Philippine Herbal Medicine

The Age of Artificial Brains

February 11, 2009 on 1:00 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off Reverse engineering the brain is just a matter of time. If we get our collective act together with respect to supporting and developing longevity science then many of us will see the age of artificial brains.

Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind:

"The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain," says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

A Preliminary Roadmap to Whole Brain Emulation

As this review shows, [whole brain emulation] on the neuronal/synaptic level requires relatively modest increases in microscopy resolution, a less trivial development of automation for scanning and image processing, a research push at the problem of inferring functional properties of neurons and synapses, and relatively businessasusual development of computational neuroscience models and computer hardware.

Functional artificial brains will bring the potential for a great many changes, such as a phase change in the nature of humanity itself, but the most interesting potential for those of us chasing personal longevity is the replacement of neurons with more reliable machinery:

Neurons made from exotic nanomaterials could one day enable humans to survive even the most horrendous accident, and as a bonus, provide amazing new capabilities.

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Burch describes how we would switch to the new brain. A daily pill would supply nanomaterials and instructions for nanobots to format new neurons and position them next to existing biological brain cells to be replaced. These changes would be unnoticeable to us, but within six months, we would be enjoying our new brain.

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Should a person with the new damage-resistant brain die in an accident, their body could be a total loss, but the brain would survive. Biological brains die within minutes after the heart stops; our new brain will simply turn itself off and wait for a new power supply.

As I examined in a post back in the achives, the major stumbling block to extreme longevity - after the necessary medical technology has been developed - is that the standard issue human brain and body are fragile. Accidents happen, and we're not well equipped to survive them. The technologies that will be developed in the decades following the culmination of the biotechnology revolution will help overcome that limitation.

It's a tough road between here and there of course: we're still struggling with the first step in the process, sufficiently good repair of aging to live into the next age of technological development. First things first, but it can't hurt to occasionally look ahead to see the golden future that awaits should we succeed in repairing the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging.

What the LifeStar Project is Presently Up To

February 11, 2009 on 1:00 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off You'll recall I mentioned the LifeStar Project initiative of the Millard Foundation recently:

The Millard Foundation principals, and by extension the LifeStar Project, differ from other large Foundations interested in aging and longevity - such as the Glenn Foundation and the Ellison Foundation - by virtue of their strong support for the "repair the damage" viewpoint that informs the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. Aging is exactly the results of an accumulation of biochemical damage acquired over time: we should be trying to directly repair that damage, not just slow down its accumulation by tinkering with genes and metabolism.

From the LifeStar website, a look at what they're presently up to:

What is needed - and does not yet exist - is a concerted, focused, competent, and fully-funded effort to finish the development of the complete set of therapies and protocols that will prevent the occurrence of the diseases of aging.

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Our focus right now is developing the basic "Foundation Document" - which will set forth the mission clearly; of course, the formal project plan and proposal will be thousands of pages and will take most of a year - and funding - to prepare. In the meantime, we are working to set forth the mission and the basic plan in a book to be published later this year, which we hope will elicit the necessary support for humanity to embark on this exciting and historic endeavor.

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this book in due course. I can't say as I agree with their apparent focus on inducing government funding and participation as the best path forward, however. I'm in the philanthropic funding camp: culture the visionaries who will pay for research and development most likely to succeed, bootstrap the proof of principle onto the table, and the rest will follow as people see what can be achieved. Involving politicians in anything, let alone something of vital importance, does not have a good track record.

Wasted Research Resources

February 11, 2009 on 1:00 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off Wherever you see the heavy hand of government, you can be sure there is a great deal of waste: activities taking place that provide no great benefit. They are there to pad a budget, or as the result of political favor, and certainly wouldn't be undertaken in a more competitive environment. People take up occupations they probably shouldn't be in, and people who could be doing more productive work elsewhere sideline themselves.

Given that something like a third of all medical research in the US is funded by the US government, one would expect to see a great deal of useless research - programs and studies that have no real end beyond consuming dollars and provide second-class information that doesn't advance the boundaries of the possible. Which is exactly the case.

Take this for example:

Thomas B. Shea, PhD, of the Center for Cellular Neurobiology; Neurodegeneration Research University of Massachusetts, Lowell and his research team have carried out a number of laboratory studies demonstrating that drinking apple juice helped mice perform better than normal in maze trials, and prevented the decline in performance that was otherwise observed as these mice aged.

In the most recent study Shea and his team demonstrated that mice receiving the human equivalent of 2 glasses of apple juice per day for 1 month produced less of a small protein fragment, called "beta-amyloid" that is responsible for forming the "senile plaques" that are commonly found in brains of individuals suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

We live in an age of stem cells, cell cultures, rapidly pulling apart biochemistry to establish mechanisms, and designer drugs. Is it not plausible that this sort of work linked above should be beneath someone who is looking to make an actual difference to the future of medicine? Would any self-respecting biotech startup start there? If you're into pulling down government grant funds (or selling food products), then it might be your thing: you could keep on running mouse studies on random dietary alteration after random dietary alteration from here until doomsday. All a complete waste of time in comparison to more modern methods and lines of research.

This sort of work is why I'm always dubious of any government funding budget for science. There's no incentive for it to go towards research that will actually make a difference, and every incentive for it to be wasted on people who could be accomplishing better work elsewhere, or on tasks that only exist in order to fill out a budget.

Magical Thinking at Work

February 11, 2009 on 1:00 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off In a free world you'll find high-profile freeloaders, gleefully exploiting the human tendency towards magical thinking by adopting, misusing, and ultimately corrupting the best-known terms made popular by progress in medical science. This is particularly widespread and pernicious in the "anti-aging" marketplace, or indeed anything to do with cosmetics products.

The scientific method is the cure for problems caused by magical thinking, such as a lack of progress towards better lives, and all the limitations - dramatic or trivial - that stem from an incorrect understanding of the way in which the world works. To make progress happen, you must tackle complex systems in a methodical way: propose, explore, test, verify, record, repeat. But that requires more work than merely guessing, and so there will always be some market for those willing to take the "shortcut" to the wrong answer. When the wrong answer doesn't have clear, obvious and rapid bad consequences attatched to it, magical thinking will prosper. Such is the downside of human enonomic preferences - there is always a market for "incorrect" when "incorrect" is sold more cheaply than "correct."

There is no perfect solution to the issue of short-sighted fools who've found a way to make money through flaws in human nature and the poor choices of others, and along the way make life difficult for people who are aiming at real progress. You can - and should - shame them for their idiocy, and you can - and should - do your own due diligence for any product you buy, but any sort of law or proscription will always wind up causing more harm than good. The FDA is the end result of just such an impetus to regulate and prohibit, and it's probably causing more harm to scientific progress in medicine than any other single source in the world.

I noticed a particularly outrageous example of Star-Trek-like bio-babble associated with an "anti-aging" cosmetics product today:

The list of ingredients is certainly staggering - but for no other reason than that their very names sound as if they were dreamed up by a group of stoned science students, each trying to outdo the last with a more ridiculous suggestion: Phyto-CelTec Malus Domestica, Anti-Cyto Stressor, Happybelle, Nano-Claire GY.

Seriously? I feel like saying: 'Pull the other one, it's got Happybelles on it.' And that's before I read the bit that tells me this is: 'The first cosmetic product that contains stem cells from the rare Uttwiller Spatlauber Swiss apple, so rare that only three trees remain in existence!'

Apparently 'stem cells' from this tree - yes, apple trees do have stem cells too, but only a few years ago, I bet they'd just have called it 'an extract'.

Sadly, there's a market for these sorts of near-outright falsehood, and there will continue to be a market for this sort of thing until the buyers stop buying. All these folk should be free to continue in their foolishness for so long as they care to, but feel free to let them know what you think of their actions.

Why We Need a War on Aging

February 11, 2009 on 1:00 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off Two posts on a recent presentation by philosophers Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, and biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey:

Savulescu, Bostrom and de Grey: Why we need a war on aging

There is no normal human life span, or if there is, it was very short. Life-expectancy for the ancient Romans was about 23 years; today the average life-expectancy in the world is close to 64 years. For the past 150 years, best-performance life-expectancy has increased at a very steady rate of 3 months per year.

Why We Need a War on Aging

Many people fear that a longer life would result in boredom and a gradual loss of meaning. This would be more likely if one was a solitary Methuselah. But in a world where many of those close to us also lived longer, the greatest source of human well-being - deep human relations - would remain intact and arguably grow richer as that network expanded across generations.

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And surely it is up to individuals to decide whether their lives come to lack meaning. For our part, we would take the longer life.

Our goal should be more, much more, longer and better life. We need a war on aging.

Billions of dollars have been spent preparing for a flu epidemic. The Spanish flu killed 20 million people. Aging kills 30 million every year. It is the most under-researched cause of death and suffering relative to its significance. Whatever breakthroughs occur in medicine or health care generally, at the moment we face the inevitability of ageing. That might not be necessary.

As I remarked a few days ago, the argument for longevity science to avert mass suffering and death gets less traction than it should. People care in the abstract, but unquestioningly accept what they have always known to be the case, no matter how horrible - so the deaths of tens of millions each year receives far less attention than less usual and much smaller disasters.