Lifeboat Foundation

Harvard you’re wrong. Why? Harvard needs to explain to all the families with genetic mutations tied to various types of cancer, cancer survivors who carry a genetic mutation, or the workers who were exposed at work to radiation or carcinogens how their smoking caused their cancer when they never smoked in their entire life. However, how do you explain that to the countless million patients, survivors, and loved ones who lost someone to cancer that never smoked or were exposed to smoking.

As many as 40 percent of cancer cases, and half of cancer deaths, come down to things people could easily change, researchers said Thursday.

While Americans often worry about whether chemicals, pollution or other factors out of their control cause cancer, the new analysis shows otherwise: People are firmly in charge of much of their own risk of cancer.

Continue reading “Here’s How to Prevent Half of Cancer Deaths” »

This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I’ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It’s out in print today too.

When John Lennon released “Imagine” in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist — only three years earlier, his song “Revolution” had shrugged off people who “go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.” But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, “Imagine” eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fever dream.

Left Behind, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out “Imagine” as a weapon in Satan’s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia — the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens — who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.

Continue reading “The Future Is Now for the Transhumanist Party” »

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.

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.

What are epigenetic modifications, and how might they play out across generations?

By Jen Christiansen on May 12, 2016.

Very nice.

The Food and Drug Administration has given so-called “breakthrough” status to a treatment that uses the once-feared polio virus to target aggressive forms of brain cancer, in the hope of speeding it to market.

The therapy, developed at Duke University, hopes to use the virus’ debilitating properties to help fight cancer instead of harming its host, CBS News reported Thursday.

Continue reading “FDA fast-tracks treatment that uses polio virus to fight brain cancer” »

Very promising. I hope within the next 10 years that Glioblastoma is eradicated.

A team from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste has obtained very promising results by applying gene therapy to glioblastoma. Tests in vitro and in vivo on mice provided very clear-cut results, and modelling demonstrates that the treatment targets at least six different points of tumour metabolism. Gene therapy, a technique that selectively attacks a tumour, might provide hope in the fight against this type of deadly cancer, for which surgery is practically impossible and chemo- and radiotherapy are ineffective against very aggressive recurrences. The study was published in the journal Oncotarget.

Only a few days ago, the press (especially in English-speaking countries) enthusiastically announced the publication of a study that described in great detail the genetics of breast cancer, a discovery that according to many marks a breakthrough in the battle against this cancer. This kind of news confirms the impression that in the near future the war against cancer will be fought on the battlefields of genetics. Italy too, is working on this front. At SISSA, for example, where Antonello Mallamaci and his group have just published highly promising results on the application of gene therapy against glioblastomas, a family of brain tumours among the most common and aggressive. A diagnosis of glioblastoma is literally equal to a very imminent death sentence: “surgery is rarely curative, as these tumours insinuate themselves in healthy tissues, and also chemo- and radiotherapy have little effectiveness.

Gene expression is the process by which genetic information is used to produce proteins, which are essential for cells to function properly and fulfil their many purposes. It takes place in two distinctive steps: first the transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then the translation, in the cytoplasm. Control of gene expression is vital for cells to produce the exact proteins that are needed at the right moment. Until now, gene transcription and translation into proteins were thought to be two independent processes. Today, microbiologists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Germany) provide additional evidence that these two processes are intrinsically related and show that a protein complex called Ccr4-Not plays a key role in gene expression by acting as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm. Published in Cell Reports, these results shed light on the very mechanisms governing gene expression, a process that controls the life and death of our cells.

Gene expression refers to the biochemical processes through which the information that is stored in our genes is read like an instruction book to produce proteins that will make our cells function properly. Until now, gene expression was thought to take place in two distinctive steps: first transcription, which takes place in the nucleus, then translation, in the cytoplasm. Today, research led by UNIGE and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory shows that transcription and translation are intrinsically related and continuously influence one another. To do so, a very efficient communication within the cell, between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, is essential. This dialogue is made possible by a protein complex called Ccr4-Not, which globally determines the cell translational capacity.

Gene expression: a two-way street

Martine Collart and her team from the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine discovered in 2014 that the Ccr4-Not complex enables the cytoplasm to provide information to the nucleus during translation. Today, they prove that it is a two way-street communication as the nucleus also communicates information to the cytoplasm at all stages of gene expression, thanks to Ccr4-Not. This complex acts as a messenger between the nucleus and the cytoplasm to ensure that both transcription and translation levels are well adapted. It is also able to enhance translation to compensate for transcriptional stress, thus ensuring that gene expression remains well-balanced.

I remember years ago when researchers identified that families with high rates for severe allergies also had high rates of cancer. Today, we talk about cancer and immunology as an intertwined dependency. Just means we’re still understanding cancer, genetic mutations, and the trigger/s in causing cancer among families and individual.

Scientists say the NLCR5 gene allows cancer cells to escape the immune system. A test for the biomarker may predict how long a cancer patient can survive.