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PhotonQ-Aubrey de Grey and the Longevity of Economy =)
Image by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE
At BIL 2009 conference, with Aubrey De Gray, showing a fun cartoon on the Financial Crisis =)
"Aubrey De Gray is a world-known British biomedical gerontologist, and author of the general-audience book "Ending Aging," a detailed description of how regenerative medicine may be able to defeat aging entirely within a few decades.
He is the chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation.
He works on the development of what he has termed "strategies for engineered negligible senescence" ( SENS ) – a tissue-repair strategy intended to rejuvenate the human body and thereby allow an indefinite lifespan.
To this end, he has identified seven types of molecular and cellular "damage" caused by essential metabolic processes; SENS is a proposed panel of therapies to repair this damage
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The seven types of aging damage proposed by de Grey
1# Cancer-causing nuclear mutations/epimutations:
These are changes to the nuclear DNA (nDNA), the molecule that contains our genetic information, or to proteins which bind to the nDNA. Certain mutations can lead to cancer, and, according to de Grey, non-cancerous mutations and epimutations do not contribute to aging within a normal lifespan, so cancer is the only endpoint of these types of damage that must be addressed.
2# Mitochondrial mutations:
Mitochondria are components in our cells that are important for energy production. They contain their own genetic material, and mutations to their DNA can affect a cell’s ability to function properly. Indirectly, these mutations may accelerate many aspects of aging.
3# Intracellular aggregates:
Our cells are constantly breaking down proteins and other molecules that are no longer useful or which can be harmful. Those molecules which can’t be digested simply accumulate as junk inside our cells. Atherosclerosis, macular degeneration and all kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s disease) are associated with this problem.
4# Extracellular aggregates:
Harmful junk protein can also accumulate outside of our cells. The amyloid plaque seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients is one example.
5# Cell loss:
Some of the cells in our bodies cannot be replaced, or can only be replaced very slowly – more slowly than they die. This decrease in cell number causes the heart to become weaker with age, and it also causes Parkinson’s disease and impairs the immune system.
6# Cell senescence:
This is a phenomenon where the cells are no longer able to divide, but also do not die and let others divide. They may also do other things that they’re not supposed to, like secreting proteins that could be harmful. Immune senescence and type 2 diabetes are caused by this.[citation needed]
7# Extracellular crosslinks:
Cells are held together by special linking proteins. When too many cross-links form between cells in a tissue, the tissue can lose its elasticity and cause problems including arteriosclerosis and presbyopia. wiki "
Ramachandran’s Brain
Image by jurvetson
…embodied in a glimpse behind the veil of Powerpoint.
V.S. Ramachandran made a frazzled head wiggle when I laughed at the sheer chaos of his desktop.
I really enjoyed his book, Phantoms in the Brain, and even though I have heard this UCSD Prof three times, I find it perpetually provocative of deep thoughts.
Some interesting tidbits on his ongoing work with:
1) Phantom Limb Pain – feeling persistent pain in the limb that has been amputated
The 1:1 topographic mapping of the missing hand to the face also maps to the shoulder (the two neighbors in the cortical net). So the remapping of the sensory cortex occurs fairly consistently with crosstalk to the neuronal neighbors. If you amputate one finger, the neighboring fingers feel the missing digit, and so does the face.
“If you amputate the penis, whether by cancer or a jealous spouse, the sensation maps to the foot, and some find that erotic.”
The mapping is “modality specific” whereby feelings of hot, cold, vibration, touch, dripping water all transfer with fidelity to the new region.
“The theory lends credibility to acupuncture, but I have not found a correlation with the specific organ map claims of acupuncture.”
Getting results with the mirror therapy with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD). Acute pain triggers a reflex to pull away whereas chronic pain causes paralysis (evolved so as to not worsen certain injuries through movement). With RSD, you have to unlearn the learned distrophic pain to break the cycle of paralysis.
Some phantom limb pain is triggered when the patient sees someone else getting poked. The mirror neurons are like “monkey see monkey do” neurons, and are the source of sympathy and empathy. But we don’t actually feel someone else’s pain. With the phantom limbs, it’s as if they are “Gandhi neurons – the ultimate empathy neurons.” In each of us, our real sensory neurons veto the input from the mirror neurons and so we do not literally feel other’s pain. Not so with the phantom limbs. They need the visual input, but then they feel the pain. For one patient, he would watch his wife massage her own arm and that would relieve his phantom limb pain.
2) Synaesthesia Seeing numbers as colored or in a spatial line.
Not nearly as rare as we thought – 1 in 50 people have it. It’s 8x as prevalent among artists, poets, novelists and creative people. Shakespeare was a master: “Juliet is the sun.”
“A word is just a penumbra of associations… a syntactic juggling in the head”
Dismissed as nuts at first. “If you say they are crazy, it means you are not smart enough to understand.”
Blamed on drugs: “The incidence does go up on LSD… and there are more cases in Berkeley than Stanford.”
Many cool tests to verify its physical "hardware glitch" basis: response time tests in spotting color patterns quickly, drops off with peripheral non-color vision, occurs in color blind people (really a wild effect to see numbers as colors they can’t see anywhere else), does not happen with Roman numerals (visual appearance of the number is key, not the concept).
Seeing days of week, or months of year as certain colors: the ordinality of sequences. “The Brain did not evolve to represent numbers, but it did evolve to represent space. Cardinality maps onto space.”
Suspected to be a cross wiring in the fusiform gyrus that has a genetic basis given its hereditary pattern in families. The necessary neuronal pruning is interrupted by some mutation.
Why doesn’t it disappear from genetic drift? Why would it persist? “They are the outliers in the population. They are more creative. They may be gaining, but evolution moves slowly. Now, you don’t want everyone to be that creative. For example, you don’t want your neurosurgeon to get creative.”
An unexpected adventure
Image by Sandwiches Of The Dead
I haven’t been around much lately, and this is the reason why. The good news is that my cancer is very treatable, with nearly a 90% cure rate. The bad news is that the treatment is both chemo and radiation therapy. I’ve been through one round of chemo, and have one more to go. I go for radiation daily and feel tired for several hours after. The chemo isn’t as bad as it apparently used to be, but it’s still no fun.
If you are over 40, I definitely recommend going for a colonoscopy.