Intriguing article in MIT Technology Review, “Transplant surgeons revive hearts after death.”

These days, we’re familiar with heart transplants from brain-dead patients into others needing a new, healthy heart.

But in a new experimental breakthrough, successes have been achieved in transplanting the hearts of those not brain dead. Yes, there are procedural and ethical issues involved.

Mind you, this involves actual human hearts, not 3-D printed replacements, or bits of heart tissue grown in labs from human stem cells.

But the possibility raises some issues of medical ethics to be explored: if the donor is not brain dead, when and by what criteria can the heart be removed?

Rather than dig in deeply here, I’ll refer you to the article itself. You’ll see a “reanimated” donated heart actually beating outside the bodies of both donor and recipient.  Here's the link.

The  method used in my medical techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, depends on human stem cells from adult donors (Induced Pluripotent Cells—IPS cells) rather than tissue from aborted fetuses--a topic very much in the news recently because of a series of videos.

(Want to know more  about Induced Pluripotent Cells? Here’s a link to a basic Wikipedia overview.) 

In case the link doesn't work, here it is in open form:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell

 That said, an alternate research strand is very much in the news these days—fetal tissue research using organs from aborted fetuses.

Reasonable people can—and most definitely do, strongly—disagree on the medical ethics not only of abortion but also of “organ harvesting” from the resulting fetus. The fields of bio-engineering, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine are moving very fast, and  medical ethicists are struggling to keep apace.

I expect you’ve heard about—and perhaps watched—the series of videos made by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group recording interviews with Planned Parenthood staffers, as well as shots of the product of abortions induced in Planned Parenthood  facilities. 

In A REMEDY FOR DEATH,   I  raised different but related issues involving bio-engineering, organ harvesting and other issues--different because the plot-line does not involve aborted fetuses. But it does  touch upon some of the same issues of medical ethics and biological research ethics as are raised by these videos and resulting discussions.

For  an informative, balanced article on this issue of using aborted human fetal tissue in research, I suggest Sarah Kliff’s piece in VOX: "The Planned Parenthood controversy over aborted fetus body parts, explained"

That link repeated, in case it didn't come through:  http://www.vox.com/2015/7/14/8964513/planned-parenthood-aborted-fetuses

At last!  Now that the Baby Boomers and even the Millennials are just beginning to think those thoughts of "Am I getting old? Not me!"  Now comes “Compound 14”—a recently discovered molecule triggers  “a chain reaction of events in the cell that . . . well, to make  long technical story short, tricks human body cells into “thinking” the body has just been for a good, solid workout.

Or, put differently, “ZMP” the master regulator, sends the signal that activates “AMPK” the cells’ central energy censor. Got that?

Bottom line: alas, Compound 14 isn’t for sale yet at the corner drugstore, but the work, headed by Ali Tavassoli, a professor of chemical biology, and Felino Cagampang, an associate professor in integrative physiology, is underway at the University of Southhampton in England.

The study, published in the journal, Chemistry and Biology, details how Compound 14 was given to two groups of mice, and the fat, chubby group lost five percent of body weight after receiving it for seven days.

Is that not a big step toward the Fountain of Youth (at least for mice)!

Who knows what wonders await us, thanks to the tools of bio-engineering and synthetic biology . . . provided somehow we can slow the human aging process so we can all hang around until those wonders do arrive.

If you're not ready for the complete paper in the scientific journal, check out this article in the Washington Post by Ariana Eunjung Cha

We’ve been hearing a lot recently about how tissues and organs from aborted human fetuses are valued for medical experiments. (More on that another time here.)

Those “harvested” tissues are useful, but come from aborted fetuses . . . an issue which raises a host of legal and ethical issues, and offends many people. 

What if there were a way to generate human brain tissue, not from a fetus, but from stem cells generated from healthy adults?

In other words, suppose you could let a lab technician take a small sample of the flesh on your hand, and, hey presto! you might soon have small globules of brain tissue for researchers to work with.

But then the question, Why would you want a brain in a jar? One reason, among many: if you or your children were suffering from neurological disorders or brain abnormalities, such as autism. Then there might be no need to take actual brain samples . . .  or to wait while those abnormalities are studied in experimental animals (which may or may not provide results transferable to humans).

It’s not happening full-out just yet, but the work is underway at Cambridge University by Dr. Madeline Lancaster and team. Here’s the link to the article at Singularity Hub

Another question that may come to mind: How does the possibility of growing replica human brains tie in with my medical bio-technothriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH: Playing God with body, soul and biotech?  

Excelloent question! You'll find the answer at the top of this blog, or you can can check it out on Amazon.  I hope you will.

“Have scientists found the key to eternal life?”—an article in DailyMail.com, July 24 2015

In a study at Northwestern University, Dr. Morimoto and team found that a certain strain of worms  begin the downhill slide to aging when they reach their equivalent of puberty.

It seems the same gene that causes this effect is also present in humans. Implication (still being studied): perhaps there is a way, using biochemical and genetic methods, to switch the  mechanism that sends the signal: “time to start aging!”  That is, to reverse the aging process, perhaps opening the way to radical life extension.

Is there a way we can prevent that aging switch from flipping—or, even better for the rest of us,  flip the switch in reverse?  Is it a valid step toward reversing the aging process, even toward human immortality?  Who knows? Stay tuned.

Here’s the link to the Daily Mail article

Hyperbaric oxygen treatment and Michael Crichton-- the two leading keywords by which people find their way to this blog. Hardly a day passes without one or the other or both listed as "referral" keywords.

Michael Crichton

 Michael Crichton  had long been one of my favorite authors--some have termed him the founder or king of the science techno-thrillers-- and so I when I find something interesting on him I usually link to it from this blog. (Sadly, he died in 2008.)  

There was quite a flurry of pieces about him in the past few months, in part because his earliest thrillers, pubished under the name John Lange, had been re-published. Partly also because of the new sequel to JURASSIC PARK, as well as a remake of WESTWORLD.

 Here's the link to an old interview with him, click to go to that page in this blog.  That will lead to some of the other Crichton articles.

But the two Michael Crichton-related posts that draw the most relate to articles on the Michael Crichton conspiracy.  Why those draw highest, over more informative interviews with him, I have no idea. 

 Hyperbaric oxygen therapy -- HBOT

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy plays a key role in the plot-line of my science techno-thriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH, so I've been posting here links to articles from my older research, as well as newer peices that I run upon.

 This week (January 6, 2015) the Wall Street Journal ran quite a long article, "Patients take pure oxygen in off-label treatments" link. I had not known that some parents of children with autism have been using HBOT as an off-label treatment.

HBOT is also being used for FDA-approved uses including nonhealing wounds and, of course, the orignal use--treating divers with decompression problems.

Not in this article, but I have heard of other studies using high pressure oxygen therapy in fields including regenerative medicine, rejuvenating aging bodies and body parts, and other anti-aging therapies

But HBOT is being used experimentally with, in addition to treating autism, sports injuries, strokes, and various athletic injuries.  

Also, according to that WSJ article, the Defense Department has also studied the use of HBOT to treat post-concussion symptoms. DOD found no significant difference between the test group (who did receive HBO), and a control group, the members of which did not actually receive pure oxygen but were told they did.

However, seems to me that by telling the control group that little fib, the researchers were casting a shadow over the whole test. Why? I don't have time or space to get into it here, but a number of recent studies have explored the placebo and "nocebo" effect. Those studies (still underway) suggest that simply by telling the control people they were getting the treatment they may have unconsciously improved themselves.  (Granted, that is just my speculation; I haven't seen the full study. But, based on what I do know, seems to me the study invalidated itself.)

A few months ago, I wrote two posts on the so-called "Michael Crichton Conspiracy" on my main blog, MichaelMcGaulley.com.   Here's the link to the first of my posts  Here's the link to the second article

A strange thing happened: since then, these two topics have been right at the top of my most clicked-to items. It seems that hardly a day or so goes by without someone from somewhere in the world pulling them up.  Michael Crichton was one of my favorite writers, as he was for a few million others, as well, so I thought I'd pass them on.

Those two posts are also among the often-clicked on another of my blogs, this for my technothriller A REMEDY FOR DEATH.

That's by way of background for today's post, a pair of interviews with Michael Crichton in which he discussed his books PREY and TIMELINE. They're not new--as, sadly, he died suddenly in 2008-- but they are new to me, and I thought you'd find them of interest, as well.  It's not clear whether they were originally separate interviews.

Here's the link to the interviews in BookBrowse

The article begins with a fascinating experiment conducted by Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer back in 1981. In it, a group of elderly men were brought to a site for a week where they were induced to imagine themselves as they might have been a couple of decades earlier.  The result? As Prof. Langer phrased it, the men in the experiment "'put their minds in an earlier time,' and their bodies went along for the ride."

To be sure, some other academics reject the reported results, for a variety of reasons, including the design of the experiment.  

Others, I gather, would reject it and other experiments on the grounds "Everyone knows that sort of stuff is impossible.". Prof. Langer responds, "To which I would say, 'There's no discipline that is complete.  If current-day physics can't explain these things, maybe there are changes that need to be made in physics,'"

Yes, her work also addresess the issue of placebos (and the opposite: nocebos), and the effect of expectations. I won't get into that here, just encourage you to read the whole article.  

Here's the link: NYTimes article.  It will also appear in the NYTimes Magazine's paper issue of October 26, 2014

British scientists have now taken cells from a mouse embryo and, "flipped a genetic switch" in the DNA, and then injected the product into another mouse with a defective organ, where those injected cells grew into the whole organ of another mouse. (In that case, it was the thymus, which relates to  the immune system.)

The work was done under the lead of Prof. Clare Blackburn, of the Medical Research Council / Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. The most complete article I've found is by Rebecca Smith, medical editor of London's Daily Telegraph. Here's the link

You can also find a shorter piece by Pranav Dixit in Gizmodo. Here's that link

 If you've keeping up with this blog, you'll have seen other stories about growing replacement organs. So what's distinctive about this?  This is reportedly the first time the organ has been grown inside the target creature.

When can we expect to find something like this happening for humans?  According to one scientist, maybe ten years and tens of millions of pounds for research. But by then, odds are the products will relate to other elements in the quest for radical life extension.

The article raises this question: "Are myths about  the rejuvenating powers of young blood true?"

The answer, as I discern it from this and other literature: Definitely yes and no.

Not long ago here we posted about some research in Lund, Sweden attempting to rejuvenate blood (of mice) by reprogramming stem cells.  Link to that post and the article on rejuvenating blood    The broader topic there, of course, is the search for methods of achieving radical life extension.

My point is that the idea of recapturing youth by somehow rejuvenating via young blood is very new-- witness the Swedish research.  But it is also very old, as recounted in this article in the Briish AEON, which begins way back in the myths of ancient times and carries through to what's happening now. Oh yes, vampires are covered in it, as well.  Here's the link to that AEON article