Towards the one step replacement of damaged DNA & promise of living forever
We’ve been getting far more effective at understanding the way our brains work especially as they relate to the idea of ‘mind’. Simply, the idea that we make decisions based on our conscious understanding, appears limited at best and highly flawed at worst. And now, the step towards longevity, perhaps even the fountain of youth, is being unpacked. Just recently a medical research team announced that they had successfully rewired a living organ (a thymus), such that an aged one began operating as new. The next piece of this puzzle is a one step fix of faulty DNA
Using a gene-editing technique, researchers at MIT have successfully removed a defective gene and replaced the DNA strand with a fully functioning one. The implications of this technique are profound – humans with defective genes could, in time, have their defective gene replaced with a fully functional ‘correct’ one. The promise in this technique is that people impacted by gene related disease, may avoid or recover from those impacts. Here’s an article on KurzweilAI about the process and the article on the reinvigorated thymus is here
And if, as some researchers believe, that ageing is caused by a defective gene response, perhaps the door to living forever, is being opened
With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…
Read More >In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…
Read More >Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…
Read More >I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…
Read More >On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…
Read More >With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…
Read More >For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…
Read More >I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…
Read More >One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…
Read More >As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…
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