Tuesday, April 07, 2015

once there was philanthropy, now the 1% seeks immortality...,


WaPo |  “If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental, then you’ll work only on very incremental things. It’s self-fulfilling,” Thiel, who is 47 and estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, said in an interview. “It’s those who have an optimism about what can be done that will shape the future.”

He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”

8 comments:

Constructive_Feedback said...

[quote] it will be interesting to see whether and how Americans either hang-together or divide themselves up into their respective little identity bands and hang together.[/quote]

Iraq (Kurds, Shai, Sunni) provides a roadmap about what to expect. Those who have disarmed themselves of their institutions and failed to develop their children as job #1 will be the first to go.

CNu said...

So..., does the Federal Gubmint have to be dismantled, its command control communications and intelligence infrastructure bombed back to the stone age, and the entire DoD (Baath military) sent home with no pay and unemployed for a few years prior to this apocalypse jumping off?

In conjunction with total dismantling of governance, store shelves need to be bare and all the church and charitable organizations picked clean and rendered incapable of providing any humanitarian relief. As DD is quick to point out, the U.S. remains the global food production super power with no end to that agrarian hegemony in sight.

Finally, with even the Southern Baptists trending in the direction of Pope Francis http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/southern-baptists-wrestle-with-the-sin-of-racism/389808/ - I'm not so sure things are as far along into hell-in-a-handbasket as your lament presupposes.

Maybe you should stop inhaling those Marcus Garvey meets Pat Buchanan political fumes you been huffing lo these many years, and come on out into the fresh air of an integrated Roman Catholic parish/diocese and do a little constructive community service. Jes sayyin....,

John Kurman said...

"Waah! Waah! Wanna live forever!" Great Britain spent £100,000,000 to lose 13 colonies. How much will Thiel blow?

Tom said...

They get confused. Obviously PayPal is an easier problem than immortality, but the money has a psychedelic effect on their brains.

CNu said...

Those senolytics are kind of exciting...,

John Kurman said...

Agreed. I can't wait to die healthy.

John Kurman said...

Longer answer. Pretty sure all longevity genes switch to on. Epigeneering? Shrug. That ain't the point is it? Me? 150 years allows me to get the good stuff to the right people. That's what I built for. Information conduit. You wanna upgrade me? Cool. Live forever fuck that baby poop.

CNu said...

The Bourne Legacy - art imitating life:An enzyme borrowed from the CRISPR/Cas genome-editing system can be used to modify epigenetic marks to flip on gene enhancers and promoters and thereby manipulate gene expression, according to a report published in Nature Biotechnology today (April 6). The tool works by facilitating the acetylation of histones at specific promoters or enhancers.

“There are already drugs that will affect enhancers across the whole genome, but that’s like scorching the earth,” Timothy Reddy, a bioinformatician at Duke University and coauthor of the study, said in a press release. “I wanted to develop tools to go in and modify very specific epigenetic marks in very specific places to find out what individual enhancers are doing.”http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42608/title/CRISPR-Enabled-Epigenome-Editing/
https://youtu.be/FuJIdqy6Xn4

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