90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, May 12, 2018

A stealthy Harvard startup wants to reverse aging in dogs, and humans could be next...

The world’s most influential synthetic biologist is behind a new company that plans to rejuvenate dogs using gene therapy. If it works, he plans to try the same approach in people, and he might be one of the first volunteers.

The stealth startup Rejuvenate Bio, cofounded by George Church of Harvard Medical School, thinks dogs aren’t just man’s best friend but also the best way to bring age-defeating treatments to market.

The company, which has carried out preliminary tests on beagles, claims it will make animals “younger" by adding new DNA instructions to their bodies.

Its age-reversal plans build on tantalizing clues seen in simple organisms like worms and flies. Tweaking their genes can increase their life spans by double or better. Other research has shown that giving old mice blood transfusions from young ones can restore some biomarkers to youthful levels.
Harvard biologist George Church is working on technology to reverse aging in dogs and humans.

“We have already done a bunch of trials in mice and we are doing some in dogs, and then we’ll move on to humans,” Church told the podcaster Rob Reid earlier this year. The company’s other founders, CEO Daniel Oliver and science lead Noah Davidsohn, a postdoc in Church’s sprawling Boston lab, declined to be interviewed for this article.

The company’s efforts to keep its activities out of the press make it unclear how many dogs it has treated so far. In a document provided by a West Coast veterinarian, dated last June, Rejuvenate said its gene therapy had been tested on four beagles with Tufts Veterinary School in Boston. It is unclear whether wider tests are under way.

However, from public documents, a patent application filed by Harvard, interviews with investors and dog breeders, and public comments made by the founders, MIT Technology Review assembled a portrait of a life-extension startup pursuing a longevity long shot through the $72-billion-a-year US pet industry.

“Dogs are a market in and of themselves,” Church said during an event in Boston last week. “It’s not just a big organism close to humans. It’s something people will pay for, and the FDA process is much faster. We’ll do dog trials, and that’ll be a product, and that’ll pay for scaling up in human trials.”

Noah Davidsohn (left) and Daniel Oliver (right)—seen here with the dog-show announcer David Frei—have appealed to dog owners to fund an anti-aging study in pets.
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It’s still unknown if the company’s treatments do anything for dogs. If they do work, however, it might not take long for people to clamor for similar nostrums, creating riches for inventors.

The effort draws on ongoing advances in biotechnology, including the ability to edit genes. To some scientists, this progress means that mastery over aging is inevitable, although no one can say exactly how soon it will happen. The prolongation of human lifespan is “the biggest thing that is going to happen in the 21st century,” says David Sinclair, a Harvard biologist who collaborates with the Church lab. “It’s going to make what Elon Musk is doing look fairly pedestrian.”

Dog years

Rejuvenate Bio has met with investors and won a grant from the US Special Operations Command to look into “enhancement” of military dogs while Harvard is seeking a broad patent on genetic means of aging control in species including the “cow, pig, horse, cat, dog, rat, etc.”

The team hit on the idea of treating pets because proving that it’s possible to increase longevity in humans would take too long. “You don’t want to go to the FDA and say we extend life by 20 years. They’d say, ‘Great, come back in 20 years with the data,’” Church said during the event in Boston.

Instead, Rejuvenate will first try to stop fatal heart ailments common in spaniels and Doberman pinschers, amassing evidence that the concepts can work in humans too.

Lab research already provides hints that aging can be reversed. For instance, scientists can “reprogram” any cell to take on the type of youthful state seen in an embryo. But turning back the aging program in animals is not as easy because we’re made up of trillions of specialized cells acting in concert, not just one floating in a dish. “I don’t think we are even near to being able to reverse the aging process as a whole in mammals,” says J. Pedro de Magalhães, whose team at the University of Liverpool maintains a database of longevity-connected genes.

Starting around 2015, Church’s large Harvard lab, also known for attempting to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth, decided to make a run at rejuvenating mice using gene therapy and newer tools like CRISPR.

Gene therapies work by inserting DNA instructions into a virus, which conveys them into an animal’s cells. In the Harvard lab, the technology has been used to modulate gene activity in old mice—either increasing or lowering it—in an effort to return certain molecules to levels seen in younger, healthy animals.
A flyer promoting a gene-therapy study in pet dogs says technology can make them “younger.”

The lab started working through a pipeline of more than 60 different gene therapies, which it is testing on old mice, alone and in combinations. The Harvard group now plans to publish a scientific report on a technique that extends rodents’ lives by modifying two genes to act on four major diseases of aging: heart and kidney failure, obesity, and diabetes. According to Church, the results are “pretty eye-popping.”

Any age you want

In a January presentation about his project at Harvard, Davidsohn closed by displaying a picture of a white-bearded Church as he is now and another as he was decades ago, hair still auburn. Yet the second image was labelled 2117 AD—100 years in the future.

The images reflect Church’s aspirations for true age reversal. He says he’d sign up if a treatment proved safe, or even as a guinea pig in a study. Essentially, Church has said, the objective is to “have the body and mind of a 22-year-old but the experience of a 130-year-old.”

Such ideas are finding an audience in Silicon Valley, where billionaires like Peter Thiel look upon the defeat of aging as both a personal imperative and, potentially, a huge business that would transform society. Earlier this year, for example, Davidsohn told Thiel’s Founders Fund that because scientists can already modify life spans of simpler organisms, it should be possible to do so with humans as well. He told the investors that one day “we’ll be able to control the biological clock and keep you whatever age you...

England has been culturally enriched by the blessings of diversity.

The identities and ethnicity of the mob have been scrubbed from the few news reports. The attack took place outside an Afghan restaurant in Alum Rock area of Birmingham. The 2011 population census recorded Alum Rock as having the highest Muslim population in migrant-heavy Birmingham.

This is the shocking moment a gang of armed thugs smash up a Mercedes before beating a defenceless man to the ground outside an Afghan restaurant.
Around 20 men wielding hammers, cricket bats and planks of wood were caught on video smashing car windows and attacking members of the public outside Kabul Darbar in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham.
Dramatic footage showed one man with blood pouring from his head after being chased down and beaten senseless by the mob.
A member of the gang was also seen jumping up and down on the bonnet of the Mercedes while another shattered its brake lights with a hammer, before several men fled the scene in two cars.

This is the shocking moment a gang of armed thugs smash up a Mercedes before beating a defenceless man to the ground outside an Afghan restaurant....

In my previous two-part article titled " The Exceptional Cuban Underwater City ," I argued that the existence of a city at a depth of over 2,000 feet (609 meters) below sea level off the coast of Cuba could be explained by the Caribbean Basin having been dry and habitable when the city was built.

Toward the end of the second part of the article, I suggested that the Taino flood myth describing "how the sea was created" was referring to not the creation of the world's oceans, but the Caribbean Sea in particular, and the land Zuania that the storytellers said was flooded was not South America but was instead the Caribbean Basin.

My theory posited that the Caribbean Basin had plausibly been dry during the existence of behaviorally modern man—an intriguing possibility that could not be ruled out. In this article, I will attempt to provide hard evidence to demonstrate it.

The First Steps Towards Discovery

In the early 17th century, the first telescopes were invented. Like many useful inventions, they were initially regarded as either mere toys or novelties. Later on, the militaries of the time realized that the telescope could be used to detect the coming of ships over the horizon before they could be noticed by the naked eye. But it was not until Galileo Galilei pointed this new invention at the heavens above that the telescope was actually used for what we today most associate it with—observational astronomy.

Though in the long run the new findings that the telescope unveiled came to revolutionize astronomy, awakening it from its Ptolemaic slumber, the astronomers and scholars contemporary with Galileo viewed his discoveries with a hard-headed skepticism at best and hostility at worst. Most surprisingly, some scholars of his day rejected his conclusions not by arguing that Galileo's interpretations of the evidence he had collected were faulty, but rather that the images formed by the telescopes he used were themselves flawed. In other words, the craters on the moon and the blemishes on the sun that he observed were not really there, but were image artifacts produced by the telescope itself.

Over time, such views were discarded as the telescope repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to generate accurate images, and both the scientific community and the average person take for granted that when one peers into the eyepiece of a telescope, “what you see is what you get.” Perhaps our faith in this instrument has gone too far in the opposite extreme, for it is commonplace for scientists to speculate on such profound questions as the creation and ultimate fate of our universe using only the images that appear on an instrument even though the objects that are being viewed appear as they did eons ago and can never be inspected up close due to their distance.

Advancing Technology Unveils Mysteries

It is a common aphorism that we know less about the seafloor than the surface of the moon, and even the other planets in our solar system for that matter. As recently as a decade ago, detailed seafloor maps were expensive and time-consuming to access for the average person. Worse yet, even though the information was there, it was difficult to interpret, as the information was represented in the form of two-dimensional contour maps, whereas we naturally perceive the world through three dimensions. So an interesting feature that was found on the seafloor would only appear as a rather unusual arrangement of contour lines on a map, and such an arrangement could easily be overlooked even by the trained observer let alone an average person.

However, one may fairly say that all of this has changed with Google Earth. Using Google Earth (a virtual globe, map, and geographical information program), anyone with an internet connection and a computer can view the surface of the Earth's land and sea like never before. This is not to say that Google Earth is an infallible instrument, as every instrument has its flaws; for instance, the refracting telescopes used by Galileo to study the heavens law produce a...

He is burning through tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer cash every month as he tries to find something substantive to attack the Trump presidency with. So far Robert Mueller has come up with nothing beyond a couple of minor plea deals largely unrelated to President Trump (and even those are now crumbling after closer legal scrutiny) and those who backed him are said to be growing angry over how little Mueller has so far delivered.

“The clock is really ticking on Mueller now. His reputation, legacy, whatever you want to call it, it’s all on the line. He’s under enormous pressure. His investigation has been a huge failure.”

So says a longtime Congressional staffer with years of experience surviving the D.C. swamp.

“Mueller’s getting desperate. He’s frustrated. Some say he’s despondent. He’s pulling people off of airport runways in gotcha interview sessions. Kicking in doors, showing up unannounced at workplaces, monitoring private conversations, travel, everything. It’s bizarre, police-state type stuff that’s going on. The public is tired of it all but they don’t even know how bad Mueller’s behavior has been and how it’s getting worse. The entire investigation is out of control. The media has been covering up just how abusive it really is.

“Mueller has always been a rat but now he’s a rat in a corner and that means he’s at his most dangerous. Behind closed doors, Dems are screaming for his head. They pinned so much of 2018 on him and he hasn’t given them sh*t. The polling shows the gap between Republicans and Democrats has been reduced to a near tie which means Trump is overperforming the historical party-in-power trend big time. 2018 was supposed to be a Midterm bloodbath but it isn’t shaping up to be that.

“The Special Counsel appointment should never have been allowed. It was Establishment Republicans who let that happen. They’re paying a price for that too. Trump is doing everything he said he would. That includes going to war with the swamp. No president in our lifetime has ever done that. Even some Democrat voters are learning to appreciate what’s happening. Imagine if Republicans were to actually pick up more seats than they lost? It might happen.....