Yesterday we attended Daniel Kraft’s lecture “Digital doctor in your pocket”. The lecture was carried out by the cool educational center Digital October here in Moscow in the framework of a non-profit project Knowledge stream. I found the event organized perfectly. This is a very rare occasion in Russia, where something is always not working. Yesterday was an exception, we were watching Daniel Kraft in HD as if he was right here sitting with us and talking about medicine. Great job, Digital October.

Nevertheless, I can’t say I enjoyed the lecture 100%. It’s such a pity, I mean, I am very fond of Daniel and what he’s doing bringing together FutureMed and his work at the Singularity University, however, I found his presentation lacking 2 major things:

1. Structure

2. Overall idea or a goal of future medicine

Daniel Kraft has presented a very good overview of existing gadgets and mobile phone apps currently used in medicine, however, the review didn’t have any structure at all and was hard to listen to. I also think that he could have given the audience a bit broader perspective on the future directions of IT technologies applied in medical care, maybe ideas for innovations, but not as nearsighted as using a drone helicopter for drug delivery in Africa. Maybe one of the reasons for that was the lack of general idea of future medicine. It was not cellar what kind of bigger goals medicine will be reaching, what kind of tasks it will be solving, weather it would be curing cancer, or making all the paraplegic people able to walk, or living longer.

I have to say though, that Daniel has done a good job making the audience learn about great stuff like Luke Arm and Dean Kamen, focused ultrasound and MRI for treating brain cancer and applying AI (its current prototypes like IBM’s Watson) to solving medical problems. It’s a terrifying thought that the majority and I mean 99,99% of Russian population has no idea even about 1/10 of what Daniel Kraft was talking about.

There was also a discussion after the lecture and it was chaired by Danila Medvedev, one of the leaders of Russian Transhumanist Movement. Danila looked good and in my opinion did a good job as a chair and a speaker. He’s becoming quite professional at this. I myself have to follow his example and practice more to become an eloquent longevity advocate. I took some pictures during and after the lecture.

The rooms were packed, which was great.

Alexei Turchin, transhumanist and a great expert in global risks.

Mikhail Batin, president of the Science for Life Extension Foundation and Alexei Turchin, his co-author of the book “Futurology”, which is being published at the moment and will become the “bible” of transhumanism.

Danila Medvedev during the discussion.

I love charts, because it’s a great way to explain complex biological processes. This chart shows what happens when our telomeres shorten. And the beauty of this series of charts created by Dr. Alexei Moskalev is that we added the definitions of biological phenomena to make the illustrations easier to understand. You are most welcome to download the pdf of the telomeres and aging chart here.

Aging biomarkers are parameters that always and in all people change during aging

It is possible to evaluate and improve therapies aimed at slowing down aging using the biomarkers of aging

The value and change dynamics of aging markers provides information about the intensity of aging processes in the cells of the patient

Aging biomarkers monitoring allows not only to diagnose various diseases, but also to prevent their development

Aging already can be slowed down at the moment. There are several scientific approaches that could lead to slowing down aging and life extension. Scientists have already been able to significantly extend lifespan of model animals. It is time to apply biogerontology knowledge in clinical practice.

In order to understand if a given therapy is effective or not, first of all we have to da all the conventional clinical tests and create the electronic health passport, and after that perform measurements of the aging biomarkers listed in the table. There indicators will provide the answer if the therapy is working.

Thereafter we can look at dozens of thousands of parameters obtained using genome and transcriptome sequencing, epigenome mapping and analysis of proteome and metabolome. Altogether these data will make anti-aging therapies more precise.

We, as well as the leaders of transhumanism all over the world, have a challenge to deal with. It is the development of a convincing advertising, agitprop content that attracts attention to our topic. We also must impel people to act in favor of radical life extension. We need video-blogs, scientific and popular science lectures, movies, ads and virus videos. We hardly have anything, and anyway if there’s something then it’s rather low quality.

On the other hand, the problem is that all the movies and presentations demonstrated in different countries did not cause much impact. The number of supporters is growing, but incredibly slow. It may seem that the flow of «natural information» about the scientific progress has to draw an educated listener to a conclusion that radical life extension is possible and that it’s their top priority. However, in reality we observe the unwillingness of people to consider fighting death.

There is a vicious cycle: a large budget is needed to create a good media product, but in order to have a large budget, one needs to have a persuasive media product.

Nevertheless, our task is to create relevant content, even in these straitent circumstances, in order to improve everyone’s and our own chances to survive.

This is where we face an insanely complicated question: why is it, that all the previous activities of many people startign from the end on the 19th century, didn’t lead to success? And another, even more complicated question – how can we finally become persuasive?

Even one argument would be sufficient for us: there’s so little being done for life extension in the whole world, the amount of resources allocated to scientific research is negligible. When we engage in public discussions, we come across an absolutely irrational, controvircial and suicidal position.

Approving of death and reluctance of physical immortality have a complex set of reasons.

Philosophers of the past tried to justify death, seeing its inevetability. It was impossible to realize that умкн single human life collapses, ends with a tragedy. It’s obvious that the very nature of any human being strives towards undying, however, not seeing such a possibility, the humanity lost itself in religious illusions.

People have always died from aging and they are not capable of imagining that things can be different.

Because of that in the cultural context people started to concieve immortality as something bad, even as a punishment.

Also, human mind is set in a way to avoid the terrifying thoughts about death. Therefore, it’s much easier not to think about the inevitable death from aging, than to do something about it.

A person is very much afraid of death «right here, right now», but there’s no genetically coded fear of death in 30-40 years. That’s the reason why the value of an extra long life doesn’t meet the corresponding program of our minds’ activity.

There has always been a dilemma in the propaganda of transhumanism ideas – whether it’s best to tell the people first of all what they can understand and then move gradually from there, or to advocate the concept of a new and beautiful world without death, dealing at the same time with the risk to gain the character of a loony.

In the fisrt case, we are talking about some age-related disease and tell the people that it has its molecular basis, which actually is aging that we need to fight against. In the course of our work we see that this approach gets approval, however it gets no enthusiasm, it doesn’t drive people to any actions at all.

In the second scenario, we have much fewer supporters, but among those there are true enthusiasts, fans, which we ourselves are.

There’s also a question about what audience we are talking to: educated people, ones who already are interested, people with resources, the youth, the elderly, scientists, people who don’t want to die, people who want to look good, self-motivated people, voters, politicians, ones who want to get healed, ones looking for friends and like-minded people, the ambitios, ones who want to make money, ones who want to help people, ones striving towards justice, ones who want to help lots of people, doctors, patients, ones aspiring to gain knowledge, ones looking for social guaranties, middlebrows, heroes, parents, children?

Judging from the knowledge we have, our relatively rich work experience, we believe that first of all we have to focus on people with an active social position, on innovators. In this case, creation of content is the subjust of interaction with a particular person. Meaning that our work must be focused on personal communications, on building a social network, on creating the community, on creating an informal and folmal organisations. The idea, that ok, here we go and tell everyone about scientific news in the area of life extension and show the ways to become immortal, hasn’t worked on its own anywhere in the world. Every time we ahve to see a particular person and envision clearly what exactly we want from them. First of all, we want this person to become the same power engine in the area of transhumanism, as we are ourselves. It’s possible that a couple dozen people in the world will change the situation, more precisely, will accelerate the change. By creating the video content we have to come up with a non-trivial solution that is more likely to achieve the result.

Sometime around Christmas Mikhail Batin, President of the Science for Life Extension Foundation, and I gave talks at the headquarters of one quite famous journal called Science and Life. This journal is sort of like a Russian version of Popular Mechanics or Scientific American. The idea of this “media club” is to enlighten the journalists about emerging technologies like personalized genomics, synthetic biology and possible life extension therapies. This meeting was about regenerative medicine. My talk was a brief overview of the field, what it consists of and when and which organs were engineered in the lab. Here’s the presentation I showed to the audience. You are most welcome to download and use it in the way you like.

As a matter of fact, virtual humans are already helping to figure out the right radiation dose for pregnant women and defibrillator types for children. Virtualization technologies provide the opportunity to create anatomically accurate simulations of the human body with its organs. Obviously, the physiological properties may not be 100% accurate at the moment, but they sure will be quite soon. Even more, I believe at some point of time in the future we will have sophisticated virtual models of our own bodies, accurate even on the molecular level, depicting all the interactions between the molecules within our cells and tissues. This kind of in silico humans will provide us with the opportunity to test potential drugs for safety and efficiency and also model the aging and pathological processes on all levels in our bodies. This will definitely lead to significant life extension. All we need is accurate mathematical descriptions of biological processes and enough computational resources. Sounds impossible, but I’m quite optimistic, because the technological progress is growing exponentially, hence the probability of gaining sufficient knowledge and computer power within “observable” time frame is not that small.

Read the Wall Streeet Journal article “Scientists Find Safer Ways To Test Medical Procedures”

Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, established the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in 2003. By integrating genomic and anatomic information, as well as sophisticated data search and viewing tools, the unique resources of the Institute offer researchers unprecedented access to details and patterns of gene activity throughout the brain. The information is stored in Atlases:

1. ALLEN Mouse Brain Atlas – an interactive, genome-wide, three-dimensional map of gene expression throughout the adult mouse brain
2. ALLEN Spinal Cord Atlas – an interactive, genome-wide map of gene expression across the adult and juvenile mouse spinal cords
3. ALLEN Developing Mouse Brain Atlas – a detailed three-dimensional map revealing how genes change during the development of the brain
4. ALLEN Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas – three-dimensional, high-resolution map of neural connections throughout the mouse brain
5. ALLEN Human Brain Atlas – a one-of-a-kind resource for understanding genes at work in the human brain

Most importantly, all the data is in open access. Allen says:

… we generate data for the purpose of sharing it. Since opening shop in 2003, we’ve had 23 public releases, or about three per year. We don’t wait to analyze our raw data and publish in the literature. We pour it onto the public website as soon as it passes our quality control checks. Our goal is to speed others’ discoveries as much as to springboard our own future research.

I think we’d get more bang for our buck by making more data more useful to more scientists—and, by extension, to the world community that will benefit from their work

Paul Allen is definitely brilliant. I believe, researchers in the whole world can benefit a lot by having open access to any scientific publication, clinical trial data or pharmacological company data sets they want. This could accelerate progress a great deal and make radical life extension much closer to reality.

I really hate to live on the wrong continent. Not because one can’t buy music is iTunes in Russia, but because I am missing all the meetings worth going to. I believe Extreme Future Festival, put together by Rachel Haywire and Michael Anissimov is one of those gatherings. I am sure alliances like underground culture plus academia could yield new creative thoughts and collaborations. In my opinion, transhumanism really lacks good design (seriously, 95% of the time) and better conversations with the artistic audience. So, I really enjoyed the story by Summerspeaker, who was lucky to witness all the great and less-than-great things at the Festival this weekend. His perception of the event reflects the admiration of the people and their ideas and simultaneous frustration with the movement as an organization. It’s too bad I didn’t have the chance to be part of the event and describe my own impression. I am sure though, that I will try to make it to the next one, because the whole idea of the Festival seems extremely attractive to me.