prolonged fasting reduces IGF-1/PKA to promote hematopoietic-stem-cell-based regeneration and reverse immunosuppression’. Cell Stem Cell, 14(6), June 2014 9. Varady, KA, Surabhi Bhutani, Church EC and Kempel M. ‘Short-term modified alternate-day fasting: a novel dietary strategy for weight loss and cardio-protection in obese adults’. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, November 2009 10. Harvie, MN, ‘The effect of intermittent energy and carbohydrate restriction v. daily energy restriction on weight loss and metabolic disease risk markers in overweight women.’

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

Although they have five children and four grandchildren and though blood transfusions are often given in childbirth, the Jenkinses had no cause to test their belief until recently. First, Bob was diagnosed with myeloma, a cancer of certain white blood cells. Severe cases are often treated with a stem cell transplant, whereby the bone marrow is killed off, new stem cells are injected, and, if all goes to plan, new and undamaged blood cells begin to reproduce within weeks. Although the removed and replanted stem cells are hematopoietic—they produce blood—Witnesses will accept stem cell transfusions. But the weeks of having reduced immunity are perilous, and blood transfusions would normally be given. A patient with leukemia, a cancer of white blood cells that can also be treated with bone marrow transplants, might receive 30 units a year.

…

“It isn’t even close to providing as much blood as we can provide Guinness,” says Klein, with one of the more unexpected analogies I’ve encountered while interviewing blood experts. “The research in the stem cell and hematopoiesis space is scientifically very satisfying,” says Devine. “But the economic picture is just awful.” It could be useful for giving blood to people with rare diseases or rare blood types. Watkins points to the famous case of a French teenager with sickle cell disease. Sickle cell is caused by a defect in the gene that governs hemoglobin, which causes hemoglobin to clump, and blockages and awful pain. It can be successfully treated with a stem cell transplant, but finding a donor is as easy as with any other transplant: it’s not.

…

Perhaps they think bones are white and brittle, not vivid and vital. Perhaps they believe blood circulates ready-made, unchanging. Blood is always dying, always renewing, and rapidly: you can’t yet grow back an arm, but you can lose plenty of blood and survive. The bone marrow produces two million red blood cells every second. It produces pluripotent stem cells that can become any cell, and red blood cells with no nucleus that can slink and slither through the tiniest of capillaries. Images of red blood cells show filled-in Cheerios or enticing pillows, so when I see a simulation of red blood cells, I want to jump into the picture and curl up in the middle of one.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

But gradually, the discussion of revelation gives way to a passionate attack on Darwinism. Evolutionary theory, argues Wang, breaking into English to reiterate the words, is “the biggest lie,” because it pretends to be rigorous science. This is immediately confirmed by a biotechnologist who works on stem cells. Every day she looks at them, admiring their beauty and complexity: stem cells must be divine. If you trust evolution, you distrust God, rejoins the surgeon. Evolution is another false idol—not unlike Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism or any of the other mock religions that China’s Communists are trying to promote, now that they have discovered that they cannot kill God.

…

In 2006 more than twenty senators and representatives who supported the Schiavo intervention were defeated while all Republicans, and all but one Democrat, who opposed the intervention were reelected. But there were plenty of other examples of overreaching. The right’s hard-line opposition to stem-cell research put it well beyond the mainstream: as even Bush has been known to point out privately, stem cells are a tricky subject for devout pro-lifers, because they can involve two lives, that of the sacrificed embryo and that of the potential beneficiary from the research. The right’s preoccupation with “the homosexual agenda” also slid into the quirky.

…

But in its Arab heartland, it plainly does not. And, overall, it remains the world religion that has found pluralism hardest to cope with. Islam has not been through a Reformation, let alone an Enlightenment. Look at every debate, from the relationship between the mosque and the state to the ethics of stem cells, and you tend to discover that Christian culture has got there first. Islam is still relevant to our argument—especially when it comes to the competition between religions. But, for all its power, we believe it is less of a harbinger of the future than Christianity. The first part of the book tries to explain why Europe and America have evolved in such different ways over the past two hundred or so years.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Apollo 11, Barry Marshall: ulcers, belling the cat, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, experimental subject, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, iterative process, Joan Didion, life extension, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, medical residency, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, Plato's cave, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Robert Mercer, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social web, statistical model, stem cell, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking, éminence grise

The human embryo and many of our adult organs possess a tiny population of stem cells that are capable of immortal regeneration. Stem cells are the body’s reservoir of renewal. The entirety of human blood, for instance, can arise from a single, highly potent blood-forming stem cell (called a hematopoietic stem cell), which typically lives buried inside the bone marrow. Under normal conditions, only a fraction of these blood-forming stem cells are active; the rest are deeply quiescent—asleep. But if blood is suddenly depleted, by injury or chemotherapy, say, then the stem cells awaken and begin to divide with awe-inspiring fecundity, generating cells that generate thousands upon thousands of blood cells.

…

These “cancer stem cells” act as the persistent reservoir of cancer—generating and regenerating cancer infinitely. When chemotherapy kills the bulk of cancer cells, a small remnant population of these stem cells, thought to be intrinsically more resistant to death, regenerate and renew the cancer, thus precipitating the common relapses of cancer after chemotherapy. Indeed, cancer stem cells have acquired the behavior of normal stem cells by activating the same genes and pathways that make normal stem cells immortal—except, unlike normal stem cells, they cannot be lulled back into physiological sleep. Cancer, then, is quite literally trying to emulate a regenerating organ—or perhaps, more disturbingly, the regenerating organism.

…

In each well, I have placed two hundred human leukemia cells, then added a unique chemical from a large collection of untested chemicals. In parallel, I have its “twin” plate—containing two hundred normal human blood-forming stem cells, with the same panel of chemicals added to every well. Several times each day, an automated microscopic camera will photograph each well in the two plates, and a computerized program will calculate the number of leukemia cells and normal stem cells. The experiment is seeking a chemical that can kill leukemia cells but spare normal stem cells—a specifically targeted therapy against leukemia. I aspirate a few microliters containing the leukemia cells from one well and look at them under the microscope.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

These four magic proteins have the ability to turn cells into other cells. From stem cells into connective tissue or skin. Amazingly, they can also get cells to reverse direction, regressing from skin cells or blood cells back to stem cells. To use the tree analogy, we can transform a root cell into a trunk cell and into a leaf cell, and back again. This technique is called reprogramming. In vitro gametogenesis is the technique of reprogramming a woman’s or man’s skin cells backward, not just back to a pluripotent stem cell, but to the Holy Grail of cells, an embryonic stem cell. And then reprogramming it forward, to go through the branches that lead to sex cells like egg and sperm.

…

Beyond Meat would be the only company that was singular in that thesis. Their stock quadrupled on the first day. I got text messages and emails from VCs—the very ones who had said I was crazy—now congratulating me on our food portfolio. The gold rush was on. Stem cell engineers are suddenly seeing hot demand for their skills. Venture capitalists are fearful of missing out on the next big food company. Software investors are asking about stem cells and fetal bovine serum. Journalists are writing thousands of news articles. I now receive industry reports on synthetic meat from major banks and data services. As of this writing, there are fifty-nine cell-based-meat companies, and double that many alternative protein companies.

…

In a computer, you can design an antibody in days. But you have no idea if it will have off-target effects, so that testing takes months and months.” Melanie said she could do it in 32 days. Melanie’s approach was truly unique. Her company, Prellis, was the world leader in 3D-printing human organ tissue, using lasers and stem cells. Her goal for Prellis was right out of a science-fiction movie: She wants to print a new liver for patients when their liver is shot. She was getting close. She’d been making mini-livers. But this was wartime. “I can make dozens of mini-lymph nodes, little immune systems. I’ll inoculate them with the virus.

Hacking the Code of Life: How Gene Editing Will Rewrite Our Futures by Nessa Carey

Barry Marshall: ulcers, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, CRISPR, double helix, epigenetics, first-past-the-post, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, stem cell

The gene editing company CRISPR Therapeutics has taken advantage of this clinical knowledge. Their strategy is to take bone marrow cells from patients with a haemoglobin disorder and edit the DNA in the lab, so that the resulting stem cells contain the protective mutation sometimes found so fortuitously in nature. They will then repopulate the patient’s bone marrow with these edited stem cells. The stem cells will produce red blood cells which express foetal haemoglobin, protecting the patient. You might wonder why the company has chosen to take this approach, rather than correcting the disease-causing mutation in the adult haemoglobin gene.

…

So we know that in sufferers, converting one of their mutant copies to the normal one should be enough to restore them to a healthy condition, on par with the carriers. Although healthy red blood cells only last about 120 days in the body, we should still be able to treat with gene editing using only a small number of interventions. This is because we can extract stem cells from bone marrow, edit the DNA and then re-seed the bone marrow with the corrected cells. Once they re-establish in the bone marrow, the stem cells should continue to produce healthy red blood cells for decades. There are also enough patients to make this economically worthwhile. Although the haemoglobin disorders evolved where malaria was rife – which is usually in poor regions – global migration means that the conditions are also fairly common in countries with well established healthcare infrastructure.

…

., Worringer, K.A., Salick, M.R., Frias, E., Ho, D., Theriault, K., Kommineni, S., Chen, J., Sondey, M., Ye, C., Randhawa, R., Kulkarni, T., Yang, Z., McAllister, G., Russ, C., Reece-Hoyes, J., Forrester, W., Hoffman, G.R., Dolmetsch, R., Kaykas, A. ‘p53 inhibits CRISPR-Cas9 engineering in human pluripotent stem cells’. Nat. Med. (July 2018); 24(7): 939–946. 11. Haapaniemi, E., Botla, S., Persson, J., Schmierer, B., Taipale, J. ‘CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing induces a p53-mediated DNA damage response’. Nat. Med. (July 2018); 24(7): 927–930. 12. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/11/crispr-stocks-tank-after-research-shows-edited-cells-might-cause-cancer.html 13.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Albert Einstein, epigenetics, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Khan Academy, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, off-the-grid, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, stem cell, TED Talk

Kokich, a professor in the Department of Orthodontics at the University of Washington and one of the world’s experts in dentistry, postulated that adults “retain the capacity to regenerate and remodel bone at the craniofacial sutures.” Liao, Six-Foot Tiger, 176–77. the more stem cells release: We create stem cells throughout the body as well. The stem cells made in the sutures and jaws are often used for local maintenance in the mouth and face. Stem cells will ship off to whatever area needs them most. What they are attracted to are stress signals—in this case, the signals that come with vigorous chewing. two to four years of age: “Weaning from the Breast,” Paediatrics & Child Health 9, no. 4 (Apr. 2004): 249–53.

…

Inside these sutures, the body creates stem cells, amorphous blanks that shift form and become tissues and bones depending on what our bodies need. Stem cells, which are used throughout the body, are also the mortar that binds the sutures together and that grows new bone in the mouth and face. Unlike other bones in the body, the bone that makes up the center of the face, called the maxilla, is made of a membrane bone that’s highly plastic. The maxilla can remodel and grow more dense into our 70s, and likely longer. “You, me, whoever—we can grow bone at any age,” Belfor told me. All we need are stem cells. And the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over.

…

And the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over. Chewing. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe. It starts at infancy. The chewing and sucking stress required for breastfeeding exercises the masseter and other facial muscles and stimulates more stem cell growth, stronger bones, and more pronounced airways. Until a few hundred years ago, mothers would breastfeed infants up to two to four years of age, and sometimes to adolescence.

The Autoimmune Connection by Rita Baron-Faust, Jill Buyon

Columbine, Helicobacter pylori, mouse model, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

The medication is currently used in Britain as a routine therapy for finger ulcers. High-dose chemotherapy with stem cell rescue involves harvesting stem cells (the cells that grow into different kinds of cells, including white blood cells), purifying them and freezing them, and then destroying a patient’s abnormal immune system with high doses of chemotherapy. After the chemotherapy, the stem cells are infused back into the patient to reconstitute the immune system with lymphocytes that will not be autoreactive. Stem cell transplantation has a high mortality rate (20 percent) and is reserved for those people who have such severe disease that they’re at high risk of dying within the next five years or those women with early and rapidly progressive diffuse skin disease, who within the first year or so of diagnosis have some lung disease and heart disease, says Dr.

…

Kimberly points out. But what if a dysfunctional immune system could be replaced with a normal one? That’s the idea behind stem cell transplantation. In this still highly experimental treatment, the immune system is destroyed with high doses of chemotherapy drugs and then reconstituted with stem cells, the cells 36 The Autoimmune Connection that have the potential to grow into any kind of cell, including white blood cells. Before undergoing chemotherapy, patients have stem cells removed from their peripheral blood, purified, frozen, and then re-infused into the bloodstream to rebuild the immune system with “naïve” cells, immune cells that are not autoreactive.

…

If we had not treated them, 85 percent of the female mice would have developed diabetes and died of it.” Dr. Maclaren hopes to test the vaccine in women newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes to see whether the destruction of beta cells can be halted. Another promising new treatment involves coaxing stem cells into becoming insulin-producing beta cells. The experiment, done with embryonic stem cells (which are known for their ability to transform into almost every cell type), might provide a better strategy for growing beta cells than merely transplanting normal beta cells. Scientists are also experimenting with transplanting beta cells from genetically modified pigs engineered so the cells would not be rejected.

Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

Hospitalization wasn’t required, but further evaluation by a hematologist was definitely in order to pin this down as the case of “polycythemia vera” it surely had to be. “P. vera” is a type of blood cell cancer, specifically one of the “chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms,” or MPNs, that’s rooted in a bone marrow stem cell gone genetically awry. Like the acute leukemias, in which stem cell mutations lead rapidly to life-threatening overgrowth (and underneath) of blood cells, the MPNs also are rooted in stem cell mutations eventually leading to a life-threatening accumulation of blood cells. The natural history of an acute leukemia, though, is that the time from initial detection of the disease to death from the disease is usually weeks to a few months, whereas with the MPNs, the natural history from initial detection to death due to disease is usually several years, if ever.

…

(Differentiation is the process by which a stem cell can mature into many different types of cells depending on various influences.) KIT is a “transmembrane” tyrosine kinase, meaning it’s a protein that’s anchored in the cell membrane, with part of the protein waving around up above the cell surface and part of it waving around down below the cell surface (i.e., inside the cell). The extracellular portion of KIT (the part waving around outside the cell) is a receptor, sort of like a lock, and when the matching key – in this case another protein called stem cell factor (SCF) – floats by the mast cell and inserts properly into KIT’s extracellular “lock” and thereby “activates” KIT, the interaction between key and lock causes the intracellular portion of KIT to instantly change shape, which might seem a modest consequence, but it turns out that this one little change in shape in one little protein molecule is like the lead domino whose toppling results in the triggering of many other domino falls which proceed, in parallel, in rapid chain reactions throughout the cell.

…

Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) is a cancer of marrow stem cells leading to excessive production of the “lymphoid” type of leukocytes, or white blood cells, as opposed to excessive production of the “myeloid” type of leukocytes, which would result in a somewhat similar disease called acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). As the “acute” would imply, both ALL and AML progress rapidly and can easily cause death within weeks to a few months of first emerging. Acute myelogenous leukemia “Uh-kyoot´ my´-el-oj´-en-us loo-keem´-ee-uh.” Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) is a cancer of marrow stem cells leading to excessive production of the “myeloid” type of leukocytes, or white blood cells, as opposed to excessive production of the “lymphoid” type of leukocytes, which would result in a somewhat similar disease called acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL).

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

In 2012, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize for the breakthrough discovery of how to persuade adult skin cells to regress into jack-of-all-trades (“pluripotent”) stem cells capable of morphing into any type of cell in the body—heart, brain, liver, pancreas, egg. It’s as if Gurdon and Yamanaka had found a way to reset the body’s clock to early development, enabling it to mint wild-card cells that haven’t chosen their career yet—without using the fetal stem cells that cause so much controversy. Space may be only one of the final frontiers. The other is surely the universe of human imagination and creative prowess in genetics.

…

Almost ten years ago, Esmail Zanjani of the University of Nevada, Reno, announced that he had injected human stem cells into sheep embryos halfway through gestation, and the lambs emerged with human cells throughout their tissues. And not just a few cells. Some of the organs were nearly half human. Only the organs. No two-legged sheep with opposable thumbs emerged. Staring at them in photographs, I found they looked eerily human, with long faces, jelly roll falling over the forehead, and down-turned eyes. Would dogs detect an odor both human and sheep? What scientists still don’t know is if transplanted human stem cells would change an animal’s inherent behaviors, attributes, or personality.

…

Our relationship with nature has changed . . . radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. How we now relate to the land, oceans, animals, and our own bodies is being influenced in all sorts of unexpected ways by myriad advances in manufacturing, medicine, and technology. Many of nature’s mysterious stuck doors have shivered open—human genome, stem cells, other Earth-like planets—widening our eyes. Along the way, our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but incrementally, and at times so subtly that we don’t perceive the sonic booms, literally or metaphorically. As we’re redefining our perception of the world surrounding us, and the world inside of us, we’re revising our fundamental ideas about exactly what it means to be human, and also what we deem “natural.”

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Understanding how blood stem cells manage this process of renewal has implications for all stem-cell research. Combatting degenerative diseases using stem-cell rejuvenation is being actively pursued as a chance to rewind the clock. We may not get sparkly skin like the Cullen family, but we won’t be deathly pale like Lestat either. The Harvard Stem Cell Institute studies healing, scarring, and skin regeneration. Skin aging can be thought of as a form of wounding, in which stem cells no longer maintain normal skin thickness, strength, function, and hair density. Understanding how to harness stem cells for scarless wound healing will also provide key insights into regenerating aged skin, a process termed rejuvenation.

…

Even its own Singularity. It’s AI. * * * Our new AI religion has what all religions have. Believers: the Singularity disciples, the Transhuman evangelists (there’s even a Mormon group), the Biohax converts, the life-extension enthusiasts, the start-up brain-uploaders, the science labs printing 3D body parts, the stem-cell researchers who will ‘match’ your perfect body ideal – so many, so different, yet all of these sharing a Gnostic unorthodoxy of loosely overlapping ideas anchored to the central, but updating text of accelerating change, inside and outside the human body. On the other side are the Sceptics, who take up the Orthodox position of believing in the unique specialness of being human.

…

Understanding how to harness stem cells for scarless wound healing will also provide key insights into regenerating aged skin, a process termed rejuvenation. Multidisciplinary collaborators in the HSCI Skin Program are investigating the biological basis for how the skin ages over time and when exposed to ultraviolet radiation. * * * We know that sunshine ages our skin. Sensible vampires go out at night. Skin stem cell biology has the potential to provide key insights into the mechanisms of regeneration for other organs in the body. Vampires and axolotls can grow new limbs. Humans can’t – at least not yet. It seems unlikely, though, that can’t means won’t. We are intensely interested in physical rejuvenation, and not because we are vain and silly – though we are both those things – but because for all of us, ageing is disagreeable and absurd.

The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon

Bernie Madoff, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gregor Mendel, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, personalized medicine, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, TED Talk, theory of mind

By 1998, I was giving a mix of talks about stem cells and psychiatric research, and in 2000, our lab made a breakthrough discovery regarding how adult stem cells mobilize to repair brain injuries. The study was sent from the National Institutes of Health to the U.S. Congress as the first evidence that adult stem cells, as opposed to just embryonic stem cells, could be mobilized in the damaged adult brain, perhaps to cure Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and other neurodegenerative disorders. The work surrounding this finding diverted much of my energy and focus for the better part of six years starting in 2001. Meanwhile, our lab received three large federal grants, one to study the nature of tobacco addiction and two to design computing systems for medical imaging.

…

Collaborations with my clinical colleagues grew in scope in the early 1990s, and then they began to dominate my research interests by 2000, along with my studies of adult stem cells. Eventually this interest and involvement with human psychiatric studies led me to move my academic appointment to the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. Based on these studies, starting in the early and mid-1990s, I started to give more and more scientific, and then public and lay, talks on personality, development, schizophrenia, addictions, male-female brain differences, emotional memory, and consciousness. By 1998, I was giving a mix of talks about stem cells and psychiatric research, and in 2000, our lab made a breakthrough discovery regarding how adult stem cells mobilize to repair brain injuries.

…

If you asked me what line of work I’m in, I’d say that I am a brain researcher, and if you pressed further I’d say I am a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and affiliated with the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. I’d tell you how I’ve spent my career teaching medical students and residents and graduate students about the brain. If you seemed interested, I would then tell you about my research with adult stem cells and animal models of Parkinson’s disease and chronic stroke, and that the basic research from my lab has led to the creation of three biotech companies, one of which has been netting profits consistently for the past twenty-five years, and another that just won a national award from its peer biotech companies.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Damage to a single strand of the double helix is easy for the cell to repair – the sequence on the intact strand is used as a way of synthesising the required complementary bases. In the 1980s it was discovered that mammalian stem cells can respond to a double strand break by using the corresponding sequence on the other chromosome as a template to repair the missing bases. In this repair mechainism, called homologous recombination, the cell can be tricked into using an artificial DNA template to synthesise a new DNA sequence, which now forms part of the cell’s genome. This method of gene targeting eventually enabled the creation of recombinant mammals and raised the possibility of carrying out gene therapy in stem cells from the blood, skin or liver.1 But a number of problems remained.

…

., et al. (2013), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110:19012–7; Tan, W., et al. (2013), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110:16526–31; Hou, Z., et al. (2013), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 110:15644–9; Schwank, G., et al. (2013), Cell Stem Cell 13:653–8. 44 Choulika, Réécrire la vie, p. 66. 45 Shalem, O., et al. (2014), Science 343:84–7. 46 Ding, Q., et al. (2013), Cell Stem Cell 12:393–4. 47 Musunuru, K. (2019), The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World’s First Gene-Edited Babies (n.p.), pp. 82–3. 48 Pennisi, E. (2013), Science 341:833–6. 49 https://twitter.com/UoM_GEU/status/1263057453320671235?

…

The impact of genetic engineering on virtually every part of biology over the last half-century has been so overwhelming that a book detailing those effects would turn into a history of modern biology itself. As a consequence, many scientific, technical and social developments that flowed from, or coincided with, the appearance of genetic engineering are deliberately not covered in any detail here – IVF, stem cell biology, embryo research, biotechnology, mammalian cloning, synthetic biology, genomics, DNA sequencing, transhumanism and many others. Some experts will undoubtedly find that their favourite technique, their favourite experiment or their favourite researcher has been missed out for reasons of space.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“So one might well ask, How is it possible to make medical care on seasteads or ships a reality? Step one? You guessed it. Focus on the inaccessible, high-cost treatments for well-off locals.” Stem cells are mother cells that have the potential to become any type of cell in the body. “Stem cell treatments are absolutely incredible. Why is this exciting for seasteading? First, it’s inaccessibility in the US. The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] is still not behind it in any advanced or motivated way.” The FDA takes the position that any stem cell, once taken outside the body and cultured, is considered a drug and must be regulated as such before it can be reinjected into the same body.

…

Yet Dr. Christopher Centeno, one of the first physicians to repair severe orthopedic tears with a patient’s own stem cells, points out that in vitro fertilization requires a much more complex culturing process, and fertilized eggs are not regulated as drugs. “Asia and some parts of Latin America are ten years ahead of the US,” continues Nishant. “Why not market stem cell procedures for US patients for conditions that are rare or untreatable with typical medical options?” The marvel of stem cell cures is not held up by technology, lack of doctors, or lack of funding. They are held back only by politics.

…

Many suffer for decades and even die waiting for procedures to be approved in their home countries that have long been available elsewhere. Every time a government restricts a medical procedure, it simply migrates to another jurisdiction. Why wait for stem cell surgeries to be approved in your host country when Claudia Castillo, suffering for years in Colombia with a narrow trachea, or windpipe, caused by tuberculosis, travelled to Spain in 2008 to have her stem cells harvested from her leg bone marrow? It took four days to grow a brand new trachea in the lab, and four days after it was surgically implanted, the medical team found that the new organ was indistinguishable from the rest of Castillo’s body.

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, a Nd My Life by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

back-to-the-land, epigenetics, index card, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, mouse model, place-making, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

In a recent evaluation of a number of studies that show physical activity to be an effective treatment for depression, strong support emerged that the reason for patient recovery was, indeed, adult neurogenesis. And experts believe that yoga in particular may facilitate the potential for the brain to undergo these neuronal changes. *** PHYSICAL ACTIVITY ALSO helps generate stem cell growth and individual cell repair throughout the entire body. In animal studies, exercise increases the number of stem cells in muscle fiber by almost half. This increase in muscle stem cells makes rats more likely to demonstrate what researchers refer to as “spontaneous locomotion,” that feeling that signals our body to just get up and dance. A little like rats whose brains are on joy—or whatever the rat equivalent to joy might be.

…

In a process scientists now refer to as neurogenesis, given the right cues, these immature nerve cells can divide and differentiate into either new, baby neurons, or they can become additional neural stem cells that integrate into and enhance the brain’s neural network. These new neurons often come to life in the areas of the brain associated with higher learning. As we age, however, these neural stem cells tend to become less able to transform. They’re there, but it’s as if they’ve shut down and aren’t responsive; think of them as being in something akin to a cellular coma. They aren’t getting the cue that tells them to wake up.

…

This somnambulant state is caused by a protein found throughout the body known as bone morphogenetic protein (BMP), which inhibits cellular development. The more active BMP is in your brain, the less responsive your neural stem cells become, the less neurogenesis occurs, and the less vibrant your brain, your thinking, your state of mind, and your ability to learn new things. Exercise awakens these quiescent neural stem cells. Exercise in general influences the rate of neurogenesis as well as the survival of new neurons after they are born, and it does so through multiple pathways. To give just one example, when we exercise we increase another protein, what we might think of as one antidote to the BMP-induced cellular coma, appropriately named Noggin (yes, Noggin).

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

But if it were common to live to 110, 130 or 150, people might wait until they were 60, 70 or even 80 to have children. Future treatments Stem-cell medicine promises two radical future developments. The first is a series of treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The second is the production of genetically matching organs (farmed or printed using 3D fabricators) to replace those damaged by normal aging or disease, or by treatments for illness, for example, a liver damaged during cancer treatment. Historically, stem cells have been a difficult ethical area, because the process of stem-cell production for the most useful stem cells involved the destruction of human embryos.

…

In an experiment, pairs of mice were joined together to create artificially conjoined twins. The result was that old mice who were connected to young mice regenerated muscle cells much faster than pairs of old mice. Apparently, the effect has nothing to do with stem cells contained in the young blood either. This suggests that older bodies repair themselves more slowly because of a lack of some signal or other—not because the stem cells lose their regenerative ability. This finding is likely to result in various “fast repair” products for older people in the future. What’s possible? In the more optimistic corner, are those who believe that aging is genetically determined and that the “death program” or process that causes aging can be switched off, or at least amended.

…

the condensed idea Genetic prophesy timeline 1997 Release of the movie Gattaca about genetic enhancement 2008 Knome offers genome sequencing to individuals for $350,000 2009 Knome drops its price to $99,500 2012 23andMe offers gene sequencing for $299 2018 Cost falls to $49 via Walmart 2020 Hospitals and insurers offer free genome profiling 2030 Google dating based upon ideal DNA profiles 2050 DNA database creates human underclass 22 Regenerative medicine Is it possible to prevent or reverse the aging process, perhaps by fiddling with tired tissues and cells, or even growing new organs inside a laboratory? Some people regard this as a pipe dream. Others see it instead as increasingly inevitable. Physician, heal thyself. What if you are an aging surgeon and parts of your body are worn out? Options may include stem-cell therapy, the transplant of an artificial organ (a kidney grown in vitro), the printing of replacement teeth or bones using a fabricator, general life extension, some more hair, or perhaps some new fingers? This last idea may seem a little far-fetched, but if newts can repair themselves why not human beings?

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

For comparison, standard practice today involves the creation of fewer than ten embryos. 46. Adult and embryonic stem cells can be coaxed to develop into sperm cells and oocytes, which can then be fused to produce an embryo (Nagy et al. 2008; Nagy and Chang 2007). Egg cell precursors can also form parthenogenetic blastocysts, unfertilized and non-viable embryos, able to produce embryonic stem cell lines for the process (Mai et al. 2007). 47. The opinion is that of Katsuhiko Hayashi, as reported in Cyranoski (2013). The Hinxton Group, an international consortium of scientists that discusses stem cell ethics and challenges, predicted in 2008 that human stem cell-derived gametes would be available within ten years (Hinxton Group 2008), and developments thus far are broadly consistent with this. 48.

…

There is, however, a complementary technology, one which, once it has been developed for use in humans, would greatly potentiate the enhancement power of pre-implantation genetic screening: namely, the derivation of viable sperm and eggs from embryonic stem cells.46 The techniques for this have already been used to produce fertile offspring in mice and gamete-like cells in humans. Substantial scientific challenges remain, however, in translating the animal results to humans and in avoiding epigenetic abnormalities in the derived stem cell lines. According to one expert, these challenges might put human application “10 or even 50 years in the future.”47 With stem cell-derived gametes, the amount of selection power available to a couple could be greatly increased.

…

In current practice, an in vitro fertilization procedure typically involves the creation of fewer than ten embryos. With stem cell-derived gametes, a few donated cells might be turned into a virtually unlimited number of gametes that could be combined to produce embryos, which could then be genotyped or sequenced, and the most promising one chosen for implantation. Depending on the cost of preparing and screening each individual embryo, this technology could yield a severalfold increase in the selective power available to couples using in vitro fertilization. More importantly still, stem cell-derived gametes would allow multiple generations of selection to be compressed into less than a human maturation period, by enabling iterated embryo selection.

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

Normally, the genetic switches that control the transformation of an embryo into a larva or a larva into a polyp are switched on in an order that is irreversible, Stefano explained. “But Turritopsis cells can hit the rewind button.” When the Turritopsis medusa rejuvenates, muscle cells, for example, turn certain genes on or off, essentially unbaking the cells and reverting them to doughlike stem cells. Then those stem cells re-form into new and different cells in the polyp. The idea that fully cooked cells can become stem cells again has enormous and tantalizing possibilities for medical research. If we could hit the rewind button in our cells, we could open the door to all kinds of cures for diseases in which cells have gone awry, ailments like Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

…

Eventually perfectly healthy polyps sprang to life from the medusa carcass. Rather than simply die, the jellyfish seemingly reversed its life cycle, going from the degraded medusa backward to the polyp stage. Like animals, individual cells proceed through a life cycle. All types of cells are born as generic stem cells, like a lump of dough with a lot of potential. Specific genes turn on and off inside each stem cell, changing it into a muscle cell, a skin cell, or a nerve cell in the same way a baker molds the dough into a pizza crust, a loaf of bread, or a pretzel. Certain steps are required for the transformation of dough, be it spinning it in the air, rolling it into a snake and giving it a twist, or mounding it into a loaf pan.

…

In the early 2000s, they injected mouse skin cells with between four and seven pieces of protein called transcription factors. Transcription factors attach on to DNA and control which genes are flipped on. The Japanese scientists discovered that the presence of just those few proteins had the power to transform skin cells backward—to the lump-of-dough stem-cell stage. And from those stem cells, scientists were able to grow nerve cells, blood cells, and heart muscle cells. For this rule-shattering work, Shinya Yamanaka received the Nobel Prize in 2012. One major roadblock, Maria Pia told me, is that most of the work on transcription factors has been done on cells grown in a culture dish.

How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, fear of failure, framing effect, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, iterative process, lateral thinking, machine translation, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, stem cell, theory of mind

Bone marrow transplantation is the most extreme measure in medicine to cure a disease. In essence, a person is given lethal doses of radiation and chemotherapy, doses that destroy the blood and immune system. Into this void, stem cells from the bone marrow of a compatible donor are seeded. These marrow stem cells have extraordinary biological potential. They grow and mature into all of the elements that have been destroyed: red blood cells, neutrophils, monocytes, platelets, T cells, and B cells. As the donor stem cells grow and mature, they begin to perform the chores that immune cells are programmed to do. Primary among these is to recognize foreign invaders, like microbes, and to purge them.

…

There was a new case for the fellow to present, and after exchanging pleasantries, he began: "Max Bornstein is a fifty-nine-year-old gentleman who had a large-cell lymphoma successfully treated two years ago and now has MDS." MDS stands for myelodysplastic syndrome—a conglomerate term of Greek roots that signifies injury to the primitive cells of the bone marrow, the stem cells; the injured stem cells grow in a stunted, disorderly way and fail to produce enough blood. In Bornstein's case, it was the chemotherapy that cured his lymphoma two years before that had injured the marrow stem cells. "His white blood cell count is 1,900, his platelets 74,000, and his hemoglobin 9.8," the fellow said. "I calculated all of his parameters, including his marrow findings. His calculated score puts him at intermediate-II risk on the IPSS.

…

They would try different drugs in the hope that one or more would reduce the amount of lymphoma in his body to the point where he could undergo a bone marrow transplant. Because Franklin did not have a matched donor, Nimer would harvest the stem cells from Franklin's own bone marrow, treat him with what would be lethal amounts of chemotherapy, and then "rescue" him with his own stem cells. "It scares me," Franklin said to Nimer, "but I really don't have a choice, do I?" Nimer replied that everyone always has a choice, but that this was the most rational way to proceed, and the only chance of a cure. The way a physician phrases his recommendations can powerfully sway a patient's choices.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The field of genetics has the potential to improve human health and nutrition, but many people are concerned about the effects of genetic modification both in humans and in agriculture. What is the right policy balance between the benefits of genetic advances and their potential risks? 8. Stem Cells. Stem cell research advocates say it may successfully lead to treatments for many chronic diseases and injuries, saving lives, but opponents argue that using embryos as a source for stem cells destroys human life. What are your positions on government regulation and funding of stem cell research? 9. Ocean Health. Scientists estimate that some 75 percent of the world’s fisheries are in serious decline and habitats around the world like coral reefs are seriously threatened.

…

The earmark in question was secured by Representative Mike Thompson (D-CA) for research into the olive fruit fly, a widespread problem in Europe that is threatening the rapidly growing US olive industry—I kid you not. Palin followed this with “going rogue” on McCain by appearing without permission on Christian conservative James Dobson’s radio show, where she contradicted McCain’s position on stem cell research as stated to Science Debate. Concerned that he might be losing Bible Belt conservatives, McCain swung to the right. During the second presidential debate he criticized science spending in particular, singling out such congressional science earmarks as $3 million “to study the DNA of bears in Montana.

…

We have to ask, then, is every one that remains of the roughly 1½ million eggs a woman has in her ovaries at birth a life with rights? When does life begin? Is it true, as the comedy troupe Monty Python sang in The Meaning of Life, that “Every sperm is sacred”? Is it a life if we transform adult skin cells into stem cells and those into sperm and egg and then fertilize one with the other? And is that a clone or something else? Is it a life if we design its genome on a computer, as scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have done,8 buy a DNA synthesizer on eBay for $8,000 or so, use it to make fragments of the genome we designed, chemically stitch them together, inject the complete genome into a cell with an empty nucleus, and shock it into replicating?

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome) by Gavin Francis

Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell, traveling salesman

The leaflets advertising umbilical cryogenics have two types of picture on them: cute and smiling children at play, or radiation-suited scientists engaged in some challenging laboratory task. There are no images representing multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease or leukaemia, despite the companies’ claim that storing stem cells might be an insurance policy against these illnesses in later life. You can donate stem cells to a public bank, for use by anyone, or you can pay a private company to store your baby’s cord and stem cells for the sole use of your family. Some cultures maintain that a baby’s visceral connection to its umbilical cord is an association that lasts a lifetime, and for that reason the cord must always be handled with respect.

…

These cryogenics companies agree: if you want a private cord-bank to store your baby’s umbilical cord you can arrange for a lab scientist to be on standby for the birth of your child in order to extract the stem cells within the critical time period in which they’re still viable. Your baby’s lifetime’s association with the cord can be maintained through regular payments from a credit card. The National Health Service in the UK now has a cord-blood storage service, preserving stem cells for research, and investigating their use in bone marrow transplants for whoever might need them. Within a decade we’ve gone from throwing afterbirth out with the trash, to reinvesting it with a depth of significance that had almost been forgotten.

…

In wealthy, modern healthcare systems, a new possibility has arisen: to have it cryogenically preserved. Buried in the jelly of the umbilical cord are cells that are genetically identical to the baby, but which have not differentiated into any particular tissue type. These ‘undifferentiated’ cells are a type of ‘stem cell’ because, just as it’s possible to regrow a tree from a single cutting, they are stems from which other body parts can theoretically grow. The cells within the cord blood have the potential to develop into tissues such as bone marrow, while the cells within the jelly of the cord are related to the structural components of the body: bone, muscle, cartilage and fat.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

In addition to generating new connections between neurons, the brain also makes new neurons from neural stem cells, which replicate to maintain a reservoir of themselves. In the course of reproducing, some of the neural stem cells become "neural precursor" cells, which in turn mature into two types of support cells called astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, as well as neurons. The cells further evolve into specific types of neurons. However, this differentiation cannot take place unless the neural stem cells move away from their original source in the brain's ventricles. Only about half of the neural cells successfully make the journey, which is similar to the process during gestation and early childhood in which only a portion of the early brain's developing neurons survive.

…

Celera has already demonstrated the ability to create synthetic viruses from genetic information and plans to apply these biodesigned viruses to gene therapy.37 One of the companies I help to direct, United Therapeutics, has begun human trials of delivering DNA into cells through the novel mechanism of autologous (the patient's own) stem cells, which are captured from a few vials of their blood. DNA that directs the growth of new pulmonary blood vessels is inserted into the stem cell genes, and the cells are reinjected into the patient. When the genetically engineered stem cells reach the tiny pulmonary blood vessels near the lung's alveoli, they begin to express growth factors for new blood vessels. In animal studies this has safely reversed pulmonary hypertension, a fatal and presently incurable disease.

…

Short of a worldwide totalitarian state, the economic and other forces underlying technical progress will only grow with ongoing advances. Consider the issue of stem-cell research, which has been especially controversial, and for which the U.S. government is restricting its funding. Stem-cell research is only one of numerous ideas concerned with controlling and influencing the information processes underlying biology that are being pursued as part of the biotechnology revolution. Even within the field of cell therapies the controversy over embryonic stem-cell research has served only to accelerate other ways of accomplishing the same goal. For example, transdifferentiation (converting one type of cell such as a skin cell into other types of cells) has moved ahead quickly.

The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations by Thomas Morris

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, New Journalism, parabiotic, placebo effect, popular electronics, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

But at the turn of the millennium a new world of possibility opened up when researchers gained a powerful new tool: stem cell technology. In contrast to the endothelial cells in the blood vessels (for instance), stem cells are not specialised to one function but have the potential to develop into many different tissue types. One type of stem cell is found in growing embryos, and another in parts of the adult body, including the bone marrow (where they generate the cells of the blood and immune system) and skin. In 1998 James Thomson, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, succeeded in isolating stem cells from human embryos and growing them in the laboratory,66 resulting in a wealth of new research into how cells differentiate and possible new therapies.

…

In 1998 James Thomson, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, succeeded in isolating stem cells from human embryos and growing them in the laboratory,66 resulting in a wealth of new research into how cells differentiate and possible new therapies. But an arguably even more important breakthrough came nine years later. Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto University, showed that it was possible to genetically ‘reprogram’ skin cells and convert them into stem cells.67 The implications were enormous. In theory it would now be possible to harvest mature, specialised cells from a patient, reprogram them as stem cells, then choose which type of tissue they would become. One possible application of this discovery is in the treatment of heart attacks. When the cardiac muscle is damaged by an interruption in its blood supply the body does little to repair it: scar tissue forms, but few new muscle cells, or myocytes, appear.

…

To encourage the growth of new muscle, scientists first tried extracting adult stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow and injecting them into the coronary arteries, in the hope that some would adhere to the myocardium and convert into myocytes – but the results were disappointing.fn5 Rather than engineer new tissue in situ, Sanjay Sinha, a cardiologist at the University of Cambridge, is attempting to grow a ‘patch’ of artificial myocardium in the laboratory for later implantation in the operating theatre. His technique starts with undifferentiated stem cells, which are then encouraged to develop into several types of specialised cell: not just myocytes, but also smooth muscle tissue and vascular cells.

The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

That seems to trigger the desired reprogramming. Or instead of putting the nucleus into an egg cell, it might be put into a socalled stem cell from an early embryo. Embryonic stem cells can turn into any other sort of cell, so might possibly be persuaded to turn into entire people. Regardless of that possibility, embryonic stem cells have medical promise, and several firms are currently studying them. Geron, the most advanced of these firms, has worked out how to persuade embryonic stem cells to turn into seven different types of normal cell line that it hopes can be used to repair damaged tissue. Blood cells could be grown in bulk for transfusions.

…

In case that does not work, though, the discussion has turned to the idea of transplanting adult nuclei into embryonic stem cells as a way of getting round the rejection problem. This idea, known in the trade as therapeutic cloning, has caused alarm bells to go off. The technique would create organs, not people, and no one yet knows whether it would work. But some countries are getting nervous about stem-cell research. This nervousness has not been calmed by the activities of Advanced Cell Technology, a firm based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which announced in November 2001 that it had managed the trick of transplanting adult nuclei into stem cells and persuading the result to divide a few times.

…

This nervousness has not been calmed by the activities of Advanced Cell Technology, a firm based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which announced in November 2001 that it had managed the trick of transplanting adult nuclei into stem cells and persuading the result to divide a few times. In effect, act created the beginning of an embryo. In 2002 President George Bush issued a decree restricting federal funding in America to existing embryonic stem-cell lines. Attempts have even been made in Congress to ban it altogether. Reversing the usual traffic flow, some American scientists have upped sticks and gone to Britain, where the regulations on such research are liberal and settled. 268 CLIMBING THE HELICAL STAIRCASE Some countries, indeed, have more than just settled regulations. Singapore, for example, is actively recruiting people who want to work on the human aspects of biotechnology.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

I had always had niggling doubts about genetic determinism. Some of those doubts stemmed from my eighteen years of government-funded research on cloning stem cells. Though it took a sojourn outside of traditional academia for me to fully realize it, my research offered incontrovertible proof that biology’s most cherished tenets regarding genetic determinism are fundamentally flawed. My new understanding of the nature of life not only corroborated my stem cell research but also, I realized, contradicted another belief of mainstream science that I had been propounding to my students—the belief that allopathic medicine is the only kind of medicine that merits consideration in medical school.

…

Suffice it to say that after four months in paradise, teaching in a way that clarified my thinking about cells and the lessons they provide to humans, I was well on my way to an understanding of the New Biology, which leaves in the dust the defeatism of genetic and parental programming as well as survival-of-the-fittest Darwinism. CHAPTER 2 IT’S THE ENVIRONMENT, STUPID I will never forget a piece of wisdom I received in 1967, on the first day I learned to clone stem cells in graduate school. It took me decades to realize how profound this seemingly simple piece of wisdom was for my work and my life. My professor, mentor, and consummate scientist Irv Konigsberg was one of the first cell biologists to master the art of cloning stem cells. He told me that when the cultured cells you are studying are ailing, you look first to the cell’s environment, not to the cell itself, for the cause. My professor wasn’t as blunt as Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville, who decreed, “It’s the economy, stupid,” to be the mantra for the 1992 presidential election.

…

This new awareness reveals that our genes are constantly being remodeled in response to life experiences. Which again emphasizes that our perceptions of life shape our biology. Months after this book was first published, an article in one of the most prestigious journals, Nature, revealed exciting new epigenetic insights on how the environment controls gene activity in stem cells, which coincidently is the same subject and conclusion I offer in Chapter 2. I must admit that I was amused by the fact that my chapter is entitled “It’s the Environment, Stupid” while the more recent Nature article was titled “It’s the Ecology, Stupid.” (2005 Nature 435:268) Essentially, we are on the same page!

Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Crawford, Dorothy H.

clean water, coronavirus, CRISPR, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, Francisco Pizarro, hygiene hypothesis, Louis Pasteur, megacity, Nelson Mandela, stem cell

We now know that HPVs target squamous epithelial cells, that is, the thick layer of cells that make up the skin on the outside of our bodies, and line certain internal areas such as the genital tract, the mouth, the throat, and upper larynx. The basal layer of the epithelium contains self-renewing stem cells capable of a lifetime of cell division. This production line is normally finely balanced by cell loss from the regular shedding of dead cells from the skin surface. Entering through a small cut or abrasion, HPVs set up a persistent infection in these epithelial stem cells. The HPV genome replicates each time the cell divides, with one copy being retained in the stem cell offspring so ensuring its long-term survival in the host. The second daughter cell progresses up the epithelium, and its maturation is the signal for HPV to begin virus production, so that when the cell dies and is shed from the surface, it contains thousands of virus particles ready to infect new hosts, spread by close contact such as sexual intercourse.

…

When this happens, it causes cytomegalic inclusion disease in around 10% of affected infants, inducing a wide range of symptoms including growth retardation, deafness, abnormalities of internal organsre0S blood clotting, and inflammation of the liver, lungs, heart, and brain. CMV establishes latency in the bone marrow stem cells that develop into blood monocytes and tissue macrophages. These cells transport the latent virus via the blood to the tissues where virus reactivation is common. In healthy hosts, this is dealt with by the immune system without causing disease, but CMV replication produces significant pathology in immunosuppressed patients, and was responsible for blindness, severe diarrhoea, pneumonia, and encephalitis in many HIV-positive people before effective antivirals were developed in the early 1990s.

…

base pairs: the pairs of nucleotides that form the ‘letters’ of the genetic code. In DNA, adenine (A) pairs with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G). bluetongue virus: midge-borne virus of the Orbivirus genus, so called because of the orb-shaped capsid. B lymphocyte/B cell: an antibody-producing cell Q3 virusle c that develops from stem cells in the bone marrow, circulates in the blood, and matures in lymph nodes. bocavirus: a parvovirus, its name being derived from its two known hosts, cattle and dogs (i.e. bovine and canine), recently identified as a cause of childhood respiratory disease in humans. bronchiolitis: inflammation of the bronchioles – the smaller air passages of the lungs.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, cognitive load, end world poverty, endowment effect, energy security, experimental subject, framing effect, higher-order functions, hindsight bias, impulse control, John Nash: game theory, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monty Hall problem, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, ultimatum game, World Values Survey

And embryos themselves are not viable unless placed in the proper conditions. Indeed, embryos could be engineered to not be viable past a certain age even if implanted in a womb. Would this obviate the ethical concerns of those who oppose embryonic stem-cell research? At the time of this writing, the Obama administration still has not removed the most important impediments to embryonic stem-cell research. Currently, federal funding is only allowed for work on stem cells that have been derived from surplus embryos at fertility clinics. This delicacy is a clear concession to the religious convictions of the American electorate. While Collins seems willing to go further and support research on embryos created through somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), he is very far from being a voice of ethical clarity in this debate.

…

Concern over human embryos smaller than the period at the end of this sentence—when, for years they have constituted one of the most promising contexts for medical research—is one of the many delusional products of religion that has led to an ethical blind alley, and to terrible failures of compassion. While Collins appears to support embryonic stem-cell research, he does so after much (literal) soul searching and under considerable theological duress. Everything he has said and written about the subject needlessly complicates an ethical question that is—if one is actually concerned about human and animal well-being—utterly straightforward. The ethics of embryonic stem-cell research, which currently entails the destruction of human embryos, can be judged only by considering what embryos at the 150-cell-stage actually are.

…

It should concern us that these two orientations are not equally empowering. Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of current efforts to pass antiblasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate.6 Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right—or that anything can ever be truly right—often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands.

The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable--And How We Can Get There by Vincent T. Devita, Jr., M. D., Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, double helix, Frances Oldham Kelsey, mouse model, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, three-martini lunch

If you did a blood count during this time, the cell count would appear normal, even though the stem cell factory (stem cells generate all the cells in the marrow) had been shut down. But the damage had been done, and the storage compartment would be emptying. However, a second dose of a drug that is toxic to the marrow during the first ten days isn’t as damaging as the first. There are two reasons for this. The more mature cells left in the storage compartment aren’t all that sensitive to chemotherapy in the first place. And the stem cells would have been rendered quiescent by the first dose. Cells that are going through a lot of cell division, as stem cells normally do, are most vulnerable to the toxic effects of chemotherapy.

…

Inactive cells, however, aren’t dividing, so they’re less susceptible to damage. From day 9 after a dose of chemotherapy until about day 18, patients are out of white blood cells and platelets. While the stem cells in the marrow are awakening, they are not making many cells. This is the period of greatest danger for acquiring an infection or bleeding. After day 18, the marrow wakes up again in earnest, and the stem cells begin furiously churning out more white blood cells and platelets, although few of them leave the marrow until the storage compartment is full again. If you give another big dose of drug between days 14 and 18, it will cause severe marrow toxicity that could be fatal to the freshly dividing cells.

…

Pretty soon, we realized we had another problem. In childhood leukemia, the drug combinations were given intensively, every day, for as long as possible, with the intent to destroy every leukemic cell lingering in the bone marrow and circulating in the bloodstream. Then you stopped and prayed there were enough normal marrow stem cells left to regenerate the bone marrow. Often, there were. But in patients with solid tumors, we didn’t want to damage the marrow. In fact, we needed, as much as possible, to avoid damaging it, as our patients would become more fragile if their blood counts dipped. We needed a different dosing schedule, one that killed the Hodgkin’s cells but didn’t destroy our patients’ bone marrow.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

Suppose the Apple iLiver is way better than the Microsoft X-Liver. How long should Apple have the right to keep its product patented? The various ethical issues of stem cells may arise for organ printing, but at least so far it does not appear to be a major moral conundrum. Most ethical concerns with stem cells are associated with the use of embryonic stem cells. But the stem cells most likely to be used for bioprinters are pluripotent stem cells, which are like embryonic cells but are derived from patients. A few concerns may be unique to bioprinting, but they seem pretty mild to us. For example, one concern is that printed organs may acquire bacteria during the printing process.

…

Better still, a 3D printer would be able to make the product to order for each patient. This is handy, because a five-foot-tall woman does not want the same heart as a seven-foot-tall man. It’s also handy because an on-site 3D printer could use cells harvested and cultured from the individual patient that will receive the organ. For example, you could harvest immature stem cells from someone, coax them into replicating and becoming the cells that make up a particular organ, and then transplant an organ made from these cells back into the patient. Such an organ would not have the rejection problems that normally come from organ transplants. You may have the impression that 3D printing is mostly for weirdos with too much money who spend their time obsessively printing Star Wars miniatures.

…

., 47 Delp, Michael, 59n Demaine, Erik, 102, 107–8, 118, 122, 128 dementia, 307 Dempsey, Gaia, 179 depression, 245, 247, 250, 301, 302 depth perception, via smell, 187 Derleth, Jason, 25–27, 35–36, 40 designer babies, 219 deuterium, 73–74, 77, 83 deuterium gas, 81–82 Deutsch, David, 330 diabetes, 245 diminished reality, 181–82 dinosaurs, 225 disease, 198–203, 217 Disney, Walt, 97 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The (Bauby), 316 d-limonene, 210 DNA, 191, 192–98, 201–2, 204, 205, 213–14, 217, 221, 222, 234, 236, 239, 332 of mammoths, 222–23 as memory storage, 220 Doctor Who (TV show), 82 dogs, 187 Domburg, Jeroen, 161 Dong, Suyang, 177 Doudna, Jennifer, 212 Dowling, Jonathan, 330n drones, 152–53 drugs, 269 drug trials, 254–55, 268–69 Duff, David, 116 ears, 186 Earth, 16, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 67, 68, 69, 159, 169, 319 earwax, 196n East Germany, 135 ECoG (electrocorticography), 294–95, 298, 302 École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 112 ecology, 219 Edison, Thomas, 134, 146 education, 183–84 Edwards, Bradley, 31 EEG (electroencephalogram), 287–90, 291, 292, 294, 298, 299, 310 efficiency, 125–26 eGenesis, 207 EGFRvIII, 243 Egyptians, ancient, 6 Eiben, Gusz, 120n Eiffel Tower, 150, 171 Eisen, Jonathan, 234n electric shock therapy, 299 electromagnetic railgun, 24–25 electrons, 5 Elvis, Martin, 65–67, 68, 320n embryonic stem cells, 273 “emergency guide robot,” 130–32 Empire State Building, 172 environment: biosynthetic monitoring of, 210–12 fusion power and, 94 programmable matter in, 128 robotic construction and, 155–56 space flight damage to, 39–40 synthetic organisms and, 218–19 environmental movement, 97–98 EPFL Laboratory for Timber Construction, 143–44 epilepsy, 295, 302 escape velocity, 55 Escherichia coli, 198 ethanol, 286 Ethnobotany Study Book, 176 European Space Agency (ESA), 22, 27, 65 European Union, 22n Everett, Daniel, 140n evolution, 196 extinction, 221–25 eyes, 186 Faber, Daniel, 53, 68, 69 Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Lipson and Kurman), 159 Fabric of Reality, The (Deutsch), 330 Facebook, 6n, 111, 180, 254 face-tracking software, 180 Falcon 9 rocket, 8n, 19 Faraday, Michael, 4, 6 fiducial marker, 169–70 fingertips, pruney, 126 Fisher, Caitlin, 173, 177–78 fission, 79n FitBit, 252n flexible electrode arrays, 298 Florida, University of, 300 Center for Smell and Taste at, 334 Florida State University, 59n flu, 247 flu vaccines, 217 flux pinning, 326–27 flying cars, 2 fMRI (functional magenetic resonance imaging), 290–91 fMRS (functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy), 292 fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), 291 food, printed, 159–63 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 254, 315, 316 foods, 190–91 Ford Motor Company, 97 Forgacs, Gabor, 268–69, 272 forked tongue, 187 “4D printing,” 103–5 France, 93n Frankenfood, 221 free fall, 42–43 “freezing of gait,” 301 Frostruder, 162 fuel cells, 208–9 fuels, 20, 208–10, 221 furniture, 127 Fusion: The Energy of the Universe (McCracken), 77 fusion bombs, 79 fusion power, 73–100 benefits of, 93–94 blast approach to, 84–85 breakeven point in, 88 concerns about, 91–93 confining and heating approach to, 85 research funding for, 92–93 where we are now with, 86–90 fusion reactors, 314 Fusor.net, 80 fusors, tabletop, 80–84 Gaia (robot), 129–30 Gatenholm, Dr., 269 gene drive, 201–3 gene expression, 239 General Fusion, 89 genes, 195–96, 197, 204, 215 gene sequencing, 2 Genetic Access Control (app), 251–52 genetic disorders, 3, 219, 235–37 Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act (2008), 250–51 genetic mutations, 40, 231 George Mason University, 56 Georgia Institute of Technology, 130 geostationary orbit, 32, 34, 43 Germany, Nazi, 135 Gilpin, Kyle, 118 GitHub, 251 Global Catastrophic Risks (book of essays), 125n glucose, 286 GMOs (genetically modified organisms), 221 Go-Between, The (Hartley), 331 gold, 52, 92 “Golden Promise” barley, 192 Google, 111, 180, 197n, 232, 254, 290 Google Glass, 175–76, 179, 186 Google Scholar, 247 gophers, 96–97 GPS, 171, 173 Gramazio, Fabio, 152 granite, 144 Grant, Dale, 46 gravity, 15–16, 42, 43, 52, 56, 78 “Gray Goo Scenario,” 125 gray wolves, 224 Graz University of Technology, 177 Great Britain, 22 Great Depression, 45 Greeks, ancient, 6 Greenpeace, 94n Gunduz, Aysegul, 300, 301 guns, 3D printed, 125 hacking, of brain implants, 309 hands, 323–24, 332 haptic pen, 175 Haque Design + Research (Umbrellium), 111 hard hats, 179 Hartley, L.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

The rest die, and many more suffer on dialysis, knowing the kidneys they need exist, people are willing to sell them, and insurance would pay (because transplants are so much cheaper than dialysis), but NOTA and similar rules around the world put the organs out of reach. Finally, the idea of carefully designed kidney markets—pushing the dimmer halfway down—is not so fanciful. In 1984, NOTA also banned sales of stem cells, which were then harvested painfully from bone marrow via hip surgery. But today these cells can be easily filtered from your blood. In 2011, one federal appeals court covering nine western states changed the analogy for stem cells, describing them as more like blood plasma, which can be sold, than kidneys, which cannot. But the judges did not push the dimmer all the way up to full sales, either. Potential sellers must join the national donor registry.

…

Payments are capped at $3,000 to limit undue influence on vulnerable potential sellers—a cap like the one doctors tried to impose on egg sales. Using a dimmer to move between the sacred and the profane—between no sales and unrestricted sales—has the potential to save many of the three thousand people who die annually awaiting stem cell transplants. But the only potential sellers are in states like Montana, covered by the 2011 court ruling. Across the border in Wyoming, the dimmer is pushed all the way down. Paying for stem cells remains banned, a crime like selling a kidney. NOTA is not set in stone. The law is less than fifty years old. When Congress passed NOTA, it was concerned “that human body parts should not be viewed as commodities.”

…

There are many good objections to kidney sales—the coercion and dignity objections give us pause—but perhaps smart ownership design can address each concern directly. We can set the ownership dimmer partway up if we choose. If you want to uncover the rules of ownership, there’s no better place to start than by mastering the art of reasoning by analogy and distinction. That’s what the Montana court did with stem cells, and it’s a tool available to all of us in everyday life. Whenever you hear someone reason by analogy—“kidneys are like people”—consider distinctions—“kidneys don’t have identities; they don’t think for themselves.” Persuasive distinctions can make the difference between life and death. Golden Eggs, Revisited Now let’s circle back to Wendy Gerrish and her golden eggs.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Hurlbut shared my reservations about creating genetically engineered babies, but for very different reasons. As a Christian, with deep convictions about the sanctity of human embryos, Hurlbut was an outlier at the summit. But he did represent an important voting bloc in America, since for religious reasons many people are fundamentally opposed to research on human stem cells and embryos. Even though I do not share his Christian beliefs, I have found his writing compelling. In an essay called “Framing the Future,” Hurlbut suggests that “exaggerated expectations and images of human perfection” have led to imprudence in quickly entering the arena of human enhancement.9 The summit’s organizing committee was meeting behind closed doors a few feet away.

…

Twenty years ago, during the heyday of the original Human Genome Project, renowned biologists were bandying about similar claims. Scientists have largely failed to produce evidence supporting grand theories about genetic determinism. Genes are just a small part of the story about life. Excitement about stem cells, gut microbes, and epigenetics—a new field exploring how genes are regulated—has displaced DNA from center stage in biology. We were standing in the largest DNA repository in the world, she said. Living materials were being stored in live cultures, while a digitization platform transformed their DNA into bits of code: ATCG, for example, was becoming 00011110.

…

It is likely that a large number of genes are involved, each of which makes only a small contribution to a person’s intelligence.”12 While BGI had not yet unraveled the mystery of human intelligence, our guide claimed that the GeneBank would deliver one of the things that George Church had talked about in his keynote lecture: immortality. Careful attention to her words, however, revealed that “immortality” had a slippery shape. The actual promise of eternal life involved giving a sample of yourself to the bank. “We are storing blood, tissues, and stem cells,” she said. “The earlier in life you store your genetic material, the better it is for you,” she added. BGI employees were given the opportunity to preserve their immune cells every year. Everyone working at BGI was also offered a free genome sequencing test. These free offers came with a catch: that your employer could use your DNA and living cells in research

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

We have 260 researchers, which may seem quite a small number compared to the likes of L’Oréal, but we also work with exterior partners, such as Stanford’s Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine.’ Stem cell research has proved fertile terrain for skincare marketers. As stem cells have the power to renew themselves, the theory is that epidermal stem cells should be protected – or even boosted – in order to ensure that they do their job of keeping our skin looking fresh and radiant with maximum efficiency. Such is the thinking behind Dior’s best-selling Capture Totale anti-ageing line, long promoted with advertising images of an apparently ageless Sharon Stone. It defends stem cells with TP Vityl, a topical constituent derived from vitamin E.

…

Beauty companies tend to promote active ingredients with language that reflects their brand DNA. For instance, La Prairie (owned, like Nivea, by Beiersdorf) makes much of its Swiss origins, equating the pure air and snows of its homeland with health and purity. Thus it assures us that its Cellular Power Infusion contains ‘the stem cells of Swiss red grapes and extract of Swiss snow algae’. This somehow explains why it costs almost 500 dollars a pot. Anyway, let’s return to Mauvais-Jarvis. ‘I believe a smaller team with exterior partners is more flexible than an enormous research department that is practically a company within a company,’ he says.

…

So I find someone to ask: a friend of a friend, who works as a product manager at a major beauty company that has already been mentioned in these pages. She spoke on condition of anonymity, but let’s call her Caroline. As we’ve established, skincare trends come and go almost as fast as fashion fads. Plant extracts, antioxidants, peptides, stem cells, bio-electricity: all of them have had their time in the sun. Beauty companies watch one another like hawks to ensure that they don’t miss out on a new active ingredient. ‘You constantly monitor what your competitors are doing,’ confirms Caroline. ‘You want to be sure you’re maintaining your fair share of the market, so you may find yourself launching a product to react to the competition or respond to a success story, but that’s by no means the only impetus.

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

Avian cells often grow better in cultured settings than mammalian cells do. For starters, it’s easier to tinker with them and get them to do what you want—they have better plasticity. Mammal cells are harder to coax into compliance; source animals must be young because they have healthier muscle stem cells, for instance. By contrast, scientists have learned that muscle stem cells, sometimes even from older birds, are still efficient for proliferation in a laboratory setting. I bring the toast up to my mouth and take a bite, chewing for a moment, savoring—and judging—the pâté’s silky texture and rich aftertaste. My eyes, mouth, and nose instinctively registered what I was eating as meat—but crackling across the buzzing synapses of my brain was only one thought: Cells!

…

“The healthiest cells are going to be from a live biopsy and the healthiest of the healthiest cells are going to be from a biopsy of a very, very young animal,” says Mike Selden, who leads Finless Foods. “Honestly, the grocery store stuff is totally useless because everything there is dead.” The scientists at cell-cultured meat companies identify which cells are stem cells. Whereas ordinary cells have limited utility, stem cells can divide and multiply many times, and they can transform into any of the more than two hundred types of cells that operate within animal bodies. Think of our cells as individuals on a building construction site. Some are assigned to lay cement, some are trained as carpenters, and another might be an electrician.

…

Back in the United States, California-based Memphis Meats CEO Uma Valeti explains that a lot of open questions about cell-cultured meat will be answered as the products near the point at which they’re ready for market. Valeti, already an accomplished cardiologist in his own right, incorporated Memphis Meats in August 2015 after spending a decade thinking about using stem cells to grow meats. “I researched every single thing I could get my hands on,” he told me one sunny afternoon at his company’s headquarters in Berkeley. “I just got more and more convinced, the pieces are all here and we just need to put them together.” From the beginning, he said that gaining consumer trust has been at the top of his mind.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

In attempting to explain the link between friendliness and the suite of traits that tend to make up the mammalian domestication syndrome, Richard Wrangham and the geneticist Adam Wilkinson became particularly interested in neural crest cells, which play an outsized role in development.23 Neural crest cells appear for a short time in all vertebrate embryos. These cells develop on the back of the neural tube, which eventually becomes the brain and spine. Neural crest cells are stem cells, which means that as the embryo develops, neural crest cells can transform into a variety of cell types. They are also migratory. As the embryo develops, these special stem cells travel all over the body. A set of librarian genes is thought to have powerful sway on which type of cell these stem cells become and when and where they migrate. Migratory neural crest cells play a role in the development of a host of traits associated with the domestication syndrome.

…

For almost every challenge, the Millennium Project proposes solutions involving technology. Climate change causing havoc? Switch to renewable energy and retrofit fossil fuel plants to reuse CO2. Overpopulation bursting the earth at the seams? Build eco-smart cities, grow steak in a petri dish from stem cells, and genetically engineer high-yield drought-resistant crops. Need to make education universal? Develop scalable software for children anywhere in the world to teach themselves reading, writing, and math online in eighteen months flat.76 But as Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, said, “technology alone isn’t the solution.

…

Yu, “Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Exposure Alters Osteoblast Gene Expression and Craniofacial Development in Mice,” Birth Defects Research Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology 100, 912–23 (2014). 55. C. Vichier-Guerre, M. Parker, Y. Pomerantz, R. H. Finnell, R. M. Cabrera, “Impact of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors on Neural Crest Stem Cell Formation,” Toxicology Letters 281, 20–25 (2017). 56. S. Neubauer, J. J. Hublin, P. Gunz, “The Evolution of Modern Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances 4, eaao5961 (2018), published online EpubJan, 10:1126/sciadv.aao5961. 57. P. Gunz, A. K. Tilot, K. Wittfeld, A. Teumer, C. Y. Shapland, T.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

These bars were ultimately lifted in part by the Obama administration, which helps (though a new, if limply supported, witch hunt by Boomer Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn does not), as did the development of nonembryonic sources.38 While stem cell research is now proceeding well, years were lost—though not by everyone. Even as some states were banning stem cell research, others (e.g., California and New York) saw beyond the nonsense and promoted stem cell research at their own expense, and this is what gives the Right its walk-on role in science history. Over the coming years, we will see the results of a certain rough experiment, comparing New York’s and California’s achievements in biology to whatever is going on in the various places that restrict such research.* It may seem odd to mention the arcane world of stem cells in a chapter about existential issues, but stem cells are existential, at least for individuals.

…

Over the coming years, we will see the results of a certain rough experiment, comparing New York’s and California’s achievements in biology to whatever is going on in the various places that restrict such research.* It may seem odd to mention the arcane world of stem cells in a chapter about existential issues, but stem cells are existential, at least for individuals. If the therapies work, people live longer; if they don’t exist, people die. And stem cells are but one example of potential and serious losses due to underfunded science. The Boomer Left has a much healthier attitude toward R&D, though it has made its own dogmatic mistakes and in its early years was much too skeptical about the net benefits of research.

…

However, the dogmatic Right does occasionally participate in a sort of scientific process, if only by accident, as in the case of stem cells. Researchers discovered the therapeutic potential of these entities but were forced, early on, to rely on fetal tissue as a prime source of material. The Right sensed a chance to score points with the dogmatists, whatever the lost opportunities for wellness. It spun up the whole apparatus of the pro-life movement, and the Bush II administration limited federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. These bars were ultimately lifted in part by the Obama administration, which helps (though a new, if limply supported, witch hunt by Boomer Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn does not), as did the development of nonembryonic sources.38 While stem cell research is now proceeding well, years were lost—though not by everyone.

The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Atul Gawande, cognitive dissonance, Johannes Kepler, medical residency, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, stem cell, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes

He has published articles in Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The New York Times. In 2015, Mukherjee collaborated with Ken Burns on a six-hour, three-part PBS documentary on the history and future of cancer. Mukherjee’s scientific work concerns cancer and stem cells, and his laboratory is known for the discovery of novel aspects of stem cell biology, including the isolation of stem cells that form bone and cartilage. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters. Read the book and watch the talk. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s TED Talk, available online: www.TED.com Meet the authors, watch videos and more at: SimonandSchuster.com authors.simonandschuster.com/Siddhartha-Mukherjee WATCH SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE’S TED TALK Siddhartha Mukherjee’s TED Talk, available for free at TED.com, is the companion to The Laws of Medicine.

Hormone Repair Manual by Lara Briden

Columbine, crowdsourcing, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Multics, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury, ultra-processed food

That could, of course, change if medicine discovers ways to keep the ovaries switched on for additional years or even decades. Such a scenario is possible because it is looking more likely that ovaries do not run out of eggs but actually contain ovarian stem cells that could, in theory, be stimulated to grow to make new follicles or eggs. It’s a theory that’s been around for a while and has been hotly debated from both sides, with some scientists claiming ovarian stem cells don’t exist and others insisting that it’s only logical that they do. For example, researcher Jonathan Tilly says, ‘There’s no fathomable reason why a woman would have evolved to carry stale eggs around for decades before attempting to get pregnant while men evolved to have fresh sperm always available’.

…

For example, researcher Jonathan Tilly says, ‘There’s no fathomable reason why a woman would have evolved to carry stale eggs around for decades before attempting to get pregnant while men evolved to have fresh sperm always available’. Through my lens as a biologist, I suspect we do have ovarian stem cells. What we do with them, however, is another matter. Our normal physiology is to shut down ovarian function at about the age of 50, and no diet or lifestyle can change that. The only way to reactivate ovarian stem cells will be with technology, such as the PRP (platelet-rich plasma) technology, which is currently under investigation. It uses an isolate of growth factors derived from a person’s own blood serum and has been used by a team of Greek researchers to ‘rejuvenate’ ovaries and restore fertility.

…

It uses an isolate of growth factors derived from a person’s own blood serum and has been used by a team of Greek researchers to ‘rejuvenate’ ovaries and restore fertility. In one study, the treatment was given to thirty women between the ages of 46 and 49, two-thirds of whom went on to restart their menstrual cycles and produce eggs, and one woman to give birth. The other technology under investigation does not involve stem cells but instead freezes the ovarian tissue of a woman when she is young and then reimplants it when she reaches the age of menopause. By doing so, the researchers say, the technique could delay the age of menopause by twenty years. The freezing part of the technique is currently being offered by a fertility clinic in the UK.

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

I attracted high-risk cases like a magnet, then revelled in the contest, me versus Grim Reaper. I was repeatedly told that my schemes would never work – that silicone rubber tubes in the windpipe would clog (they didn’t); that pulseless people couldn’t survive (they did); that putting electricity into people’s heads was dangerous (it wasn’t); that injecting stem cells directly into scarred hearts would cause sudden death (not so; we use them to treat heart failure now). Risk-taking is a vital part of medical innovation, and life itself is a risk. If deprived of the opportunity to innovate, cardiac surgery is finished. 4 hubris Through that retrospectoscope I viewed the next stages of my career with deep embarrassment.

…

When allegations of ‘inappropriate process’ and misinformation were used against Safe and Sustainable in court – which we had rechristened ‘Dodgy and Distainable’ – the whole process was discredited and thrown out. As a result, the other threatened centres remain open years later. After our paediatric service was closed down, other children were not as lucky as Oliver. By then I was involved with a number of different and exciting projects, such as the artificial hearts and cardiac stem cells, but I missed the immense satisfaction that comes from saving a child. Who else gets messages like this last line from Nicky’s letter? I know how lucky we were as a family to have had you in our lives for that brief moment of time. Every day for us, every family get together, every Christmas or special occasion is that much happier for what you did.

…

Much of the surgery we did for coronary artery disease has been superseded by coronary stenting under local anaesthetic, often on a day-case basis. When performed during a heart attack, this technique restores blood flow to the dying muscle and if done in time can salvage a significant amount of it. Some of those saved do go on to suffer heart failure, but they might soon receive an injection of stem cells down that catheter too. Even though the results are marginally better with coronary bypass surgery, who would honestly prefer a foot-long incision up the sternum and another in the leg or arm to harvest the graft conduits? Even prosthetic heart valves can now be inserted by a cardiologist. They are rolled on to the end of a catheter, then unfurled forcibly within the diseased valve, an approach that is already routine in older age groups in some European countries.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

“I was collegial and tried to find out who was working in the field to see if they would mind if I did so,” he recalls. An early riser, he dispatched it just after 4 a.m. one day: Jennifer and Emmanuelle, Just a quick note to say how inspiring and helpful is your CRISPR paper in Science. My group is trying to apply some of the lessons from your study to genome engineering in human stem cells. I’m sure that you have received similar appreciative comments from other labs. I look forward to staying in contact as things progress. Best wishes, George Later that day, Doudna wrote back: Hi George, Thanks for your message. We will be very interested to hear how your experiments progress.

…

Haydar Frangoul of the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville with Victoria Gray CHAPTER 32 Therapies Sickle cell In July 2019, a doctor at a Nashville hospital plunged the needle of a large syringe into the arm of a thirty-four-year-old African American woman from a small town in central Mississippi and infused her with stem cells that had been extracted from her blood and edited using CRISPR-Cas9.They were now being reinserted in an attempt to cure her of the sickle-cell disease that had plagued her with debilitating pain since she was a baby. Thus did Victoria Gray, a mother of four children, become the first person in the United States to be treated with a CRISPR gene-editing tool.

…

Sickle-cell disease afflicts more than four million people worldwide, about 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and about ninety thousand people in the U.S., mainly African Americans. The simplicity of the genetic glitch and the severity of the syndrome make it a perfect candidate for gene editing. In the case of Victoria Gray, doctors extracted stem cells from her own blood and edited them, using CRISPR, to activate a gene that produces a type of blood cell that is normally made only during the fetal stage of life. That fetal-stage hemoglobin is healthy, so if the genetic modification works, patients can start producing their own good blood. A few months after she was injected with her edited cells, Gray drove up to the Nashville hospital to see if the therapy was working.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

(Such a dialectic was absent in the Soviet Union, and the result was Chernobyl.) Embryo research is telling a similar story. Advocates of embryonic stem cell research promise amazing benefits, at this point largely as a matter of faith, imagination, and the need to justify more research funding. Opponents, in their own creative space, see in the instrumental exploitation of embryos a cheapening of the value of life that will undermine civil society. One effect of these ignorance-based disputes has been to stimulate the search for alternative approaches to stem cell research that don't require destruction of the embryo. Option spaces are widening. The organizational challenge is to take these sorts of unbounded and often pathological disputes and mainstream them-move them into the institutions and activities where technological change is created-into laboratories, universities, government offices, corporate boardrooms-while ignorance is still rampant.

…

Even when we did things to enhance our inner capabilities, we did them with external interventions-eyeglasses, education, and the like. Now, we are told, with powerful new genetic technologies on the horizon, with the increasing fusion of human and machine intelligence, and with neuropharmaceuticals, artificial body parts, and stem cell therapies, we are beginning the business of transforming ourselves from the inside out, of exerting explicit and conscious control over our existing selves and our evolving selves in ways that create new opportunities, new challenges, and new ways of thinking about who we are and where we are going.

…

An assumption underlying all these ethical formulations is that decisions about ethics by individuals or by specific political entities are meaningful because they will lead toward the desired consequences. Recent history suggests otherwise: .neither the European Union's strong stance against agricultural genetically modified organisms nor the George W. Bush administration's efforts to limit federal funding of embryonic stem cell research has prevented the rapid advance of the science and technology in question-nor, for that matter, have anti-pirating laws prevented people from illegally downloading or copying software or music. Many technologies, including pharmaceuticals, supersonic air transport, and nuclear power generation, are limited by regulatory actions, but rarely has a society been able to forgo a powerful technological capability unless (as in the case of nuclear power, for example), there was an existing and economically feasible substitute.

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night by Henry Nicholls

A. Roger Ekirch, confounding variable, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, global pandemic, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, traumatic brain injury, web application, Yom Kippur War

Something that tickled up the hypocretins would be useful for any condition where excessive daytime sleepiness is an issue, not to mention the myriad other situations where low levels of these messengers may play a role, including obesity, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia. Then there is stem cell therapy. Sergiu Paşca has the office next to Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford. He can do clever things with cells, like taking a skin cell, rewinding it to an early developmental stage known as a pluripotent stem cell and then letting it mature into a brain cell. ‘You can use this system to derive various brain regions and like a Lego game assemble them to form circuits in a dish,’ he says. Recently, his lab has succeeded in taking a skin cell from someone with narcolepsy and transforming it into a neuron that manufactures hypocretins.

…

Second, this kind of operation – to insert cells into the brain – is not something to be taken lightly, as there’s always a risk of doing more bad than good. Third, it’s unlikely that a hypocretin neuron would ever grow projections to all the right places. Fourth, it’s possible that the same autoimmune response that took out the hypocretin neurons in the first place could do the same again for the stem cells. The story of narcolepsy and the hypocretins is of still wider significance to the entire field of sleep medicine. Nobody has yet come up with a satisfying neurological explanation for idiopathic hypersomnia or Kleine-Levin Syndrome, for instance. Similarly sleepwalking, sleep talking, REM sleep behaviour disorder, sleep paralysis, restless legs syndrome and periodic limb movement disorder.

…

p. 263 dementia Stephanie Lessig and others, ‘Reduced Hypocretin (Orexin) Levels in Dementia with Lewy Bodies’, Neuroreport, 21.11 (2010), 756–60 <https://doi.org/10.1097/WNR.0b013e32833bfb7c>. p. 263 mature into a brain cell Anca M. Paşca and others, ‘Functional Cortical Neurons and Astrocytes from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells in 3D Culture’, Nature Methods, 12.7 (2015), 671–78 <https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3415>. p. 263 derive various brain regions Sergiu P. Paşca, Correspondence with author, 23 August 2017. p. 265 seasonal fluctuations Shengwen Zhang and others, ‘Lesions of the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Eliminate the Daily Rhythm of Hypocretin-1 Release’, Sleep, 27.4 (2004), 619–627.

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

When your mode of interacting with others and the universe is to affirm truths you’re in no position to affirm, the liabilities of that are potentially infinite. To take a case that I raised a moment ago, stem-cell research, you don’t know in advance that the idea that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception will turn out to be a dangerous idea. It seems totally benign, until you invent something like stem-cell research, where it stands in the way of incredibly promising, life-saving research. You can almost never foresee how many lives dogmatism is going to cost, because its conflicts with reality just erupt.

…

A majority of people in the United States clearly agree that the doctrine of martyrdom in Islam is appalling and not at all benign, and liable to get a lot of people killed, and that it is worthy of criticism. Likewise the doctrine that souls live in Petri dishes: even most Christians, 70 per cent of Americans, don’t want to believe that, in light of the promise of embryonic stem-cell research. So it seems to me that once we focus on particulars, we have a real strength in numbers, and yet when we stand on the ramparts of atheism and say it’s all bogus, we lose 90 per cent of our neighbours. DAWKINS: Well, I’m sure that’s right. On the other hand, my concern is actually not so much with the evils of religion as with whether it’s true.

The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically by Peter Singer

Albert Einstein, clean water, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Flynn Effect, hedonic treadmill, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, Peter Singer: altruism, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, trolley problem, William MacAskill, young professional

National Marrow Donor Program, and there are about eleven million on donor registries worldwide.5 Bone marrow donation requires anesthesia and leaves the donor feeling sore for a day or two, but there is now an alternative procedure for harvesting stem cells from the blood that does not require anesthesia and in the majority of cases serves the same function as bone marrow donation. Blood, bone marrow, and stem cell donations are relatively simple forms of effective altruism, and as the cells soon regenerate, they can become a regular part of an altruistic life. The donation of a nonregenerative organ has long been regarded very differently.

…

Effective altruists donate to charities that, instead of making an emotional appeal to prospective donors, can demonstrate that they will use donations to save lives and reduce suffering in a way that is highly cost-effective. In order to be able to do more good, effective altruists limit their spending or take a different career path so that they will have more to give or will be more useful in some other way. They may also donate blood, stem cells, bone marrow, or a kidney to a stranger. What motivates them? Obviously it is not conformity to social norms. The people we have met are distinctive precisely because they go beyond—in some cases, far beyond—social norms. Perhaps the first answer that comes to mind is that effective altruists are motivated by the kind of universal love we hear about so often, when people say, “All we need is love” or declare that our fellow humans are our brothers and sisters.

…

See also happiness and well-being Sagan, Agata, (i) “Savings for Change,” (i) Scanlon, Thomas, (i), (ii) Schott, Diana, (i) Science, (i) Scott, Miles, (i) Sethu, Harish, (i), (ii) severe burden, concept of, (i) Shapiro, Jeremy, (i) Sidgwick, Henry, (i), (ii), (iii)n9 SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), (i), (ii) Sober, Elliott, (i) socialism, (i) Society of Friends (Quakers), (i) Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, (i) speciesism, (i), (ii) Spira, Henry, (i), (ii) State University of New York at Stony Brook, (i) stem cell donation, (i) sugar industry, (i) Superintelligence (Bostrom), (i) Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), (i), (ii) sustainability, (i), (ii), (iii) Thomas Aquinas, (i) trachoma, (i), (ii), (iii)n7 Transplantation, (i) trolley dilemmas, (i) Tuna, Cari, (i) Turner, Ted, (i) Tzu Chi (Compassionate Relief), (i) UN Consolidated Appeal for the Horn of Africa, (i) UNICEF, (i) United Kingdom: kidney donation, (i); National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), (i); World War II MI5 rocket deception, (i) United Network for Organ Sharing, (i) United States: poverty in, (i); Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors list, (i) universal love, (i).

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, Asilomar, autism spectrum disorder, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, food miles, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, invention of gunpowder, John Elkington, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, placebo effect, precautionary principle, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Simon Singh, Skype, stem cell, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, twin studies, Upton Sinclair, X Prize

Who doesn’t have a family member with diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, or some form of cancer? When faced with genuine solutions (not just promises) to such terrible fates, few will continue to question the value of stem cell research or cloning. Even Nancy Reagan, whose husband served as commander-in-chief of the American war against legal abortion, became an ardent and vocal supporter of stem cell research after watching him submit to the dark fog of Alzheimer’s disease. We have acquired more knowledge in the past decade than in the previous two centuries. Even bad news soon proves its worth. Look at avian influenza: bird flu may cause a devastating epidemic.

…

Obama has assembled a uniformly gifted team of scientific leaders, and when he speaks publicly about issues like swine flu or HIV, the president routinely makes a point of saying that he will be guided by their advice. That is quite a departure from the attitude of his predecessor, who, in one of his first major initiatives, announced that he would prohibit federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. George W. Bush encouraged schools to teach “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution, and he all but ignored the destruction of our physical world. His most remarkable act of denialism, however, was to devote one-third of federal HIV- prevention funds to “abstinence until marriage” programs.

…

At the NIH workshop, Celeste Condit, a professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia, spoke about the way she thought Lahn’s study was framed. “The papers could be seen as having a political message,” Condit told Science magazine: in other words, the research might have implied that those genes contribute to differences in IQ. Lahn, who has since shifted the focus of his work to stem cell research in part because of the controversy, has repeatedly stated he had not meant to suggest that. During the bicentennial celebration of Darwin’s birth, in 2008, the journal Nature invited distinguished scientists to debate whether the subject of race and IQ was even worthy of study. The dispute was lively.

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

“Four rounds of VAD cocktail, two rounds of DT-PACE, which has thalidomide—” “No plans on getting pregnant any time soon?” I kidded. “—and then two rounds of stem cell transplants. They basically pump your blood through a machine, which pulls out all of your stem cells, like 50 million of them. Then they give you this high dose of melphan, which is like battery acid. It kills all your bone marrow and then they bring you back by reintroducing your own stem cells, which regrows the bone marrow.” “I had no idea,” I said in wonderment. “It’s gone. I get tested every month. $900 in blood tests—how that’s paid for is another nightmare, a keg’s worth of discussion.

…

You need a statin to lower your bad LDL and this new torcetrapib thing or the peptides to increase your HDL. Bingo,” goatee practically shouted. “Match, set, point.” Wow, the cholesterol conspiracy lives on. This drug sounds pretty neat. I just wonder if it reduces heart attacks. At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters. There were the two hedgies again. “Stem cells,” one of them said. “What about ’em?” “You figure out how to invest yet?” “Lobbyists.” “Thought so.” “Look, they may work someday. Rebuild organs. Get the crippled to walk again. Solve Alzheimer’s.” “Yeah?” “But if there was a public company today, I’d short it. There’s plenty of time to see if they really work or not.

…

Simpson, John Sinclair, Bob single base pair differences (SNPs) singularities Site 515 area skin transplants Smalley, Richard smallpox Smartphones smoking Social Security Social Security Amendment (1983) solar activity sonograms Sony Sorrell, Michael Space, Telecommunications and Radioscience Laboratory (STAR Lab) spectroheliograms spectrometers spinal cancer Sputnik launching (1957) standard of living Stanford Linear Accelerator Stanford Radio Propagation Lab Stanford University statins stem cell transplants stenosis stents Stereotaxis stethoscopes Steve (resident) Stewart, Martha stock market stomach-stapling surgery Strandberg, Steve stress tests strokes: costs of incidence of medications as cause of prevention of scanning for survival rate for surgeons surgery: eye heart-bypass insurance coverage for laparoscopic gallbladder micro- noninvasive procedures vs.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

It can tell you that, if you want to object to cloning humans, you must not appeal to arguments such as ‘The clone wouldn’t be a full person’ or ‘The clone wouldn’t have a soul’. Science cannot tell you whether anybody has a soul, but it can tell you that, if ordinary identical twins have souls, so do Dolly-style clones.6 You cannot have it both ways. Science cannot tell you whether stem cell cloning for ‘spare parts’ is wrong. But it can challenge you to explain how stem cell cloning differs morally from something that has long been accepted: tissue culture. Tissue culture has been a mainstay of cancer research for decades. The famous HeLa cell line, which originated in the late Henrietta Lacks in 1951, is now being grown in labs all over the world.

…

A typical lab, at the University of California, grows 48 litres of HeLa cells per day, as a routine service to researchers in the university. The total daily worldwide production of HeLa cells must be measured in tons – all a gigantic clone of Henrietta Lacks. In the half century since this mass production began, nobody seems to have objected to it. Those who agitate to stop stem cell research today have to explain why they do not object to the mass cultivation of HeLa cells. You cannot have it both ways. Science cannot tell you whether it is right to kill ‘Mary’ to save her conjoined twin ‘Jodie’ (or whether both twins should be allowed to die).7 But science can tell you that a placenta is a true clone of the baby it nourishes.

…

At present we get away with our flagrant speciesism because the evolutionary intermediates between us and chimpanzees are all extinct. In my contribution to The Great Ape Project I pointed out that the accidental contingency of such extinction should be enough to destroy absolutist valuings of human life above all other life.72 ‘Pro life’, for example, in debates on abortion or stem cell research, always means pro human life, for no sensibly articulated reason. The existence of a living, breathing Lucy in our midst would change, forever, our complacent, human-centred view of morals and politics. Should Lucy pass for human? The absurdity of the question should be self-evident, as in those South African courts which tried to decide whether particular individuals should ‘pass for white’.

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

The research on exercise for mental illness didn’t factor any of this into their studies. Mitochondria play a direct role in translating exercise into beneficial effects in the brain. When people exercise, one of the benefits is that they usually develop new neurons in the hippocampus from stem cells. This process has been found to be directly related to both mood and cognitive disorders. The growth of these stem cells into new neurons depends upon mitochondria. When researchers genetically manipulated mitochondria to inhibit or enhance their function, the development of these new neurons was inhibited or enhanced, respectively.7 Based on this research, it appears likely that if someone has poor mitochondrial function in this brain region, they may not get the same benefits from exercise that other people get.

…

We also know that the number of mitochondria decreases with many diseases. People who are considered the “fittest” among us—athletic champions—have more mitochondria than most, and their mitochondria appear to be healthier. Mitochondria Are Involved in Cell Growth and Differentiation Cell growth and differentiation is a complicated process during which a generic stem cell becomes a specialized cell. Differentiation means that the cells become different from each other and take on specialized roles. Some become heart cells. Others become brain cells. Within the brain, different cells take on varying roles. Brain cells change throughout life. Some form new synapses.

…

One research group directly demonstrated that mitochondrial dysfunction causes hyperexcitability by deleting a protein in mice, sirtuin 3, known to be essential to mitochondrial health. Sure enough, the mice developed mitochondrial dysfunction, hyperexcitability, and seizures, and they died early deaths.15 Another research group turned stem cells from people with bipolar disorder and healthy controls into neurons and found that the neurons from the people with bipolar disorder had mitochondrial abnormalities and the cells were hyperexcitable.16 Interestingly, lithium reduced this hyperexcitability. Hyperexcitability of neurons has been found in many mental and metabolic disorders.

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

California voters stepped in, approving a $3 billion bond issue to create CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The purpose was to provide ten years of support for stem cell research freed from the Bush restrictions. CIRM intended to fund five or six centers at university campuses throughout the state, each one of which would eventually get hundreds of millions of dollars. The money would help construct research facilities entirely separate from any federal funding, as well as fund grants for faculty to develop new stem cell treatments for diseases. UCI already had an important group of stem cell experts and was strategically placed in biotech-rich Orange County. However, to qualify, the campus had to complete building the research center in two years, and significant portions of the funding had to come from both the university and private donors.

…

The George W. Bush administration had severely restricted the allowed federal funding of stem cell research. Further, labs doing proscribed research had to be absolutely separate from federally funded facilities. Theoretically, if a pencil paid for by government funds was used for forbidden work, the entire federal grant could and would be revoked. The nation faced a delay in the development of lifesaving therapies, a massive brain drain as our scientists moved overseas to continue their work, and the loss of our lead in stem cell technology. California voters stepped in, approving a $3 billion bond issue to create CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

…

The Duke senior had become a billionaire known worldwide as William H. Gross, the Bond King. Bill and his wife, Sue, had already donated tens of millions for medical causes, so a group at UCI arranged a lunch meeting with Bill to see if he and Sue would give $10 million and become the lead donors for a new CIRM-subsidized stem cell research center. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that a $10 million gift would lead to as much as $600 million in the years to come, leveraging their donation sixty times. I saw an instant flash in Bill’s eyes and thought: Bill and Sue must value the chance to make an impact far greater than the value of the amount donated, just as Vivian and I do.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Bush announced that the American government will not fund research on human embryonic stem cells if scientists have to destroy new embryos to extract them (the policy permits research on stem-cell lines that were previously extracted from embryos). He derived the policy after consulting not just with scientists but with philosophers and religious thinkers. Many of them framed the moral problem in terms of “ensoulment,” the moment at which the cluster of cells that will grow into a child is endowed with a soul. Some argued that ensoulment occurs at conception, which implies that the blastocyst (the five-day-old ball of cells from which stem cells are taken) is morally equivalent to a person and that destroying it is a form of murder.16 That argument proved decisive, which means that the American policy on perhaps the most promising medical technology of the twenty-first century was decided by pondering the moral issue as it might have been framed centuries before: When does the ghost first enter the machine?

…

As the creationist advocate John West put it, “If human beings (and their beliefs) really are the mindless products of their material existence, then everything that gives meaning to human life—religion, morality, beauty—is revealed to be without objective basis.”30 The other moral doctrine (which is found in some, but not all, Christian denominations) is that the soul enters the body at conception and leaves it at death, thereby defining who is a person with a right to life. The doctrine makes abortion, euthanasia, and the harvesting of stem cells from blastocysts equivalent to murder. It makes humans fundamentally different from animals. And it makes human cloning a violation of the divine order. All this would seem to be threatened by neuroscientists, who say that the self or the soul inheres in neural activity that develops gradually in the brain of an embryo, that can be seen in the brains of animals, and that can break down piecemeal with aging and disease.

…

And since unverifiable beliefs have to be passed along from parents and peers rather than discovered in the world, they differ from group to group and become divisive identity badges. And who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the understanding of the mind as a physical organ? I see no dignity in letting people die of hepatitis or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease when a cure may lie in research on stem cells that religious movements seek to ban because it uses balls of cells that have made the “ontological leap” to “spiritual souls.” Sources of immense misery such as Alzheimer’s disease, major depression, and schizophrenia will be alleviated not by treating thought and emotion as manifestations of an immaterial soul but by treating them as manifestations of physiology and genetics.10 Finally, the doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.

Bulletproof Problem Solving by Charles Conn, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

For Rob's knee arthroscopy, discussed in the next chapter, he framed the hypothesis that he should have surgery now and then set out the supporting analyses. He set a clear threshold for those: that the outcome would be better than doing nothing and that no improved technology solution was imminent. The end product of his analysis was the completed decision tree where he compiled research studies and the latest timing of new treatments such as stem cells for meniscal repair. They porpoise frequently between the hypothesis and data. They are flexible in the face of new data. This means they are ready to cease analysis where it has reached a dead end and start work on promising new lines of inquiry. In the Avahan HIV project in India that we introduced in Chapter 2, the team started with an initial hypothesis that was directionally useful but provided no leverage for action.

…

On the other hand, he learned from the sports medicine specialist of cases of football players with an average age of 22 with knee injuries who were going in for surgery immediately. He had also heard of research suggesting that APMs led to no better outcome than physiotherapy, and that he might be better waiting for stem cell treatments or printable hydrogel menisci, new technologies in development. How would you make this decision faced with so many disparate pieces of information? As in most problem solving you need to gather some facts. In Rob's case, he read a Finnish study in The New England Journal of Medicine that indicated that when there is low discomfort and age‐degenerative meniscal tear, there is no significant improvement from APM compared to physical therapy.

…

The conclusions of the 12‐month follow‐up were that the outcomes for the APM surgery were no better than for the sham APM surgery, notwithstanding that “both groups had significant improvement in primary outcomes.”15 Rob also wanted to assess whether he should wait for a new technology solution to develop, such as stem‐cell treatment or a printable hydrogel meniscus. It turns out that clinical trials are getting underway for articular cartilage but not meniscal repair, so a reasonable conclusion can be drawn that any alternative to an arthroscopy is more than five years away.16 3D printable hydrogel menisci are now getting a lot of interest but he couldn't estimate when they might be an option.17 With the best facts and estimates in hand, things now started to fall into place.

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

These cells are cultured, and before long, a spray gun is gently painting the wounds with a solution of Matt’s own stem cells. Three days later, his arms and face are completely healed. (And this miracle has to be seen to be believed! Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXO_ApjKPaI and see the difference.) There’s barely a scar visible on him. I know it sounds like a scene from a sci-fi film. But it’s a real story that took place in Pittsburgh just a few years ago. While the technique that healed Matt Uram is still in clinical trials in the United States, a similar stem cell procedure has already been used on hundreds of burn victims in Europe and Australia.

…

In the last 15 years, none of the tissues made from stem cells has ever been rejected by the body. He and others are already working on more complex organs, like hearts, kidneys, and livers. So someday, if a heart attack or virus damages your heart valves, your doctors will be able to order you up some new ones. Or maybe they’ll just grow you a new heart from a few of your skin cells! If you have means, some of these miraculous cures are available already. There’s something called “extracellular matrix,” or ECM, made of cells from a pig’s bladder. When you apply it to injured human tissue, the matrix coaxes our own stem cells to regrow muscles, tendons, even bone.

…

The concept behind regenerative therapies is simple: our body already knows how to regrow its parts; we just have to learn how to turn on the stem cells that already live inside us. We already know that when we lose our baby teeth, another set grows in. But did you realize that, according to Dr. Stephen Badylak from the University of Pittsburgh, if a newborn loses a finger, another one can grow in its place up to the age of two? We lose that ability as we grow older, so the question is: How do we stimulate it? Salamanders grow back their tails—why not human limbs or spinal cords? When we figure out how to harness the full power of stem cells, the medical and cosmetic applications are limitless.

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The idea of a symbiogenesis is an underlying theme of life expansion,8 in relation to a “biotechnogenesis”9 of emerging and speculative technologies, which form the media of life expansion. The biotechnogenesis media of life expansion for the human and transhuman include biotechnology (genetic engineering, and methods of regenerative medicine, i.e., stem cell cloning and regenerative cells growing organs), nanotechnology (nanomedicine, nanorobotics, and molecular manufacturing) and human–computer interaction, including artificial intelligence (artificial general intelligence), and processes for whole brain emulation. The quintessence of being alive – that element of you, the psyche according to Aristotle, form the biotechnogenesis of matter as they repeatedly ­collapse and expand into each other.

…

Manipulating these biological processes produces technologies that can directly or indirectly influence human enhancement. Increasingly, researchers are thinking of biological systems as a technology and applying them to address global challenges in the advancement of human development in areas such as stem cell research, cloning, genetic modification, in vitro fertilization, the science of aging, and tissue grafting. Human enhancement can be achieved by direct interventions where the body hosts the technology, such as in the case of neural implants. However, indirect methods in human enhancement are possible, although seldom considered in transhumanist discussions.

…

One can potentially chart paths that ­transition from Narrow AI to AGI, and this may be a viable way to get to advanced AGI, but it’s certainly not the fastest or easiest way – and it’s different than what would happen if society were to explicitly fund AGI research in a big way. The relatively paltry funding of AGI isn’t just due to its speculative nature – society is currently willing to fund a variety of speculative science and engineering projects: billion-dollar particle accelerators, space exploration, the sequencing of human and animal genomes, stem cell research, and so forth. If these sorts of projects merit Big Science-level funding, why is AGI research left out? After all, the potential benefits should AGI proceed and get done right are obviously tremendous. There are potential dangers too, to be sure – but there are also clear potential dangers of particle physics research (discovering better bombs is arguably a hazardous pursuit), and that doesn’t stop us.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In fact, along just these lines, in March of 2013, I joined forces with genetics wizard Dr. J. Craig Venter and stem-cell pioneer Dr. Robert Hariri to found perhaps my boldest venture ever: Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI).61 Venter, who serves as CEO, described HLI’s mission as “using the combined power of genomics, infinite computing, machine learning, and stem cell therapies to tackle one of the greatest medical, scientific, and societal challenges—aging and aging-related diseases.” Hariri, who pioneered the use of placental-derived stem cells, goes on to say: “Our goal is to help all of us live a longer and healthier life. By reenergizing our stem cells, the regenerative engine of our bodies, we can maintain our mobility, cognition, and aesthetics long into our later years.”

…

Part of the reason for this velocity is that the company sits at the intersection of many of the exponential technologies discussed in this chapter: robotics, which enables lightning-fast sequencing; AI and machine learning, which can make sense of petabytes of raw genomic data; cloud computing and networks for transmitting, handling, and storing that data; and synthetic biology for correcting and rewriting the corrupted genome of our aging stem cells. Couple that with the incredible value proposition of abundant, longer, and healthier lives—there is over $50 trillion locked up in the bank accounts of people over the age of sixty-five—and you understand the potential. And understanding this potential is critical if you’re going to succeed as an exponential entrepreneur.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

But you need a backstop, and that’s the 500 Project. Oh, and the work we do highlights the importance and joy that revived species can bring and that helps everyone in the conservation community.” She doesn’t mention the spin-offs. Maybe she’s tired. Two years ago, the Project worked out how to reliably make induced pluripotent stem cells—reprogrammed adult cells that can differentiate into specialized cells—from fibroblast cell cultures. They use them to create germ cells for the de-extinction process, but the same technique can also help increase genetic variability among highly endangered species. Sometimes the help travels the other way: cellular reprogramming and phenotypic simulation tools developed by the conservation community gave the Project a vital breakthrough in devising optimal surrogate chains.

…

Now, if I left it at that and provided only the necessary nutrient bath, your burger would basically be an unsightly blob of animal cells. I imagine that’s not the sort of thing you’d enjoy eating, so I needed to encourage the formation of blood vessels and arteries so that the tissue would turn into muscles that are, well, tastier and look better. Those muscles were stimulated electrically, and I made sure that the stem cells worked right. Well, I could go on, but I won’t. Anyway, if you know exactly how to do it and you have the right tools, it’s easy enough to make cloned meat. But the pioneers had to work it all out from scratch and make their own tools. Compared to the usual way of obtaining meat by rearing and killing animals, it must have been incredibly frustrating!

…

Shortly after she was born in 2034, Xu suffered a severe ventral pontine stroke from an accidental house fire following the unrest of the USTC crash. The stroke caused total locked-in syndrome, leaving her unable to control any voluntary muscles in her body, including her eyes. The severity of her condition led to Xu being selected for an experimental suite of treatments in Hong Kong that included neuromuscular electrical patches, neural stem cell therapy—and a then-cutting-edge neural lace, as seen on this brain scan from around her third birthday. The lace was a crude but effective version of the ones we still use today, and, like our own, it read Xu’s brain activity and gave her basic control over her muscles. During those years of constant treatment, Xu developed an affinity for music.

Just Keep Calm & Take Some Magnesium - Why a "Boring" Mineral Is Suddenly Hot Property for Soothing Bodies and Calming Minds by James Lee

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, epigenetics, life extension, planned obsolescence, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

You will be quite the popular one. There is also considerable excitement regarding SIRT3, another sirtuin which is central to the process of mitochondrial function and the generation of stem cells. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found that by up-regulating SIRT3 activity (which usually declines with age), they could reverse some of the markers of aging. Most importantly, increasing SIRT3 activity improves the ability of hematopoietic stem cells to regenerate. The researchers unambiguously said that “aging-associated degeneration can be reversed by a sirtuin”. A commercially available drug that targets either SIRT1 or SIRT3 is a while away, however sirtuin-related therapy appears to be one of the most promising areas of current research into delaying or reversing the aging process.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

I had some caterpillars, and a month or so later the prospect of eating more insects filled me with a mix of excitement and nervous anticipation that there is sadly no expression for. A Dutch lab has created beef from stem cells. It sounds frivolous, but making burgers like this might be the only way to get most American voters to ever accept stem-cell research. The researchers produced a mince-like substance, although by all accounts it takes just a simple tweak to make sausages, by swapping the beaker for a test tube. It’s highly significant news for the UK, as by 2020 the demand for talent-show contestants is predicted to be so high it’ll be impossible to generate enough naturally. Stem cells could cure cancer, diabetes, autism and Alzheimer’s. I like the attitude of any scientist who thinks, ‘Fuck that.

…

I like the attitude of any scientist who thinks, ‘Fuck that. Get those stem cells in a bun and find me a pickle.’ A hundred years from now scientists will come up with a solution to the problems of producing beef in a laboratory when someone discovers that dead cow meat makes an almost convincing substitute. A man has been given a face transplant and regained his sense of smell. Which isn’t the best time for that to return, considering all he can smell is the smoky barbecue wafts of a dead man’s flesh that’s been soldered on to his own skull. Another guy had the world’s first successful hand transplant.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Platelets are packed with growth and healing factors and are part of the body’s normal tissue repair system. The PRP is prepared using a special centrifuge after whole blood is drawn from your arm, similar to getting blood drawn for lab work. Making platelet-rich plasma. PRP formed the base to which the following were added: Stem cell factor (SCF), flown in from Israel, which assists in blood cell production. Bone morphogenic protein 7 (BMP-7), which helps adult stem cells (mesenchymal) develop into bone and cartilage. In retrospect, I believe this to be the most dangerous substance in all of the cocktails I tried. Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) IGF-1 has anabolic (tissue-building) effects in adults and is produced in the liver after stimulation by growth hormone.

…

The wider world thinks I’m obsessed with time management, but they haven’t seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession. I’ve recorded almost every workout I’ve done since age 18. I’ve had more than 1,000 blood tests1 performed since 2004, sometimes as often as every two weeks, tracking everything from complete lipid panels, insulin, and hemoglobin A1c, to IGF-1 and free testosterone. I’ve had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse “permanent” injuries, and I’ve flown to rural tea farmers in China to discuss Pu-Erh tea’s effects on fat-loss. All said and done, I’ve spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. Just as some people have avant-garde furniture or artwork to decorate their homes, I have pulse oximeters, ultrasound machines, and medical devices for measuring everything from galvanic skin response to REM sleep.

…

There are at least two distinct types: white adipose tissue (WAT) and brown adipose tissue (BAT). WAT is what we usually think of as fat, like the marbling on a steak. A WAT cell—an adipocyte—is composed of a single large fat droplet with a single nucleus. BAT, in contrast, is sometimes referred to as “fat-burning fat” and appears to be derived from the same stem cells as muscle tissue. A BAT cell is composed of multiple droplets that are brown in color because of a much higher volume of iron-containing mitochondria. Normally associated with muscle tissue, mitochondria are best known for producing ATP and oxidizing fat in muscle tissue. BAT helps dissipate excess calories as heat.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Socially, the act of expressing uncertainty is a display of weakness. But our lives are awash in uncertainty, and rational consideration of contingencies and likelihoods is the only sound basis for good decisions. As another example, a federal judge recently issued an injunction blocking stem-cell research funding. The probability that stem-cell research will quickly lead to life-saving medicine is low, but if successful, the positive effects could be huge. If one considers outcomes and approximates the probabilities, the conclusion is that the judge’s decision destroyed the lives of thousands of people, based on probabilistic expectation.

…

And of course it is technology that matters here, because technology is where the rubber hits the road—where science and the real world meet and must communicate effectively. Examples of failure in this regard abound—so much so that they are hardly worthy of enumeration. Whether it be swine flu, bird flu, GM crops, or stem cells, the public debate departs so starkly from the scientist’s comfort zone that it is hard not to sympathize with the errors scientists make, such as letting nuclear transfer be called “cloning,” which end up holding critical research fields back for years. One particular aspect of this problem stands out in its potential for public self-harm, however: risk aversion.

…

That judge didn’t actually cause thousands of people to die . . . or did he? If we follow the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics—the most direct interpretation of its mathematical description—then our universe is continually branching into all possible contingencies: There is a world in which stem-cell research saves millions of lives and another world in which people die because of the judge’s decision. Using the “frequentist” method of calculating probability, we have to add the probabilities of the worlds in which an event occurs to obtain the probability of that event. Quantum mechanics dictates that the world we experience will happen according to this probability—the likelihood of the event.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

3D printing, Albert Einstein, biofilm, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, discovery of DNA, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, knapsack problem, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Lyft, microbiome, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, uber lyft

This futile condition was, Goulon once said, “a new, previously undescribed, state.” At a conference in 1959, he and Mollaret gave it a name: coma dépassé, beyond a coma. Modern medicine was now challenging the familiar boundaries of death, just as it has changed how we think about birth. The beginning of life was once out of our control, until stem cell biologists learned how to turn an ordinary skin cell into an embryo, one that might potentially become a human being or something new like a brain organoid. There was a time when death was likewise inevitable if Bichat’s vital tripod lost one of its three legs. Now artificial ventilation undermined Bichat’s law, giving rise to a new kind of life.

…

“A Physicist’s Renewed Look at Biology: Twenty Years Later.” Science 168:1312–15. Desmond, Adrian J. 1999. Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest. New York: Basic Books. Devolder, Katrien, and John Harris. 2007. “The Ambiguity of the Embryo: Ethical Inconsistency in the Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debate.” Metaphilosophy 38:153–69. Diamond, Jared. 1994. “Dining with the Snakes.” Discover, January 18. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/dining-with-the-snakes (accessed June 8, 2020). Dick, Steven J., and James E. Strick. 2004. The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology.

…

“Beyond Abortion: The Implications of Human Life Amendments.” Journal of Social Philosophy 43:140–60. Marchetto, Maria C. N., Cassiano Carromeu, Allan Acab, Diana Yu, Gene W. Yeo, Yangling Mu, Gong Chen et al. 2010. “A Model for Neural Development and Treatment of Rett Syndrome Using Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.” Cell 143:527–39. Mariscal, Carlos, Ana Barahona, Nathanael Aubert-Kato, Arsev U. Aydinoglu, Stuart Bartlett, María L. Cárdenas, Kuhan Chandru et al. 2019. “Hidden Concepts in the History and Philosophy of Origins-of-Life Studies: A Workshop Report.” Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 49:111–45.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Another area that holds promise but that has had little mainstream effect to date is stem cell therapy. As a regenerative therapy, the field of stem cell transplantation provides a ray of hope in today’s age of chronic, degenerative diseases. However, though stem cell therapy has been practiced since the late 1980s for bone marrow transplants,76 its practical application has thus far failed to extend far beyond that. The very prevalence of the phrase “stem cell research,” compared to the relative absence of the phrase “stem cell therapy,” attests to the therapy’s limited practical implementation: In 2008, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer, the first phrase was used eleven times more often than the second in a sample of more than 5 million books.77 Skeptical investors have been hesitant to throw their support behind further research and development.

…

Jeffrey O’Brien writes, “Long time horizons, regulatory hurdles, huge R&D costs, public sentiment, and political headwinds have all scared financiers. Wall Street isn’t interested in financing this particular dream.”78 In short, the realization of the stem cell therapy dream appears to lie relatively far in the future. Today, though bright ideas and human ingenuity abound—as exemplified by the concepts of genomic medicine and stem cell therapy—translation into practical, clinical applications are relatively rare. Part of this discrepancy stems from the ever-increasing costs of developing new medical innovations. As we noted in figure 14–2, new drug approvals have stagnated since the 1960s.

…

By several estimates, the value of reduced mortality, particularly of infants, was as great as the value of all the growth over the same period in market-purchased goods and services. Predictions of future economic progress from our current vantage point place major emphasis on continuing advances made possible by medical research, including the decoding of the genome and research using stem cells. It is often assumed that medical advances have moved at a faster pace since the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s and 1940s, the development from the 1970s of techniques of radiation and chemotherapy to fight cancer, and the advent of electronic devices such as the CT and MRI scans to improve diagnoses of many diseases.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

You can make any of hundreds of cookie recipes, but your friend has put in a request for chocolate chip. You turn to the appropriate page, read the recipe, gather the ingredients, mix and bake them, and you and your friend enjoy the warm, chewy, chocolaty treats. When Jenny was a ball of dividing cells in the womb, and then a mass of growing and differentiating tissues, her versatile stem cells could become a number of different cell types. Just as I can choose a recipe to follow to make a particular type of cookie, the cells in growing embryos choose to “read” specific genes to make proteins, forming various cell types such as muscle cells, red blood cells, nerve cells, and more. The forty-six chromosomes in each of our cells contain the whole human “genome”—all of our DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

…

This kind of cell specialization is particularly important in growing embryos, when every new cell must eventually differentiate and decide its fate. What will it become? Which genes—which stretches of DNA—should be kept ready and available, and which should be packed tightly away? By adulthood most of our cells have already differentiated (a tiny minority of stem cells remains). Each of our cells retains all our DNA—the whole genome—yet produces proteins from only a small selection of genes. Inside the cells in women’s facial skin, the recipe for making dark, thick hair is crumpled up in the back of the shelf—so most women have only a little bit of it on their face.

…

Genes can be transcribed and translated into proteins at different rates. If protein production rises, the gene expression is said to be “upregulated,” and if it’s reduced, the gene expression is “downregulated.” THE BIPOTENTIAL GONAD When embryonic Jenny was just beginning to develop inside her mother’s womb, her stem cells received the usual instructions for what they should become—liver, nerve, bone, skin, etc. They received and followed directions about which genes to upregulate and which to ignore—so the usual proteins were produced that cause the cells to differentiate into the tissues necessary to build a human.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The new era of precision medicine and granular understanding of the interplay of all genetic material and environmental stimuli has enlivened quests for extreme longevity. Google, for example, has launched Calico, a new company focusing on radical life extension; and Craig Venter is one of the cofounders of a company called Human Longevity, which is working on extending the healthy human lifespan through genomics-based stem-cell therapies that mitigate the diseases of aging. Venter’s company is sequencing hundreds of thousands of genomes and incorporating data from functional-MRI scans that capture views of and data from processes inside a living human body in order to match genetic processes with in vivo biological ones.

…

Adding the blood vessels necessary to feed the tissues or organs that metabolize or process nutrients and toxins remains elusive; that could be decades away. But, within the next decade, any relatively simple structure that you might need replaced—heart valve, bone, ear, or nose—will likely be grown using a mixture of bio-ink and, to minimize risk of rejection, your own stem cells. There are now nearly a dozen companies working toward bioprinting real body materials; and industrial design giants such as Autodesk, led by its visionary CEO, Carl Bass, are researching the fabrication of biological materials through additive printing. Of course, we will need doctors and surgeons to do all this; it is not like printing and installing a spare part in your car.

…

Nanomaterials are of particular interest in this regard; for example, researchers are studying bone regeneration with nanostructured calcium phosphate biomaterials. The calcium phosphate acts as scaffolding and mimics crystallographic properties of inorganic components of bone. Early findings have shown that these nanostructured materials, when combined with stem cells, can accelerate bone regeneration. Alongside better-than-human materials will come sensor systems with miniature electronics that turn our bodies into minutely measured machinery. In August 2013, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued Endotronix a patent for its wireless sensor reader for continuous monitoring of pulmonary-artery pressure.

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

anti-globalists, barriers to entry, book value, Burning Man, company town, creative destruction, double helix, Internet Archive, inventory management, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Maui Hawaii, microcredit, New Journalism, off-the-grid, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, printed gun, random walk, reality distortion field, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, time dilation, union organizing, wage slave, work culture

Most of them originated on one of his printers, after all. Plus, it was the gentlemanly thing to do. “What have we here?” he said as he pulled up alongside her. She was trying on a bracelet of odd, bony beads. “Ectopic fetuses,” she said. “You know, like the Christian fundies use for stem-cell research? You quicken an unfertilized egg in vitro and you get a little ball of fur and bone and skin and stem-cells. It can never be a human, so it has no soul, so it’s not murder to harvest them.” The vendor, a Turkish teenager with a luxurious mustache, nodded. “Every bead made from naturally occurring foetus-bones.” He handed one to Perry. It was dry and fragile in his hand.

…

The clinic was in St Petersburg, Russia, in a neighborhood filled with Russian dentists who catered to American health tourists who didn’t want to pay US prices for crowns. The treatment hadn’t originated there: The electromuscular stimulation and chemical therapy for skin-tightening was standard for rich new mothers in Hollywood who wanted to get rid of pregnancy bellies. The appetite-suppressing hormones had been used in the Mexican pharma industry for years. Stem-cells had been an effective substitute for steroids when it came to building muscle in professional athletic circles the world round. Genomic therapy using genes cribbed from hummingbirds boosted metabolism so that the body burned 10,000 calories a day sitting still. But the St Petersburg clinic had ripped, mixed and burned these different procedures to make a single, holistic treatment that had dropped Lester from 400 to 175 pounds in ten weeks.

…

She’d have to get someone to run her up a blue blazer and a white shirt and a decent skirt. It would be nice to get back into grown-up clothes after a couple years’ worth of Florida casual. She’d see Geoff after dinner that night, get more detail for the story. There was something big here in the medical tourism angle—not just weight loss but gene therapy, too, and voodoo stem-cell stuff and advanced prostheses and even some crazy performance enhancement stuff that had kept Russia out of the past Olympics. She typed her story notes and answered the phone calls. One special call she returned once she was sitting in her room, relaxed, with a cup of coffee from the in-room coffee-maker.

Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby

call centre, lateral thinking, stem cell

Remarkably, all other scar tissue had disappeared. The whole inner lining of her left ventricle had been pure white scar tissue – now all gone. This provided some of the first evidence that an infant’s own cardiac stem cells can regenerate heart muscle and actually remove fibrous tissue. Adult hearts cannot recover in the same way. But what if we could identify and culture stem cells that could do just this for an adult heart? Could it provide a solution for the hundreds of thousands of adult chronic heart failure patients with coronary artery disease? My grandfather was someone who might have benefited.

…

I could no longer grasp the instruments without dropping some of them and I couldn’t shake hands without people thinking I was a member of some secret society. At that point I conceded that my operating days were over. I’d never get back to complex surgery. Instead my focus would be on our new stem cell research and the ventricular assist device we were developing – plenty to engage with but different, research with the potential to change millions of lives. Just a few weeks later I quietly disappeared from the hospital and had my right hand operated on. Normally my plastic surgery colleagues would have done it using a regional nerve block with me awake, but they didn’t want the interference.

…

Under the corporate banner ‘Calon CardioTechnology’ we now have an implantable British ventricular assist device to compete with the American pumps, all of which cost the same as a Ferrari! Stuart McConchie, past chief executive of the HeartWare Company and Jarvik Heart, came to help us with that. The Welsh connection put me in contact with the Nobel Prize-winner Professor Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University, who first isolated foetal stem cells. With his colleague Ajan Reginald and the company Celixir he has worked on a heart-specific cell for regenerative medicine. With pumps and cells we aim to create a definitive alternative to heart transplantation. Despite a degree in biochemistry and a PhD in the bioengineering of mechanical hearts I’m a computer-illiterate technophobe who’s unable to perform the simplest repair on a car.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

Some qube architecture is based on bird brains, so it got discussed for a while.” “I didn’t know.” “Well, the thinking that we mammals do in layers of cells across our cortex, birds do in clusters of cells, distributed like bunches of grapes.” “I didn’t know that.” “So you can take some of your own stem cells and introduce skylark song node DNA into them, and then you can introduce it through the nose to the brain, and it makes a little cluster in the limbic system. Then when you whistle, the cluster links into your already existing musical networks. All those are very old parts. They’re almost like bird parts of the brain already.

…

Hormonal treatments begun at puberty or during adulthood also have positive effects on longevity, but the psychological set will be hormonal treatments support the surgical addition of a functioning uterus in the abdominal wall above the penis alteration of the clitoris into a small functioning penis, with testicles grown using either conserved Wolffian ducts or stem cells from the subject. Gynandromorphs can ordinarily father only daughters, as the construction of a Y chromosome from an X chromosome involves problematic females adding functional reproductive masculinity are helped by a process imitating a natural 5-alpha-reductase deficiency principal categories of self-image for gender include feminine, masculine, androgynous, gynandromorphous, hermaphroditic, ambisexual, bisexual, intersex, neuter, eunuch, nonsexual, undifferentiated, gay, lesbian, queer, invert, homosexual, polymorphous, poly, labile, berdache, hijra, two-spirit, cultures deemphasizing gender are sometimes referred to as ursuline cultures, origin of term unknown, perhaps referring to the difficulty there can be in determining the gender of bears KIRAN ON VENUS The moment Kiran was alone with Shukra, Shukra said to him, “We’re going to have to put you through some tests, my boy.”

…

Extracts (13) certain metabolic actions accumulate lifetime damage, and each kind of damage has to be treated individually, and the treatments coordinated with each other as well as with the ordinary functioning of the organism cell loss or atrophy is ameliorated by exercise, growth factors, and directed stem cells cancerous mutations are identified by massively parallel DNA sequencing and transcriptome sequencing and dissolved by targeted gene therapies and telomerase manipulation; chemo and radiation therapies are now highly targeted, using monoclonal antibodies, avimers and designed proteins death-resistant cells that are senescent in their function must not be allowed to transform into harmful forms, but must rather be targeted by suicide genes and immune response undamaged mitochondria are introduced into cells suffering mitochondrial mutations lipofuscin is one kind of accumulated junk inside our cells that can’t be carried away by the immune system.

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

Wall Street Journal political columnist (and longtime Washington observer) Alan Murray spoke for many of us when he lamented, “I’m not interested in a Democratic Party that lets labor unions turn it away from free trade, or lets teachers unions block any semblance of education reform, or lets trial lawyers stand in the way of common sense class-action reform. But I’m also not interested in a Republican Party that is pushed by the National Rifle Association to give gun makers extraordinary protection from lawsuits, or is forced by extreme religious groups to ban stem-cell research that could save countless lives, or believes the worthiest recipients of tax relief are the heirs of the wealthy.”18 More and more voters are describing themselves as independent.19 But independents define themselves primarily by what they are not, namely, Republicans or Democrats. The challenge is organizing this discontent into a meaningful and positive political force.

…

Here is the fundamental insight: reasonable people disagree about whether or not abortion should be illegal; but no reasonable person thinks that abortion is a good thing. Reasonable people disagree about how readily guns should be available and what the requirements for purchase ought to be; but no reasonable person wants guns to fall into the hands of criminals or those who are dangerously mentally ill. There are plenty of other social issues: drug policy, stem cell research, flag burning, the death penalty, and so on. In time, the Centrist Party will have to wrestle with them all. For now, abortion and guns will do a fine job of illustrating how the Centrist Party can bring people together on issues that normally drive them apart. The key to diffusing these ideologically charged social issues is refocusing them on two more pragmatic questions: 1) What is the real harm to society associated with this activity?

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The president did,” said Dean McGrath, Cheney’s deputy chief of staff. “This afforded the vice president a little more freedom.” IN THE EARLY months of the administration, perhaps the toughest issue Bush faced was stem-cell research. For months, he struggled with whether federal money should be used to target the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s by experimenting on stem cells from embryos grown in a laboratory. No one was talking about banning such research altogether, only whether taxpayer money should pay for it. The tension between Bush’s antiabortion convictions and the prospect of saving or improving the lives of millions weighed on him.

…

“We have got to be really cautious,” Bush responded, “because it is like stepping off a cliff. If you step off a cliff and you have made a mistake, by the time you realize it, you are at the bottom.” Andy Card set aside thirty-minute blocks of time for Bush to meet with ethicists and scientists. Doug Melton, a leading stem-cell researcher from Harvard University, told Bush that embryos were not alive, and while he agreed they should not “be treated cavalierly,” he believed the research could make a world of difference to real people. He mentioned that his son suffered from juvenile diabetes. “I’m committed to doing everything I can to help my son,” Melton told Bush.

…

On the other hand, I believe technologies and science will help solve many medical problems, and I have great hope for cures.” His guests sympathized. But unlike Melton, Kass viewed frozen embryos as living human beings, even if at a very early stage of development. “We at least owe them the respect not to manipulate them for our own purposes,” he told Bush. But what about existing lines of stem cells from embryos that had already been destroyed? Kass found no ethical compunction about that since “you are not necessarily complicit in their destruction,” provided that Bush make clear he opposed such destruction and would not reward it in the future. Maybe Bush had found the middle ground he was seeking.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

This perverse phenomenon was deemed the “backfire effect,” whereby some partisans not only refused to give up their original beliefs but held onto them more strongly once they were challenged. When the time came to provide corrective information to the “liberal” belief—that Bush had imposed a total ban on all stem cell research (whereas in fact he had imposed a limited ban only on federally funded research on stem cell lines created before August 2001, with no ban on private research)—the correction worked for conservatives and moderates, but not for liberals. Notably in this case, however, researchers found no backfire effect. Although the corrective information did not convince liberals to give up their mistaken belief, it did not cause them to hold it more strongly.

…

But all of this optimism was thrown into doubt by a landmark 2010 study published by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler entitled “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” which proposed something popularly known as the “backfire effect.”11 Here, the experimental design involved exposing political partisans to corrective information that would challenge their false beliefs. For conservatives, it was the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) before the Iraq War. For liberals, it was the idea that President George W. Bush had imposed a total ban on all stem cell research. Both of these claims are factually false. All participants were initially primed with bogus newspaper articles that seemed to corroborate these false beliefs. This was done to provide both liberals and conservatives with reason to think that the claims were true. But when later presented with credible corrective information—for instance, a quotation from a speech that Bush had given, in which he admitted that there had been no WMDs in Iraq—results broke down upon partisan lines.

…

See also Rebuttal techniques School shooting conspiracies, 12, 18, 22–23, 37 Science comprehension thesis (SCT), 50, 51 Science denial belief formation and, 49, 66, 71, 120, 204n9 cafeteria skepticism and, 38, 44, 50 cherry-picking evidence, 33, 35–36, 199n28, 200n37 conspiracy theories and, 33, 36–40, 198n20 disinformation campaigns, 68–72, 73, 106, 174, 181, 205n20 evidence rejection, 204n77 five-tropes script and, 34–35, 41, 45–46, 55–56, 90–91, 160, 163, 184 illogical reasoning, 33, 42–43 insistence that science must be perfect, 33, 43–45 liberal science denial and, 224n15, 225n18, 225n19, 226n22, 226n25, 226n26 motivational roots of, 45–47 outsize impact of, 78 partisanship and, 121–125 post-truth and, xi, 49, 161, 179–180 psychological roots of, 39, 47–55 reasoning errors, xii, 33–34 reliance on fake experts, 33, 40–42 skepticism vs. denial, xvi, 85, 89, 126, 181 use of term, 33–34, 202n53 “Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science, The” (Mooney), 123–124 Scientific attitude, xv–xvi, 9, 17, 34, 197n4, 197n7, 207n33 Scientific Attitude, The (McIntyre), xv, xvi, 9, 17, 34, 197n4, 207n33 Scientific reasoning concept of warrant and, 50, 89, 137, 154, 197n4 conspiracy theories and, 37–38, 198n14 Seeds of Science (Lynas), 129–131 Séralini, Gilles-Éric, 133 Shermer, Michael, xiv, 66–67, 122–123, 139–140, 205n21, 223n5, 224n14 Skepticism anti-vaxxers and, 74, 124–125, 138 cafeteria skepticism and, 38, 44, 50 climate change denial and, 50–51, 92, 129 conspiracy theories and, 38, 44, 50 Flat Earthers and, 4, 18 GMOs and, 135–138, 153–154 partisanship and, 122 skepticism vs. denial, xvi, 85, 89, 126, 181 Skiba, Robert, 6–8, 18, 29, 41, 192n15 Skin cream experiment (Kahan), 51 Social factors belief change and, 66, 67, 72, 120, 204n9 belief formation and, 49, 66, 71, 120, 204n9 Social media amplification of misinformation and, 77–78 anti-vaxxers and, 168–169 COVID-19 denial and, 168–169 disinformation and, 77–78, 168–169 Facebook and, 168, 169, 173, 242n33 Flat Earthers and, 168–169 misinformation and, 77–78 Russian propaganda campaigns and, 161–162, 174, 184–185, 188 Twitter, 168, 169 YouTube, 4, 27, 168, 169 Socolow, Robert, 82 Spectrum of persuadability, 70, 77 Stem cell research, 63 Strategies for changing minds. See also Belief conversion; Face-to-face engagement circle of concern, 118, 119, 120, 180, 185–186 content rebuttal, xii–xiii, xv, 30–31, 68, 71, 73, 174, 181 moral framing and, 119 no response as, 68 personal engagement, xv, 62, 67, 70, 72–73, 79–80, 120, 171, 173 pre-bunking vs. debunking, xiii, 71, 206n30, 207n31 technique rebuttal, xiii, xv, 68–72, 73, 106, 174, 181, 206n30 values and, 114–115 Superior mirage effect, 7–8, 20, 195n38 Technique rebuttal, 68–72, 73, 106, 174, 181, 206n30 Tobacco companies, 11–12, 36, 46–47, 86, 86–87, 179, 201n45 Trivers, Robert, 201n47 Trump, Donald, xv, 38, 83–84 Trust belief formation and, 71 reliance on fake experts and, 40, 41–42 Truth about Denial, The (Bardon), 207n35 “Twenty Years of Failure” (Greenpeace), 131–132 Twitter, 168, 169 Urquiza, Kristin, 174 van der Linden, Sander, xiii, 71, 172, 206n30, 207n31 Wakefield, Andrew, 74, 74–75, 133, 138, 208n43, 231n63 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 11, 193n24 Warrant, concept of conspiracy theories and, 13 scientific reasoning and, 34, 50, 89, 137, 154, 197n4 use of term, 12, 13, 34, 43–44 Warzel, Charlie, 175–178 Weapons of mass destruction, 63 Welfare spending, 59–60, 204n4 West, Mick, 71, 198n11 “When Corrections Fail” (Nyhan and Reifler), 62–63, 64–66, 67 When Prophecy Fails (Festinger), v, 67, 194n34, 205n20 White supremacist movements, 75–76, 209n50 Whole Foods Market, 123, 139–140, 143–144, 147 Wood, Thomas, 36–37, 64, 68 Zimmerman, Maggie Kendall, 85

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Benoit Mandelbrot, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwork universe, double helix, Drosophila, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, out of africa, phenotype, power law, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, stem cell, unbiased observer

In contrast, if the mutation made the mitochondrion more alacritous in its response to an equivalent signal, we would expect to see an expansion of its DNA. At every signal to divide, the mutant mitochondria would leap into action, and so would eventually displace the ‘normal’ mitochondria from the population. And if the mutation occurred in a stem cell (which gives rise to Demise of the Self-Correcting Machine 293 replacement cells in a tissue) the mutants would be more likely to be passed on every time the stem cell divided, and so would finally take over the entire tissue. It’s important to note that such mutations are most likely to stage a tissue takeover if they’re not particularly detrimental to mitochondrial function. This is likely to be true, as there is nothing the matter with the respiratory complexes themselves.

…

There are parallels with ageing here. We don’t inherit all of our defective mitochondria from the egg cell: some accumulate in adult life, due to free radicals formed by normal metabolism. This generates a mixed population of mitochondria in the cells affected. What happens next depends on the type of cell. If the cell is an adult stem cell (responsible for regenerating tissue), a possible outcome would be the clonal expansion of defective mitochondria. This happens in some muscle fibres, producing the ‘ragged red fibres’ characteristic of mitochondrial diseases, but also found in ‘normal’ ageing. Conversely, if the mutation affected a long-lived cell no longer capable of division, such as a heart-muscle cell or a neurone, then the mutation could not spread beyond the bounds of that single cell.

…

Our neurones, for example, are usually as old as we are ourselves: they are rarely, if ever, replaced, yet their function doesn’t spiral out of control in an error catastrophe, but rather declines imperceptibly. What isn’t possible though, is any return to the fountain of youth. While the most devastating mitochondrial mutations can be eliminated from cells, there is no way of restoring their pristine function, short of not using the mitochondria at all (which is how egg cells, and to a degree adult stem cells, do reset their clocks). The more a cell relies on defective mitochondria, the more oxidizing the intra-cellular conditions become (oxidizing means a tendency to steal electrons). When I say ‘oxidizing’, however, I don’t mean the cell loses control of its internal environment. It retains control by adapting its behaviour, establishing a new status quo.

Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

Matsui Y, Zsebo K, Hogan BML (l992) Derivation of pluripotential embryonic stem cells from murine primordial germ cells in culture. Cell 70:841-847 Nelson JF, Felicio LS (l986) Radical ovarian resection advances the onset of persistent vaginal cornification but only transiently disrupts hypothalamic-pituitary regulation of cyclicity in C57BL/6J mice. BioI Reprod 35:957-964 Paganini-Hill A, Henderson VW (1994) Estrogen deficiency and risk of Alzheimer disease. Am J Epidemiol 140:256-261 Pesce M, Farrace MZ, Piacentini M, Dolci S, De Felici M (1993) Stem cell factor and leukemia inhibitory factor promote primordial germ cell survival by suppressing programmed cell death (apoptosis).

…

With the many studies of neuron number that are ongoing, we may anticipate a brain map that gives the quantitative variations in different neuron populations and the thresholds of neuron loss during age-related neurological disease that are associated with different degrees of functional change. Some populations of neurons may prove to be strongly linked to life expectancy. Similar questions can be posed for the immune system, which depends on clonally lineages of cells that are derived from obscurely enumerated stem cells. A possible consequence is variations between individuals in immune responses at later ages that could be a determinant of resistance to infection or the proclivities to autoimmune disease. Thus it is likely that organ systems differ widely during aging between individuals in the stochastically determined numbers of cells above critical thresholds for irreversible loss of function that influence morbidity and mortality.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

They have created novel zinc-finger designs that are intended to bind with new target sequences.27 The Boston team has engineered new circuits in yeast, a eukaryote, using modular, functional parts from the eukaryotes themselves and “wiring” them up with the help of zinc fingers.28 There are many immediate applications of this work, such as helping to develop stem cells for regenerative medicine, and in-cell devices and circuits for diagnosing early stages of cancer and other diseases. This method may also equip groups of cells to perform higher-order computational tasks for processing signals in the environment in sensing applications. Efforts by others are under way to extend and modify the existing genetic code, to code for new amino acids that don’t exist in nature.

…

I can envisage that, in the coming decades, we will witness many extraordinary developments of tangible value, such as crops that are resistant to drought, that can tolerate disease and thrive in barren environments, that provide rich new sources of protein and other nutrients, that can be harnessed for water purification in harsh and arid regions. I can imagine designing simple animal forms that provide novel sources of nutrients and pharmaceuticals, customizing human stem cells to regenerate a damaged, old, or sick body. There will be new ways to enhance the human body as well, such as boosting intelligence, adapting it to new environments such as the radiation levels encountered in space, rejuvenating worn-out muscles, and so on. Let’s keep our focus on the global problems that are affecting humanity.

…

This device has a number of names at present, including “digital biological converter,” “biological teleporter,” and—the preference of former Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson—“life replicator.” Creating life at the speed of light is part of a new industrial revolution that will see manufacturing shift away from the centralized factories of the past to a distributed, domestic manufacturing future, thanks to 3-D printers. This technology is already being used to assemble embryonic stem cells into tissues, grow bones, and to build planes or even entire buildings by “concrete printing.” Why stock warehouses with parts when entire designs can now be stored in virtual computer warehouses waiting to be printed locally and on demand? We might one day get to a point where individuals can make all the products they want, from door handles to smartphones, including the next generation of 3-D printer.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Underpinned by the same technologies of the Third Disruption, defined by declining costs of information and exponential progress in digital technology, it is no coincidence that cellular agriculture arrived at around the same time as genome sequencing, consumer AI and autonomous vehicles. Ultimately it will mean a world where producing meat, leather, milk and eggs no longer requires animals. Post’s approach is easy to grasp if not to execute. First you remove a small sample of muscle from an animal before isolating stem cell tissue which can be scaled in a bioreactor. You then proceed to warm it while feeding those cells with oxygen, sugar and minerals. After between nine and twenty-one days, the developed cells – which have grown into skeletal muscle – are harvested. At present this approach can’t work with all meats, especially those whose composition is highly complex and contains additional fats.

…

But it didn’t stop there: a year earlier Post, now at Mosa Meats, had already claimed the process he initially pioneered could produce beef in a laboratory for $80 a kilo, meaning that a burger using cultured meat could cost as little as $12 – a more than 99 per cent fall in cost from just four years earlier. And all in the absence of truly industrial-scale production. That isn’t to say there aren’t major hurdles to commercially viable steaks that don’t require cows. For one thing the material in which the stem cells currently grow is foetal calf serum. Using animal products to feed ‘synthetic’ animal tissue defeats the whole point, although those at the forefront of the industry claim a vegan alternative isn’t far away. The other major issue is energy – specifically for synthetic mammal meat like pork, beef and chicken.

…

Post’s personal view is that synthetic meat will be competitive on price within twenty years. The truth is that the power of the experience curve could mean it’s even sooner. Meat from Vegetables Cellular agriculture extends beyond just synthetic meat, however. Indeed, farming minced meat, fillets and breasts from stem cells remains incredibly time-consuming – at least for now – and while these products could be mainstream within a generation, for some that isn’t soon enough. Which is why Impossible Foods have chosen a different approach in trying to create vegan products that are indistinguishable from meat. But rather than ‘grow’ meat proteins, they think they can do that by making non-meat proteins more closely resemble those found in animals.

The Plundered Planet: Why We Must--And How We Can--Manage Nature for Global Prosperity by Paul Collier

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, business climate, carbon tax, Doha Development Round, energy security, food miles, G4S, Global Witness, information asymmetry, Kenneth Arrow, megacity, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, search costs, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons

By 1821 the French-German Enlightenment philosopher Baron d’Holbach was writing, “Man is only unhappy because he does not understand nature.” If only we could get back to nature we could get off the psychiatrist’s couch.The more prosperity has distanced us from nature, the more we have demanded that governments protect it from science. And the more emotive the issue involved the more it is apparent, as with stem-cell research and genetically modified food. Agriculture, as the economic activity that most directly impinges on nature, has borne the brunt of these sentiments. But the misunderstandings of ordinary citizens offer fertile opportunities for special interests. Regulation not only protects, it redistributes.

…

The development NGOs, dedicated as they are to the eradication of poverty, also reflect the environmental concerns of the wealthy countries that fund them. Their attitude to a local farming economy can therefore border on the schizophrenic: they want both change and preservation. The victims of today’s curtailment of stem-cell research are tomorrow’s incurables. But the victims of the anti-science, pro-peasant regulation of agriculture are today’s poor. Curtailing technology and discouraging the commercialization of African agriculture have tended to increase the price of food, and food is the main item of expenditure for poor households.

…

See also fisheries self-sufficiency, 213–14 September 11 terrorist attacks, 129 service activities, 180, 185 Shirky, Clay, 234–35, 239 Sierra Leone and capital goods, 149 and construction, 147–48 and diamonds, 37, 165 and oil, 126 prospecting in, 69 territorial waters of, 163 signature bonuses, 90, 91, 110 Singer, Peter, 24 slum dwellers, xiii smallholder agriculture, 214–15 smuggling, 89 social ownership, 160, 161 social value, 179 solar power, 181, 182, 194 Soludo, Chukwuma, 234 Somalia, 163–64 South Africa, 64, 75, 224 South America, 66 Southern hemisphere, 209 South Korea, 218 sovereignty issues, 239 Soviet Union, 49 special-interest lobby groups, 135 Spence, Michael, 111, 138, 233, 234 Stability Pact, 238 Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, 137 Starved for Science (Paarlberg), 220 stem-cell research, 8 Stern, Nicholas, x, 9, 26, 140, 186, 202 Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, 9, 140 stewardship, 32–33 Stiglitz, Joe, 5 structures, 131, 148 stunting, 211 subsidies, 164, 208, 223–24 subsistence agriculture, 213, 217 subsoil assets, 20, 64–68. See also specific assets, including coal and oil Sudan, 122, 218 sustainability and economic growth, 98 and extinction, 154, 161 and fisheries, 154, 161, 164, 168–71 of nonrenewable natural assets, 98, 100–102, 154 and Permanent Income, 103 and preservation of nature, 98 of renewable natural assets, 154, 155, 156, 161 Tanzania, 166 taxation and asymmetric information, 88–90 of carbon emissions, 185–88, 192, 198, 199, 241 and corruption, 51–52, 88 in decision chain, 127 excess-profits tax, 88–89 and extraction revenues, 84 of fisheries, 169–70 in low-income countries, 100 low-tax commitments, 85–87, 117 pan-European tax, 27 redistributive taxation, 24, 27, 28, 168 and rents and rent-seeking, 52, 88–89, 127, 143 and time-inconsistency, 85 and volatility in revenues, 117 technology and bottom billion countries, 5 and democratic power, 235 and discovery process, 68 fickleness of, 5 and fishing, 164–65 and modern agriculture, 216–17 and nature, 4 and ocean floors, 167 and oil demand, 106, 194 and prosperity, 4 and resource scarcity, 229 territorial waters, 162, 167 terrorism, 129–30 “Testing the Neo-con Agenda” (Collier and Hoeffer), 49 Thailand, 135 threshold effects, 60 tidal power, 181, 182 timber in Thailand, 135 time-inconsistency, 71–74, 85 Toxic Assets Recovery Program, 176 trade trade negotiations, 237 trade restrictions, 193, 194 trade wars, 237 tragedy of the commons, 161 transparency, 80–82, 94, 122–25, 129–30 Transparency International, 129 trees and custody principle, 157–59 of Eritrea, 158–59 of Haiti, 19 as natural assets, 160 See also forests Ukraine, 218 uncertainty, 18–19 unilateralism, 238 United Arab Emirates, 218 United Nations, 168–71, 218, 238, 240 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 215, 216 United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 184 United Nations Security Council, 238 United States anti-Americanism, 220, 225 and carbon emissions, 189–90, 195 and finders-keepers rule of assets, 46 and social cost of energy, 183 United States Congress, 176–77, 193 universalism, 24, 26, 27–28, 29, 31 urbanization, 209, 211, 217–18 Utilitarianism about, 23–25 and climate change, 200–201 and custody principle, 112 as ethical framework, 10, 25, 26 limitations of, 27 and Permanent Income, 102–3 and universalism, 24, 26, 27–28, 29, 31 value of natural assets, 83–84 vehicles, 182–83 Venables, Tony, xiv, 59, 111, 139 veto points, 135–36 violence and food crises, 211 Wall Street Journal, 128–29 Warnholz, Jean-Louis, 132 Welsh National Party, 30 West, American, 19, 21 West Africa, 94 wind power, 181, 182 worker productivity, 139 World Bank and Cameron, 81 Doing Business survey, 145 and ethanol subsidies, 224 evaluation of development projects, 141–42 and prospecting aid, 76 and subsoil assets, 20, 54, 65, 66 and Zambia, 87 world financial markets, 117, 128 World Food Programme, 170–71, 210–11 world interest rate, 104, 155 World Trade Organization, 164, 193, 219, 237 Wrong, Michaela, 159 Yamani, Ahmed Zaki, 106 Zambia and agriculture, 209 and copper mining, 5, 32, 64, 143 and private investment, 143 prospecting in, 76 and state-owned copper company, 93 and taxation, 86–87, 89 Zedillo, Ernesto, 6, 233–34 Zeufack, Albert, 81, 82 Zimbabwe, 199, 218

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

A cute rhesus monkey called ANDi (inserted DNA … spelled backward) … Showed that you could insert specific genes into animals very similar to humans …8 And begin to think about studying Alzheimer’s, cancer, blindness, Parkinson’s, vaccines, cancer … In a much more deliberate way. (Start-ups like Ximerex are beginning to engineer pig organs to include human enzymes in an attempt to someday transplant their hearts, kidneys, and livers into our bodies … Stem Cells has engineered mice that grow human brain cells to try to cure Alzheimer’s.) Which also raises the specter of eventually engineering human embryos.9 This should not surprise us. There used to be one way of getting pregnant … Now there are more than seventeen … Leading to test-tube babies, surrogate mothers, pregnant grandmothers, orphan embryos.

…

“Stable Germline Transformation of the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles stephensi,” Nature 405 (2000): 959–62. 2. Britain was the first country to allow this. The measure passed in the House of Lords 212 to 92, despite the opposition of various religious leaders. The clones can grow only to 14 days. The objective is to create human stem cells (undifferentiated cells that can grow into any tissue), in an attempt to treat leukemia, Parkinson’s, and cancer. 3. Of course not everyone gets excited by new maps. During the presentation of the human genome at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings … folks were scrambling to get their hands on the first printed genome maps … One enterprising reporter snagged her copy … ripped it open … spread it out on the floor … and used it as a quilt to lie on during the press conference.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

Abraham Maslow, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, delayed gratification, different worldview, longitudinal study, off-the-grid, peak-end rule, Skype, stem cell, the long tail

We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore. It happens in a bewildering array of ways. Hair grows gray, for instance, simply because we run out of the pigment cells that give hair its color. The natural life cycle of the scalp’s pigment cells is just a few years. We rely on stem cells under the surface to migrate in and replace them. Gradually, however, the stem-cell reservoir is used up. By the age of fifty, as a result, half of the average person’s hairs have gone gray. Inside skin cells, the mechanisms that clear out waste products slowly break down and the residue coalesces into a clot of gooey yellow-brown pigment known as lipofuscin.

…

Aubry, False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer (Oxford University Press, 2007). Ten states enacted laws: Centers for Diseases Control, “State Laws Relating to Breast Cancer,” 2000. Never mind that Health Net was right: E. A. Stadtmauer, A. O’Neill, L. J. Goldstein et al., “Conventional-Dose Chemotherapy Compared with High-Dose Chemotherapy plus Autologous Hematopoietic Stem-Cell Transplantation for Metastatic Breast Cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine 342 (2000): 1069–76. See also Rettig et al., False Hope. Aetna, decided to try a different approach: R. Krakauer et al., “Opportunities to Improve the Quality of Care for Advanced Illness,” Health Affairs 28 (2009): 1357–59.

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

This was used by opponents of the technology even though their objections may have been influenced by other considerations. The invention of lithography by Alois Senefelder of Munich in 1796 made it possible to print books without compromising aesthetic considerations. A contemporary example of such trends includes the identification of alternative sources of stem cells, which helped to reduce the intensity of objections from those concerned about obtaining stem cells from human embryos. Another potential example is the use of gene-editing techniques or precision breeding within crop species to address concerns about moving genes across species. Technological solutions alone are not sufficient in many cases without the complementary social change that makes new technologies more acceptable.

…

This development, however, has resulted in concerns about the ability of countries to regulate the new technologies, as people doubt the adequacy of existing institutional arrangements in safeguarding human health and environmental integrity.11 Technological and engineering advancements themselves are a major source of answers to many controversies. For example, safety concerns regarding early mechanical refrigeration could not be addressed without advances in technology. Similarly, the rapid rate at which early tractors were improved helped to foster their adoption. Recent concerns about obtaining stem cells from human embryos have been addressed by innovative approaches that helped to identify other sources. A combination of technological abundance, continuous improvement, and greater involvement of users in innovation will help to create new avenues for resolving the technological controversies that arise from immature technologies.

…

See also Regulation Stanley, William, 153, 155 Starbucks, 45, 67 StarLink corn, 355n56 Start-ups, restriction of new technologies to, 18–19 State Laboratory for Nutritional Research (Denmark), 112 States (US). See also names of individual states cold storage legislation, 196 support for domestic oils, 115 Status quo bias, 35 Steam-traction engines, 124 Steckel, Richard, 339n48 Steel, use in plows, 123 Steering wheels, 295 Stem cells, 15, 92 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 148 Stigmatization (demonization). See also Romanticization of alternating current, 144, 158–167, 171 of coffee, 45, 66 of margarine, 103 of new technologies, 8 product analogies and, 308–309 of technological innovation, 309 of telephone, 165–166, 309 of transgenic fish, 274 Stockholm, coffeehouses in, 62 Stop Smart Meters, 172–173 Storage goods, 186 Strasbourg, first printing of Bible in, 76 Street lighting, 146, 147, 149 Stupidity, Pessoa on, 280 Sublime Porte (Bâb-ı Âli), 83 Subramaniam, Chidambaran, 283 Subsidies to fishing industry, 259 Subsistence farming, 122 Substantial equivalence, 10 Success dynamics of, in scientific research, 327n115 factors affecting, 29–30 Succession in technological evolution, 326n106 Sufis, 47–48, 328n11 Sulfur dioxide, 190 Sulfuric acid, 179 Sultan of Cairo, 49 al-Sunbati, Ahmad ibn ’Abd al-Haqq, 50 Supermarkets, opposition to stocking of transgenic fish, 271, 273, 279 Supreme Court on antimargarine laws, 105 Diamond v.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

In April 2014, scientists in the United States and Mexico announced they had successfully grown a complex organ, a human uterus, from tissue cells, in a lab. And in England, that same month, at a North London hospital, scientists announced they had grown noses, ears, blood vessels, and windpipes in a laboratory as they attempt to make body parts using stem cells. Scientists at Maastricht University, in Holland, have produced laboratory-grown beef burgers, grown in vitro from cattle stem cells, which food tasters say taste “close to meat.” “Can science go too far?” I ask Dr. Gardiner and Dr. Bryant. “The same biotechnology will allow scientists to clone humans,” says Dr. Gardiner. “Do you think the Defense Department will begin human cloning research?”

…

It’s a place where scientists like myself can work with a team of students and pursue risky ideas that would be hard to pull off within the confines of LANL itself.” 18 simulating the primate visual system: Quotes are from interviews with Garrett Kenyon, March–November 2014. 19 world’s record: “Science at the Petascale,” IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, press release, October 27, 2009. 20 Tianhe-2: Lance Ulanoff, “China Has the Fastest Supercomputer in the World—Again,” Mashable.com, June 23, 2014. 21 points inside: Kenyon noted that the computer room contains a number of different machines. 22 “Regeneration is really coming alive”: Quotes are from interviews with David Gardiner and Sue Bryant, June 2013–October 2014. 23 children born with mutations: Ngo Vinh Long, “Vietnamese Perspectives,” in Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, ed. by Stanley Kutler (New York: Scribner’s, 1996). 24 a human uterus: Stephanie Smith, “Creating Body Parts in a Lab; ‘Things Are Happening Now,’” CNN, April 10, 2014. 25 make body parts: “Ears, Noses Grown from Stem Cells in Lab Dishes,” Associated Press, April 8, 2014. 26 laboratory-grown beef burgers: Maria Cheng, “First Reaction: Lab-Made Burger Short on Flavor.” Phys.org, August 5, 2013. 27 “One can imagine”: S. Hawking et al., “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?’”

…

Bryant: Regeneration biologist, former dean of the School of Biological Sciences and vice chancellor for research, UC Irvine Colonel Julian Chesnutt (retired): Former program officer, Defense Clandestine Service, DIA Colonel L. Neale Cosby (retired): Former SIMNET principal investigator, DARPA Bernard Crane: Lawyer, Washington, DC Dr. Tanja Dominko: Biotechnoengineer, stem cell biologist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Allen Macy Dulles: Student of history, Korean War veteran, son of Allen Welsh Dulles Dr. Jay W. Forrester: Computer pioneer, founder of system dynamics Ralph “Jim” Freedman: Former nuclear weapons engineer, EG&G Dr. David Gardiner: Regeneration biologist, professor of developmental and cell biology, UC Irvine Colonel John Gargus (retired): Former special operations officer, U.S.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

Contemporary welfare and social service programs have the “negative effect of creating a different kind of culture and a different kind of human being.”12 Vouchers and a negative income tax are philosophically and practically related. In each case, Friedman’s preferred policy is for government to give individuals money or credits rather than for government to provide services directly. With respect to stem cell research and gay marriage, Friedman writes in 2005 correspondence that on “stem cell research, I believe that it should be freely open but that the government should not be financing it. It does seem to me wrong for the government to be spending its citizens’ tax money on programs which a significant fraction of the population find morally abhorrent.”

…

Regarding gay marriage, “I do not believe there should be any discrimination against gays....The only question is whether th[e] laws should have a special category for a family unit whose primary objective is childrearing.”13 On abortion, he believes that it should be legal, but, similar to his position on stem cell research, that government should not pay for abortions. Friedman believes that the current public school system operates largely like a monopoly, with the inefficiency and lack of innovation that monopoly invariably entails. Universal vouchers would revolutionize education for the better, he believes; many new schools of all sorts would emerge.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

At the time of writing there are at least two projects aiming to clone a mammoth, Akira Iritani at Kyoto University, who has been working in the area since 2011, with a target of success by 2016–2017, and Hwang Woo-Suk, a South Korean ventinarian who recently set out on a crash course in mammoth recovery. The fact that Hwang is involved is not in itself very encouraging, as he infamously fell from grace as a noted stem cell researcher when he was dismissed from a post at Seoul National University in 2006 for having forged data from imaginary research into stem cells. Yet he certainly had experience of cloning, (assuming the experiment was not faked), when he cloned a dog in 2014. Other scientists are both doubtful of the short-term chances of success, bearing in mind how many failures it took to get to the much less ambitious Dolly, and dubious that there is any scientific merit in bringing a mammoth back to life.

…

Moreau, is the creation of human/animal chimeras where human cells and animal embryos are combined. Yet there is an important distinction that takes the impact out of the SF story line—where the fictional result is a monstrous crossover creature, in reality the result is not viable as a living organism, but results in the production of stem cells, which can then be used for medical purposes. Wells envisaged bizarre hybrids like the leopard-man, the satyr-man, and the dog-man on Dr. Moreau’s island. But he realized the impracticality of giving a human being wings. This hasn’t stopped science fiction writers from exploring one of humanity’s great dreams.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

For his efforts, the lead scientist was reportedly jailed for three years by the Chinese authorities. Elsewhere in China, gene editing experiments that are also ethically contentious continue. In 2019, two pigs were born with monkey DNA present in many of their organs.39 Earlier, their embryos had been injected with genetically modified stem cells from cynomolgus monkeys. The ostensible goal was to pioneer techniques that might be used to produce human-compatible organs for transplant to needy patients. And the chimeras did indeed have a small proportion of monkey cells in many of their organs. But there was a problem: both monkey-pig chimeras died within a fortnight.

…

Regalado, Antonio, ‘Exclusive: Chinese scientists are creating CRISPR babies’, MIT Technology Review, 25 November 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/25/138962/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies/. 39. Fu, Rui, Dawei Yu, Jilong Ren, Chongyang Li, Jing Wang, Guihai Feng, Xuepeng Wang et al. ‘Domesticated cynomolgus monkey embryonic stem cells allow the generation of neonatal interspecies chimeric pigs’, Protein & Cell 11, no. 2 (2020): 97–107. 40. Lei Shi, Xin Luo, Jin Jiang, Yongchang Chen, Cirong Liu, Ting Hu, Min Li, Qiang Lin, Yanjiao Li, Jun Huang, Hong Wang, Yuyu Niu, Yundi Shi, Martin Styner, Jianhong Wang, Yi Lu, Xuejin Sun, Hualin Yu, Weizhi Ji, Bing Su, ‘Transgenic rhesus monkeys carrying the human MCPH1 gene copies show human-like neoteny of brain development’, National Science Review 6, no. 3 (May 2019): 480–493. 41.

…

‘If we are living in a simulation, this UK start up probably built it,’ WIRED, 11 May 2017, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-quest-to-build-the-matrix. Freedman, Lawrence, and Michaels, Jeffrey. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Fourth ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Fu, Rui, Dawei Yu, Jilong Ren, Chongyang Li, Jing Wang, Guihai Feng, Xuepeng Wang et al. ‘Domesticated cynomolgus monkey embryonic stem cells allow the generation of neonatal interspecies chimeric pigs’, Protein & Cell 11, no. 2 (2020): 97–107. Fursenko, A. A., and Timothy J. Naftali. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, Kennedy, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1958–1964. London: Pimlico, 1999. Future of Life Institute, ‘Slaughterbots’, 13 November 2017, https://youtu.be/HipTO_7mUOw.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

The ‘code’ for a vaccine could be electronically transmitted around the world—allowing instant global distribution of a vaccine created to counter a new epidemic. People are typically uneasy about innovations that seem ‘against nature’ and that pose risks. Vaccination and heart transplants, for instance, aroused controversy in the past. More recently, concern has focused on embryo research, mitochondrial transplants, and stem cells. I followed closely the debate in the United Kingdom that led to legislation allowing experiments on embryos up to fourteen days old. This debate was well handled; it was characterised by constructive engagement between the researchers, the parliamentarians, and the wider public. There was opposition from the Catholic Church, some of whose representatives circulated pamphlets depicting a fourteen-day-old embryo as a structured ‘homunculus’.

…

See also planets; Sun space, threats to stability of, 112–13, 118 space elevator, 148–49 spaceflight: fuel as impediment to, 148–49; manned, 143–52; pioneering exploits, 138–40 (see also Apollo programme); private companies in, 146–48 space shuttle, 145, 148 space technology: international regulation of, 219; satellites, 140–42 space telescopes, 137, 142, 143 space tourism, 148 SpaceX, 146, 149 speech recognition, 85, 88 spiritual values, environmentalist, 33 Sputnik 1, 138 squirrels, genetic alteration of, 74 stars: as fairly simple objects, 173; in modern cosmology, 214 stem cells, 65 Stern, Nicholas, 42 strangelets, 112, 114 string theory, 169, 180, 187 Stuxnet, 20 Sun: ancient and modern understanding of, 3; eventual doom of Earth due to, 2; galactic location of, 124; life cycle of, 177–78; magnetic storms caused by, 16; nuclear fusion in, 54, 122; origin of, 122.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

They are summed up in his “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” (“senescence” being a term for the deterioration caused by aging), a paradigmatic example of the Engineering Approach to immortality. Like most people in his field, de Grey relies on technologies that are now in their infancy but whose promise seems immense—in particular genetics, stem cells and nanomedicine. Genetic engineering should enable us to rewrite our bodies’ instruction books, ensuring many diseases that are now fatal never arise. Stem cells, which have the ability to develop into any kind of tissue, from skin to neurons, hold out the promise of growing healthy tissue to replace that which is diseased or worn out—even whole organs. And nanotechnology (engineering on the scale of atoms or molecules) gives hope of the ability to repair our bodies from the inside out using billions of tiny, targeted machines.

…

Throughout its history, science has sought to make life unending and death reversible. In chapter 3, we saw that scientific progress is driven forward by the Engineering Approach to mortality, the modern version of the Staying Alive Narrative, which attempts to break down the challenge of death into a list of potentially solvable problems like curing cancer, harnessing stem cells or stopping smoking. We can now see that this is part of a broader ideology of mastering nature—a belief that there are no natural limits that cannot in the end be overcome by reason. This belief extends beyond the hope of staying alive to encompass also its Plan B: resurrection. This drive to mastery of nature is often regarded as the very essence of modernity.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

In laboratory-grown human cells, CRISPR has already been used to “correct the mutations responsible for cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, and some forms of blindness,” Doudna reports. “Researchers have corrected the DNA mistakes that cause Duchenne muscular dystrophy by snipping out only the damaged region of the mutated gene, leaving the rest intact.”9 Say someone has sickle-cell anemia. It now seems entirely possible to isolate stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow, use CRISPR to repair the cells’ mutated genes, and then return the edited cells to the patient, where they will “churn out robust amounts of healthy hemoglobin.”10 This kind of work has just begun to leave the laboratory and enter the real world. In the summer of 2017, the FDA approved the first-ever such treatment, this one designed to modify a patient’s own cells to fight leukemia.

…

By growing our food on vertical stands, he means. “As we extend longevity, we radically expand the resources of life.” That’s an ethical improvement on, say, Michael West, currently chair of a California start-up called BioTime, which specializes in “regenerative medicine.” West, who organized the first effort to isolate human stem cells for cloning purposes, was once asked whether immortality wouldn’t lead to overpopulation. Sure, he said, but “why put the burden on people now living, people enjoying the process of breathing, people loving and being loved. The answer is clearly to limit new entrants to the human race, not to promote the death of those enjoying the gift of life today.”16 That level of selfishness makes Ayn Rand look like Mother Teresa.

…

See also community Solomon, Tom Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (film) Southwestern Publishing Soviet Union. See also Russia soy space colonization SpaceX Spanish flu SpinVox Spotify Stalin, Joseph Standing Rock protests Staples, Sam Starr, Ken Startling Stories Star Trek (TV show) state governments Steffen, Alex stem cells Sternberg, Sam St. Louis World’s Fair Stock, Gregory Stonehenge stress hormones submarine landslides suicide SunEdison Sun Microsystems Sweden swordfish Synthego Syria Tanzania tar sands taxes cuts in opposition to Tea Party tech industry technology of maturity and repair replacement Teller, Edward Tesla Texaco Texas Texas Hold ‘Em thalassemia Thatcher, Margaret Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith) Thiel, Peter Thomas, Clarence Thoreau, Henry 350.org 350 parts per million Thurow, Lester Tillerson, Rex Tiumalu, Koreti tobacco Tolstoy, Leo Tomasky, Michael totalitarianism TransCanada Corporation transhumanism transportation Trappist solar system Triassic-Jurassic extinction Trudeau, Justin Trump, Donald tsunamis Tunica, Mississippi Tunuliarfik Fjord Turkey Turner, Frederick Jackson Twenge, Jean 21st Century Fox 23andMe Twitter U-Barrier Uber Unabomber Unconquerable World, The (Schell) Underwood, Barbara United Nations General Assembly special rapporteur on extreme poverty Sustainable Development Goals U.S.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

Dean asked Paige to call the woman and ask her where she had been the past few months. It emerged that in that brief period, the infected woman had treated herself to an astonishing number of possibly infectious procedures. An improbable number of manicures and pedicures. Botox treatments. Dental work. Some kind of stem cell procedure. By the time Paige got off the phone, she had a list of ten places where a virus might have entered the woman’s bloodstream. Dr. Dean asked her to go have a look around the places and report back. * In her first year of residency at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, Charity had worked under a doctor named Stephen Hosea.

…

When Paige Batson returned from her tour of the hep C patient’s life, Charity could feel that something was slightly off about her—in the same way she occasionally felt something was slightly off after a diagnosis failed to explain a symptom. Paige was usually a chatterbox; now she’d gone quiet. “I don’t know, Dr. Dean,” she said. “Something didn’t feel right.” She’d gone to all the places on her list, but only one of them left her feeling unsettled: the stem cell clinic. The Thomashefsky clinic, as it was called. It offered a treatment for joint and back pain, platelet-rich plasma therapy, in which blood cells were removed from the patient, whipped around in a centrifuge, then reinjected into the patient. Dr. Thomashefsky charged up to forty-five hundred bucks a pop for a procedure that wasn’t covered by medical insurance, as its actual usefulness was still a matter of dispute.

…

Hell, if she were wrong, she would fire herself. “I was like, ‘Fuck, I don’t have to be doing this. I leaned too far forward this time.’ ” The odd thing about it, to Charity, was how docile Dr. Thomashefsky had been, from the moment she’d turned up. It was as if he had been waiting for her. She returned twice more to the shuttered stem cell clinic, to poke around and see if there was anything she had missed. “I was terrified that I would not find the things I needed,” she said, “and if I didn’t find it there would be twenty more cases of something out there.” On her subsequent trips to the clinic, she discovered that Thomashefsky was prescribing Versed—one of the drugs that killed Michael Jackson—and that he was making house calls to inject it into rich old ladies in the hills.

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game