Well that was quick, follow up to yesterday's WallE post.

FTA: In a genetic engineering breakthrough that could help everyone from bed-ridden patients to elite athletes, a team of American researchers—including 2007 Nobel Prize winner Mario R. Capecchi—have created a "switch" that allows mutations to be turned on in muscle stem cells to monitor muscle regeneration in a living mammal.

We're really all over this one. If there's one thing I've learned in my life it is this, if you have to have something wrong with you, try to make it be something that a lot of people in wealthy, industrialized nations have wrong with them as well.

Genetic Modification, or Why the Future Won't Be Like WallE.

To Wit: Liam has a rare genetic condition called myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy, or muscle enlargement. The condition promotes above-normal growth of the skeletal muscles; it doesn't affect the heart and has no known negative side effects, according to experts.
Liam has the kind of physical attributes that bodybuilders and other athletes dream about: 40 percent more muscle mass than normal, jaw-dropping strength, breathtaking quickness, a speedy metabolism and almost no body fat.

And oh yeah, it might also help answer questions about horrible, chronic conditions: Liam's condition is more than a medical rarity: It could help scientists unlock the secrets of muscle growth and muscle deterioration. Research on adults who share Liam's condition could lead to new treatments for debilitating ailments such as muscular dystrophy and osteoporosis.

Not to mention help us fight the more general negative effects of aging.

Immortality and Naked Mole Rats.

Naked mole rats live nine times longer than similar sized rodents. They also enjoy good health throughout there longs lives owing to cells that are particularly efficient at getting ride of damaged proteins. All in all, pretty remarkable stuff. Understanding why some organisms live longer than others is a crucial step towards prolonging our own quality of life and, eventually, our life spans themselves.

FTA: “Naked mole rats don’t show the usual deterioration of aging, such as menopause or decline in brain function,” said paper co-author Rochelle Buffenstein, Ph.D., professor of physiology at the Barshop Institute and one of the world’s leading experts on aging in naked mole rats. “They demonstrate a healthy longevity that all of us would like to emulate.”

Film trailer for Kurzweil's "Transcendent Man"

For me, Kurzweil's money in the bank... up to a point. All prediction models break down past the singularity- yet he continues to make predictions about what will come after it. Now, all that being said, I think he's broadly right. We stand at the cusp of three major revolutions (see my post about Juan Enriquez) all of which are likely to break in the next ten to twenty years. Anyone of them could fundamentally change the world. All three of them definitely will.

What kind of world will our grandkids live in? To us, it will truly seem like magic- especially on the holodeck.

Immortality!

Scientists have stopped the aging process in a whole organ for the first time! The good folks over at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University (here in New York) managed to eliminate the build up of harmful proteins inside the liver's cells. The results?

FTA: In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old, the equivalent of octogenarians in human years, cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age.
By contrast, the livers of normal mice in a control group began to fail.
The benefits of restoring the cleaning mechanisms found inside all cells could extend far beyond a single organ, says Cuervo.

Imagine being eighty and feeling twenty. Sign me up.

Headline: An Inexhaustible Source Of Neural Cells

FTA: Research scientists in Bonn have succeeded in deriving so-called brain stem cells from human embryonic stem cells. These can not only be conserved almost indefinitely in culture, but can also serve as an inexhaustible source of diverse types of neural cell. The scientists have also shown that these neural cells are capable of synaptic integration in the brain.

And more: Transplanted into the brain of a mouse, these cells made contact with the recipient brain and were subsequently able both to send and receive signals. “This is the first direct evidence that neural cells derived from human stem cells are capable of synaptic integration in the brain”, declares Dr. Philipp Koch, the original author of the study. The scientists in Bonn are now also hoping to exploit this inexhaustible cell source to study neurodegenerative diseases and possible active agents directly in human neural cells.

This is, needless to say, incredible. We have a real chance to cure several awful diseases and to repair the natural damage caused by aging.

Cure for Cancer, link to aging...

Headline: Protein That Amplifies Cell Death Discovered: Potentially A New Way To Kill Cancer Cells

Basically we're learning a lot about cell death. We can use it kill cancer by triggering the suicide impulse of a cancer cell or we can use this knowledge to *prevent* cell death entirely. This is doubly important as these things share another link, telomeres. Adding Telomeres to a cell can prevent it from reaching its kill point... but could potentially turn that healthy cell into a cancer cell. (Telomeres is present in all cancers.) But if we understand how this works, if we can give old cells an injection of telomeres, and if we can kill any cell given too much telomeres before it becomes cancer is, we have a recipe for immortality.

On the by-and-by, personally, I've no intention of dying.