George Church is pushing the boundaries of science!
Harvard biologist George Church wants to reverse aging, reanimate a mammoth, and build an entire human genome from scratch. What makes him tick?
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2713
Should we synthesise a human genome?
Posted in biotech/medical, ethics, genetics, law
As specialists gather in private to discuss a grand plan for constructing a human genome, Drew Endy and Laurie Zoloth argue that such an enormous moral gesture should not be discussed behind closed doors.
Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images.
At Harvard today, an invitation-only group of about 150 scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, met to discuss if and how to construct from scratch an entire human genome – the heritable genetic material that in nature is transferred from parents to children.
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On Reddit Futurology today!
The Major Mouse Testing Program is an ambitious project of the International Longevity Alliance, featuring an international team of scientists and advocates testing therapies against aging decline. This experiment is is lead by world class stem cell researcher Dr Alexandra Stolzing and was inspired by our scientific advisor and colleague Dr Aubrey De Grey.
The Major Mouse Testing Program is seeking to speed up scientific progress in the field of regenerative medicine and bio-gerontology. After ILA experts conducted an analysis of delays preventing the development of life extension technologies, it was shown that a serious problem was the lack of robust animal data for the potential of different compounds to promote health and extend maximum lifespan. Without this data promising interventions cannot enter clinical trials and become available to the general public.
The MMTP is currently running a crowdfunding campaign at https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/the-major-mouse-testing-program/
George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an organizer of the proposed project, said there had been a misunderstanding. The project was not aimed at creating people, just cells, and would not be restricted to human genomes, he said. Rather it would aim to improve the ability to synthesize DNA in general, which could be applied to various animals, plants and microbes.
The project poses ethical issues about whether humans could be created without parents.
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One of the hurdles of realizing the promise of nanoparticles is that scientists can’t view where they go or how the nanoparticles interact with structures once they are inside of the body. A new technique that involves injecting an acrylamide hydrogel into organs and tissues removed from mice allows researchers to image nanoparticles more than 25 times deeper than is possible with current methods, to a depth of more than 1 millimeter. Lipids are what cause tissues to look opaque. By using the hydrogel to bind all of the molecules together except for lipids, which washed away easily, the team, led by Warren C. W. Chan, were able to make the tissues look transparent but remain intact. The work, published in ACS Nano, may help researchers be able to tell if therapy-loaded nanoparticles are delivering the cargo to the desired destination. Check out the video below.
ExclusiveTechnologies.
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Nice!!!!
Develop microscopic vehicles that can carry anti-cancer drug molecules to affected cells
Indian scientists are closing in on a breakthrough in cancer treatment that will see a variety of cancers being cured using just a series of injections without side-effects on the body, that is characteristic of chemotherapy. The new technology has the potential to completely bypass chemotherapy.
A team of scientists from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru are on the verge of developing just such a non-invasive technique to deal with cancers.
Making Holographic Apps more secured and efficient.
Since its birth, holograms have been extensively used to serve security systems and related purposes. The making of a hologram, dissecting it to pieces and again rejoining the blocks involves a steady orientation of lenses which encodes the information with depth perception that could be deciphered later according to requirement.
It’s hard to imagine a 21st century city running smooth without an immense use of holograms, small or big sized 2D cards with 3D engraved pictures that are present in credit cards, grocery objects, books, biomedical devices and in other objects requiring retrievable information to be stored.
In terms of concealing product information, these sticker based fancy stuffs were up to the mark, until technology escalated beyond imagination. Even a previously measured safe encryption suffered from threat and these tools became fragile. Researchers initialized various approaches to hit the safest and complex path, among which nanotechnology had an answer in store for them. A research team from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences had recently forced polarization to concise holograms, comprising of tiny light-polarization sensitive nanostructures to generate numerous ones depending upon the polarization configuration of light.
A team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reported a research trifecta. They discovered a new vulnerable site on HIV for a vaccine to target, a broadly neutralizing antibody that binds to that target site, and how the antibody stops the virus from infecting a cell. The study was led by scientists at the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of NIH.
The new target is a part of HIV called the fusion peptide, a string of eight amino acids that helps the virus fuse with a cell to infect it. The fusion peptide has a much simpler structure than other sites on the virus that HIV vaccine scientists have studied.
The scientists first examined the blood of an HIV-infected person to explore its ability to stop the virus from infecting cells. The blood was good at neutralizing HIV but did not target any of the vulnerable spots on the virus where broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies (bnAbs) were known to bind.
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Interesting…
Odd, but definitely interesting.
For a long time it has been thought that all eukaryotes — organisms in which the DNA is enclosed in a membrane including almost all life we can see — had to contain mitochondria.
Known as the “power house” of the cell, these little subunits within the cell provide the organisms with energy and were thus thought to be essential.
A RUSSIAN man who has a debilitating illness has volunteered to become the first person to undergo a head transplant – but experts say the side effects of the procedure could be worse than death.
Valery Spiridonov, 30, suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, a rare form of spinal muscular atrophy.
The controversial operation will involve cooling his head to around 12 degrees Celsius, cutting it from his body and connecting it to the donated body of a brain-dead person.
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