Lifeboat Foundation

Where there is water, there is life. This is a statement that has been reaffirmed over and over again. Whether it is in the acidic waters surrounding volcanoes or in the dark and frozen wastes of the icy Antarctic, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. That’s what makes one of the most recent finds by NASA’s Curiosity rover so amazing—Evidence of liquid water on Mars. And even more recently (this month, in fact), NASA announced that it had confirmed evidence of water flowing on Mars.

Granted, this “flowing water” is really more of a trickle (damp soil, if you will), but the find is still exciting for a number of reasons.

Continue reading “Science Explained: The Possibility of Life on Mars” »

As the biotech revolution accelerates globally, the US could be getting left behind on key technological advances: namely, human genetic modification.

A Congressional ban on human germline modification has “drawn new lines in the sand” on gene editing legislation, argues a paper published today in Science by Harvard law and bioethics professor I. Glenn Cohen and leading biologist Eli Adashi of Brown University. They say that without a course correction, “the United States is ceding its leadership in this arena to other nations.”

Germline gene modification is the act of making heritable changes to early stage human embryos or sex cells that can be passed down to the next generation, and it will be banned in the US. This is different from somatic gene editing, which is editing cells of humans that have already been born.

Continue reading “Scientists Argue the US Ban on Human Gene Editing Will Leave It Behind” »

G. Owen Schaefer, National University of Singapore

Would you want to alter your future children’s genes to make them smarter, stronger or better-looking? As the state of the science brings prospects like these closer to reality, an international debate has been raging over the ethics of enhancing human capacities with biotechnologies such as so-called smart pills, brain implants and gene editing. This discussion has only intensified in the past year with the advent of the CRISPR-cas9 gene editing tool, which raises the specter of tinkering with our DNA to improve traits like intelligence, athleticism and even moral reasoning.

Mark Zuckerberg reveals Facebook’s VR plans are just a stepping stone to TELEPATHY…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg told Bloomberg that they plan to use virtual reality to connect all the 7 billion people in the world and believes this technology will lead to a new frontier — telepathy.

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In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monster that is part lion, part goat and part snake. Far from reality, sure, but the idea of mixing and matching creatures is real — and has ethicists concerned.

That’s because last week, the National Institutes of Health proposed a new policy to allow funding for scientists who are creating chimeras — the non-mythological kind. In genetics, chimeras are organisms formed when human stem cells are combined with tissues of other animals, with the potential for creating human-animal hybrids.

Continue reading “The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?” »

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle say that we need to act fast to implement a privacy and security framework to prevent our brain signals from being used against us before the technology really takes off…

Brain-computer interfaces offer new applications for our brain signals—and a new vector for security and privacy violations.

Could humans regrow limbs? Genetic switches for regenerating tissue are traced back 420 million years…

But ultimately the researchers hope to see if the mechanism could be exploited to allow humans to regenerate limbs themselves, although they warn it could be several decades before that is possible.

Dr Yin said: ‘It depends on the pace of discovery, which is heavily dependent on funding.’

Continue reading “Scientists have found a set of genetic switches needed to regrow limbs” »

Russian scientists said they have artificially produced a unique molecule that can rapidly regenerate damaged human tissue, boasting both antibacterial and antiviral defenses, as well as stem cell growth stimulation.

The peptide, Acegram, was developed at a laboratory in the Russian Ural city of Chelyabinsk.

Continue reading “Russian scientists speed up human tissue regeneration with supermolecule” »

The US Department of Defense has developed a portable, on-demand biopharmaceutical production system that could be used in warzones to make treatments at point-of-care.

The platform was developed as part of a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program to provide far-forward-deployed Service members “what they need when they need it, obviating the need for individual drug stockpiling, cold storage, and complex logistics,” Tyler McQuade, program manager for DARPA’s Battlefield Medicine program, told Biopharma-Reporter.com.

The platform, developed in conjunction with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), consists of a biologics expression system engineered to secrete multiple therapeutic proteins and a millilitre-scale perfusion microfluidic platform.

Continue reading “Biologics on-demand: DARPA and MIT look to manufacture on the battlefield” »