UB boffins craft cells that never age

Photo: Bob Bobster (LIC)/Flickr CC

In a big step toward human superlongevity, University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo) boffins have made adult stem cells that *do not age.*

The UB researchers anticipate their finding could result in “cost-effective treatments for diseases including heart disease, diabetes, immune disorders and neurodegenerative diseases.”

More from the announcement:

UB scientists created the new cell lines – named “MSC Universal” – by genetically altering mesenchymal stem cells, which are found in bone marrow and can differentiate into cell types including bone, cartilage, muscle, fat, and beta-pancreatic islet cells.

via Researchers Engineer Adult Stem Cells That Do Not Age, Overcoming a Major Barrier to Progress in Regenerative Medicine.

"Open science": Humanity's best hope?

Photo: dno1967/Flickr CC

If we are to believe transhumanists, people who bill themselves as champions of superlongevity and artificial human enhancement, 2045 should be a very good year.

But we won’t get there by counting on the biopharmaceutical complex, said open and citizen science proponent, Joseph Jackson:

“Technologists extrapolate these trends from certain domains and completely overestimate the progress we’ll make,’’ said Jackson, a Harvard University graduate who is developing a low-cost device to help scientists study DNA outside major laboratories. “Twenty years will tick by, and we’ll still be waiting.’’

via Biotech movement hopes to spur rise of citizen scientists – The Boston Globe.

Father of the internet to seed space with ubicomp

The father of the internet, Vint Cerf, talks “internet of things” and transhumanism with a New Zealand newspaper:

Vint Cerf, vice-president and “chief internet evangelist” of tech giant Google, foresees the introduction of internet capability to existing neural interface technology such as cochlear implants, allowing, as an example, web radio played direct from computer to brain.

via Google ‘evangelist’ sees web, brain implant link | Stuff.co.nz.

But the coolest/scariest thing Cerf mentions in the interview, is a plan to bring the internet to space:

He is also involved in work to send internet infrastructure into space to create “a communications backbone between space-faring nations”.

The Sunday Star Times piece reads like a blueprint for the implementation of one of Ray Kurzweil’s vision for the Singularity: our consciousnesses, downloaded to self-replicating nanorobots (for infinite backups), and cast into space.

Chopped liver: Jobs at head of line

Steve Jobs gets his new liver… Tennessee has shorter waits, no residency requirement. That suggests those who can pay are getting to the head of the line for this sort of thing.

Incredibly, way back in 2003, the wait for a liver was 67 days. And if you were a member of the elite class, you could have a new liver the day after you put in for one.

The Journal, which says it has no specifics on precisely where or when Jobs had the transplant, notes that the waiting time for donated livers is substantially shorter in Tennessee than it is elsewhere. The wait time is shorter in Tennessee because fewer people come to the three hospitals in the state that do transplants. There is no residency requirement to be a recipient.

People in Tennessee wait 48 days, on average, compared to 306 nationally, according to 2006 figures from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

via Steve Jobs Undergoes Liver Transplant – ABC News.

Transhumanists envision a life at sea

Photo: Cynthia thanks mother ocean. CC/Bettina Neuefeind

Cynthia thanks mother ocean. Photo: CC/Bettina Neuefeind

Some folks are planning for a life at sea–on man-made islands:

The mission of the [Seasteading Institute] is to enable the building of ocean communities, to experiment with innovative political and social systems…The Seasteading Institute | SHARKRIDE!, May 2009

The Seasteading Institute (TSI) is backed by billionaire PayPal founder and transhumanist Peter Thiel.

Seasteading enthusiasts, apparently in no rush for a return on their investements, have contributed more than $500,000 to the institute to-date.

It is not clear whether the poor and the profane will find their way onto these islands. TSI does argue, however, that the islands might help isolate undesirables.

Winning entry. Image: CC/ejacobhansen

Winning entry. Image: CC/ejacobhansen

I’m not sure what is meant by “innovative political and social systems,” in the Seasteaders’ mission, but Aftermath News notes that the Bilderberg gang has been discussing overcoming resistance to depopulation:

The UK newspaper The Times reported that these “leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” and that they “discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.”

via Secret Bilderberg Agenda to Restructure Global Political Economy « Aftermath News.

Washington Post: The sorry state of virtual worlds

Not looking to good? CC/Annabeth Robinson

Not looking too good: A PS3 Home avatar takes a moment to herself. CC/Annabeth Robinson

A Washington Post columnist notes the seemingly hard times that have befallen inworld-types, in a bit about Sony’s “Home”:

Google, for example, is pulling the plug on Lively, a virtual environment it launched earlier this year. And news service Reuters is shuttering a virtual bureau it had opened in the once-buzzworthy Second Life. In a farewell note posted last month, reporter Eric Krangel confessed that he found using the service “about as fun as watching paint dry.”

via Mike Musgrove – PS3′s Virtual Home Is Inhospitable – washingtonpost.com.

But things are about to take a turn for the better in virtual worlds.

My 2009-2012 prediction (it’ll happen somewhere in there): Every internet user will acquire (or be assigned) an avatar of his own.

Transhumanism watch: Big pharma to hand out speed like Chiclets

CC/Unity Gain

Amped up on Adderall. Photo: CC/Unity Gain

Shrinks on the take from the pharmaceutical industry and the Rockefeller Foundation are pushing Adderall and Ritalin as productivity boosters for humans.

This can’t come to any good. Even the authors of this Nature piece (described in a Yahoo article, link and excerpt, below) concede the likelihood of a rich-poor divide over who gets the “brain-boosting” drugs.

My take: The poor will get their pills. Corporations can employ fewer, more productive workers, especially if they are on speed.

The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York. Two authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.

Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn’t impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.

“It’s a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don’t have an illness of any kind,” Turner said.

The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 American college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.

via Scientists back brain drugs for healthy people – Yahoo! News.

"Big Blue" rebuttal: No transhumanists here

IBM researcher defends Second Life, World of Warcraft, against Parallelnormal blog posts.

from Mark:

High-profile virtual worlders are trying to correct what they see as misrepresentations by Parallelnormal of their recent meetings and events.

One of them, Second Lifer “Dale Innis,” writes a comment blasting my comparison of real and virtual versions of New England, and my description of a conference about the convergence of reality with virtual reality.

“(You) drastically misread your sources about the WoW conference and the Extropia sims, and you seem to do the same thing in many places where Second Life is involved,” Innis writes.

Innis in real life (RL) is IBM researcher David M. Chess.

IBM has built inworld stores for big box retailers.

Chess is working to develop autonomic technologies, which are self-aware and can fix themselves.

Chess, speaking for himself, and not IBM, denies that Extropia and the World of Warcraft conference “are in fact about transhumanism.”

Yet the WoW conference was organized by a transhumanist, and one who views the world’s major religions as an obstacle to the advancement of his own beliefs.

And extropians, by their own definition, are transhumanists, real or imagined.

"Kirk" calls for depopulation

If Man won’t do it, Nature will, William Shatner says.

(In the Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” Kirk meets a wicked Spock in a parallel universe. He dissuades his first officer from eradicating an uncooperative humanoid race. Image: StarTrek.com)

from Mark:

Star Trek star William Shatner said last week that the earth is striking back against humans with natural disasters.

“They [people] are pressed together, defecating into the ocean,” said Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek. “The earth can’t take it.”

At one point in a long conversation with talk show host Glenn Beck, Shatner decried humankind’s penchant for reproduction. (See clip, and an excerpt from the transcript, below). It is a position he shares with his fellow transhumanist, Max More.

In a strange blurring of real and virtual reality, both Shatner and his Star Trek character are heroes to the transhumanists, who view the human body as limited, imperfect, and in need of artificial augmentation.

The transhumanists also want to bring about “a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.”

Shatner, a vigorous 74-year-old (he also appears to have been “under the knife”), was on Beck’s show to flog his new autobiography, Up Till Now.

Note: I was a contributing editor to one issue of Glenn Beck’s magazine, Fusion. — mb

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA2xn35NpdA]

Glenn Beck – Interviews – Shatner v. Glenn
Well, nature, nature eventually will take care of that problem like they did, like nature does with animals. We’re overgrazing. So when deer multiply, when the natural order of things is disturbed and predators are taken away, for example, the deer, they overpopulate, they eat too much of the food and they starve. And we’re going to — if we don’t curb — how do we stop the overpopulation? I guess it’s by education and saying you’ve got to have less children, you can’t have all the children you want anymore. There’s a difference in the world now. Or nature will take care of it.

Sci-Fi cover for a real-life agenda?

A Second Life transhumanist, despite her sim’s ties to movement leaders and government agencies, insists it’s all “science fiction.”

Fishers of pre-posthumans? Second Lifers drop a line in the Extropia sim. (Image: From the Extropia Core website)

by Mark Baard

One of the founders of Extropia said this week denied she is propagating any ideology through the online sim.

Extropia founder and blogger “Galatea Gynoid,” as she’s known in Second Life, this week posted a rebuttal to “certain people” (see excerpt, below) who see more to the sim than an evolving work of pure fiction.

Extropia is an area within Second Life where people, via their 3D avatars, gather to discuss transhumanism, science and science fiction.

Gynoid says she started Extropia so that she and like-minded Second Lifers might enjoy an alternative to the depressing, dystopian sims they found elsewhere in the metaverse.

But Gynoid, by trying to have it both ways, may be trying to duck criticism from those who see the transhumanist agenda at work in Extropia.

By co-hosting events with real life (RL) transhumanists and U.S. government agencies, for example, it is clear that Extropia is more than fiction. It is also a meeting place for believers.

Extropia co-hosted a NASA “future forum” on May 14. And in two weeks, the sim will host a technology and religion conference meant to “re-cast our understanding of ‘humanity’ in the Third Millennium.”

Why “Extropia”? | Extropia Core
There are certain people out there who are insisting you need to subscribe to a particular ideology to be welcome here. The funny thing is, the majority of the Board of Directors wouldnt [sic] be allowed in Extropia if what they said is true. I myself, the founder and owner of the sims, would not be allowed in Extropia if what they said was true. Its utterly, patently ridiculous.