Surprise, Surprise
July 04 2008   |   Permanent Link
From the PHG Foundation: "a new publication in the journal Cell Stem Cell has claimed that countries with less restrictive regulatory regimes account for a disproportionately high level of scientific publications, supporting concerns cited by many prominent US researchers that without easing of current legislation such as current restrictions on the use of federal funding for stem cell research [the] country will lag behind in this area of medicine. Countries dubbed 'overperforming' in stem cell publications were Singapore, the UK, Israel, China and Australia, whilst 'underperformers' included the US, Japan, France and Switzerland ... The author concludes that the most highly performing countries had generally permissive policy environments for [embryonic stem cell] research, whilst those lagging behind were characterised by 'protracted policy debates and ongoing uncertainty, regardless of their current policy environment'." No great shock there. The more you make it hard to move forward, the less moving forward there will be. This has little to do with degrees of public funding, and everything to do with levels of regulation.

The Bionic Human Checklist
July 04 2008   |   Permanent Link
We're a fair way from being able to produce a complete replacement for the functions of human body - a very sane goal if you'd like to live a lot longer - but the checklist of what can be replaced is getting longer by the month. From the New Scientist: "More and more of the body is becoming, if not obsolete, then certainly replaceable. But which of our body parts can be engineered today, and which will we have to make do with? ... Implants that copy the simple structural job of skeletal tissue are the easiest to build ... by culturing normal or stem cells it is now possible to grow pretty much any type of tissue. Some complete organs have already been grown from scratch. ... Other parts of the body's plumbing network, such as the lymphatic system, are becoming replaceable too. Last year, mice were implanted with an artificial lymph node made from collagen and cells taken from a gland in newborn mice. ... Implants can also help the blind see, by stimulating the retina, optic nerve or the brain's visual cortex. ... Other research seeks to replace entire limbs with robotic replacements."

Ouroboros on Michael Rose's SENSE
July 03 2008   |   Permanent Link
Over at Ouroboros, comments on SENSE, Michael Rose's consideration of his research as it impacts the "repair damage to cure aging" viewpoint of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS): "Rose concludes that life-extension therapeutics must address the issue of age-specific adaptation in order to be effective ... In the evolutionary view, increasing risk of mortality is the consequence of a failure to adapt to the selection-pressure landscape specific to a particular age; because post-reproductive lifespan is largely (but not always) masked from selection, it is easy to see how such age-specific failures of adaptation might occur. The 'mortality plateaus' to which the author refers are life-history periods of constant, rather than increasing, mortality risk. Rose argues that the existence of these plateaus in the survival curves of many species imply that accumulation of irreparable damage is - at the very least - not the whole cause of aging. Therefore, the argument goes, reversing this damage cannot be sufficient to prevent or reverse aging as such."

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