As many of our readers may have heard, Rolling Stone recently did a major story on Ray Kurzweil in their latest issue titled “The World’s Scariest Techno Prophet”. Originally Singularity Hub did not report on this news because the story was only available to people who had ponied up for the magazine.
Just this morning, however, we have uncovered a site that has posted a PDF of the entire Kurzweil story, so now we do indeed have something worth reporting! Go check it out while it is still up:
Imagine a future when your aging organs – a failing liver, or a brain degenerated by Alzheimer’s disease – could be repaired using cells from other parts of your body. That dream came closer to reality recently when Wisconsin researchers announced that skin cells have been genetically reprogrammed into beating cardiac (i.e. heart) tissue.
In a UW-Madison news release, co-author Tim Kamp put the research into context. “If you have a heart failure patient who is in dire straits – and there are never enough donor hearts for transplantation – we may be able to make heart cells from the patient’s skin cells and use them to repair heart muscle. That’s pretty exciting.” The study was published this month in the journal Circulation Research.
MSNBC did a short segment on this story, as seen below:
The goal of the research was to compare iPS cells (derived from skin) with embryonic stem cells in their ability to differentiate into cardiac tissue. Amazingly, the skin cells in the study were able to be reprogrammed into a variety of different types of cardiomyocytes (i.e. heart cells), including nodal, atrial, and ventricular tissue types. iPS cell samples showed normal patterns of cardiac gene expression, cell proliferation, and organization of muscle sarcomeres. As seen in a video released (at the bottom of this post) by the researchers, the tissue is capable of carrying the action potentials which propagate across a beating heart. The tissue even pumps more quickly in response to beta-adrenergic stimulation, a component of fight-or-flight physiology.
“It’s a very mysterious and complicated dance to get these cells to go from skin cells to stem cells to heart cells,” says Kamp.
So how exactly did they reprogram skin cells into functional heart tissue? It all starts with induced pluripotency, a technique pioneered in 2007 by which adult somatic cells are dedifferentiated (unspecialized) back into stem cells by tweaking their gene expression. First, human skin cells are isolated and cultured to act as hosts. Next, certain genes that normally maintain pluripotency in embryonic stem cells – such as Oct4, Sox2, and NANOG – are transfected into the host cells using viral vectors that attach themselves into the cell’s genome. After a few weeks in culture, a small number of transfected cells begin to take on characteristics of embryonic stem cells: they become induced pluripotent stem cells. These iPS cells are then differentiated using the embryoid body (EB) method, in which stem cells are induced to recapitulate the process of embryonic development. The EB method produces cardiac tissue as part of the embryoid body. After the cells have differentiated, the pluripotency genes are downregulated – put into a negative feedback loop – that allows the cells to maintain their assumed form. To summarize: skin cells are reprogrammed into undifferentiated pluripotent cells, and then redifferentiated to produce the desired cell type: cardiac tissue.
Organ transplantation is a notoriously difficult procedure in modern medicine. If transplanted tissue isn’t a perfect match for the recipient’s body, the immune system will reject the organ and attack it as a foreign invader (as it would attack bacteria). Finding an appropriate donor takes a careful consideration of blood type and antibody response, restrictions that limit the options for potential recipients. iPS cell transplants avoid these difficulties. Because the tissue comes from a patient’s own skin, the transplant is autologous and the risk of immune rejection is minimized.
While the production of cardiac cells from iPSCs is certainly an exciting breakthrough, it is only one example of a wide range of research being done in pluripotency. Because the process of differentiation follows the process of embryonic development, iPS cells can be reprogrammed into a number of desirable products. In addition to cardiac cells, iPS cells have been successfully differentiated into neurons. As our ability to change one cell type into another increases, new breakthroughs will allow unprecedented advances in the medical field.
Research into iPS cells sidesteps the ethical and political controversies surrounding embryonic stem cells, and many researchers hope that they may hold the same promise in clinical application. Still, the techniques aren’t ready for therapy. The use of a virus to insert transcription factors into the cellular genetic code carries with it a risk of forming a tumor. While the tissue derived by these methods isn’t ready for transplantation, the results are an important milestone for research and may soon be safe enough for clinical use.
You can see the beating heart tissue from the Wisconsin study below:
Long before Watson and Crick famously uncovered the structure of DNA in 1953, people envisioned with both horror and hope a day when babies could be custom designed — free of inherited disease, yet equipped with superior genes for good looks, intelligence, athleticism, and more. Now the beginnings of the day of designer babies have finally come.
 Designer Babies - here they come! |
The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life’s savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back.
For decades now a technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, has enabled In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics to screen embryos for more than 100 potentially debilitating and often deadly diseases before the embryo is implanted into the mother. A medical revolution has thus unfolded, enabling literally tens of thousands of couples and their babies to sidestep some of the world’s most terrifying diseases.
Take the case of Cindy and John Whitley. Their first child died at the age of 9 months from a deadly genetic disorder called spinal muscular atrophy. Genetic analysis uncovered that the Whitley’s statistically had a 1 in 4 chance of creating a child with spinal muscular atrophy each time they conceived. Unwilling to risk having another child with the deadly disorder, the Whitley’s used PGD to conceive three children, all healthy.
Yet PGD allows scientists to screen embryos for much more than just genetic diseases, and therein lies the promise – and the peril – of designer babies.
Gender was the first major genetic trait beyond genetic disease to be widely manipulated through PGD. The Fertility Institutes is a leader in the field, claiming nearly 100% success in providing couples with a baby of a predetermined gender. Completely healthy and fertile couples from all over the world are coming to The Fertility Institutes everyday to confront the risk, the expense, and the discomfort of conceiving their baby in a test tube, all for the ability to choose the sex of their baby.
Gender selection is a big business. Dr. Steinberg, Director at The Fertility Institutes, claims that they are performing on the order of 10 gender selection fertilizations every week, each for a fee of $18,400. Although In Vitro Fertilizations were originally designed to help parents that were unable to conceive children naturally, Steinberg says that a staggering 70% of their clients have absolutely no difficulty conceiving children, coming to the Institute purely for opportunity to choose the sex of their baby.
Now, in the latest twist in the march towards designer babies, The Fertility Institutes says they will soon be able to offer couples the ability to screen their embryos for eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Institute cannot change the DNA of the donating couple — if neither the mother nor the father has genes for green eyes, for example, then the Institute cannot give them a baby with green eyes. Yet within the constraints inherent in the DNA of the donating couple, The Fertility Institute is willing to screen embryos for these traits. The Fertility Institute wants to offer several other customizations, and many more are sure to be released in the coming years as the science behind screening for them is developed.
In many countries around the world PGD is heavily regulated and designer babies are strictly out of the question. Yet in a strange paradox, even as the United States is one of the world’s most regulated nations in several areas of medical research and development, PGD is completely legal and unregulated in the United States. Hence, even as the United States is hindered by regulation in areas such as stem cell research, the country seems poised to be a world leader in the designer baby revolution.
At the moment, The Fertility Institutes carries the mantle as the company at the forefront of this revolution, and as such they are a lightning rod for the praise and adoration, but also the bitter and severe anger, of those on both sides of this great moral debate.
The genie is officially out of the bottle, in fact it probably has been for a long time. There is no stopping the designer baby revolution. Even as some countries try to clamp down on it, others will allow it. Progress, if we call it that, will continue unabated. A similar phenomenon has unfolded with embryonic stem cell research in recent years. Even as the Bush administration almost completely strangled US investment and research in this promising field, other countries invested heavily and advances continued.
A new generation of genetically enhanced designer babies is inevitable in the coming decades. Yet for those of us that are merely “normal”, do not despair. Even as we are outmatched by the next generation genetically, a host of new technologies from chip implants to gene therapy may allow us to keep up, allowing us to enhance ourselves in equally transformative ways. The future will indeed be interesting.
Want to know more? Below are some excellent videos and articles that served as much of the source for this story:
60 Minutes Story Focused on The Fertility Institutes:
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The Wall Street Journal: A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles — Hold the Colic
Image: source
Props to Robots-Dreams for discovering this fantastic video of robots wrestling WWF style, including a championship belt and even a hot girl ringmaster:
Check out this trailer for the upcoming movie showcasing Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about the singularity, called “Transcendent Man“. Our verdict: awesome!
In Part II of our showcase of flat screen technology innovation, we focus on efforts at Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center to create a truly flexible, paper thin, durable, energy efficient flat screen display. Prototypes at ASU are excellent, but what is yet to be seen is how and when they will get these displays mass produced into consumers hands (hopefully in the next 2-3 years).
The US Army is funding the work at ASU, which includes a consortium of other players, including Applied Materials and Hewlett Packard. These displays have the potential to expand the human experience in exciting new ways.
The following video from abc is pretty cool:
Also, a decent video directly from ASU:
Several examples of competing technology from Sony and Samsung are also worth looking at here:
The race to create ever thinner, more durable, and even flexible flat screen technology has really been heating up in the last year. Most applications thus far are for e-book readers, but what we really want to see are screens that are so robust and thin that they can transform the human experience by being embedded in clothing, furniture, and even the human skin.
If you haven’t heard about them yet, you should check out Plastic Logic, a new entrant in the field with an impressive looking new e-reader set to come out later in 2009 or early in 2010. We’re doubtful this product will be the “Kindle killer” many are claiming (making a good e-reader is about more than a good screen), but at 8.5 x 11 inches and with the thickness of a standard paper notepad this product sure is cool. New Scientist has a good article describing the technology. Check out these images below from endgadget:
From New Scientist:
Plastic Logic says it has now perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto a layer of bendy plastic – allowing the screens to flex and bounce. “Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today’s e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble,” says Joe Eschbach of Plastic Logic.
To produce the transistors, the company prints a droplet of conducting polymer and a surfactant onto the plastic substrate. The surfactant makes the droplet water-repellent, so when a second droplet of polymer – without surfactant – is dropped on top of the first, it slides off and lands next to it, ending up precisely 60 nanometres away because of the size of the droplets. This close proximity is important for producing transistors with fast display switching speeds.
Below are some videos that demo the technology from Plastic Logic:
Imagine looking at a someone and instantly being fed a visual and auditory stream of information about them, such as their email address, education, marital status, interests, ethnicity, and so on. Imagine using hand gestures in a minority-report fashion to take photos, draw images, and sort information. These capabilities and more recently wowed the audience at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, CA where MIT researchers for the first time publicly unveiled a new technology, dubbed “Sixthsense“.
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Taking advantage of technological miniaturization, research student Pranav Mistry was fitted with several devices, including a wearable projector, cell phone, wireless internet access, and a tiny camera, opening new doors to a more data rich and enhanced human reality.
In one demonstration, Mistry simply looks at a boarding pass for a plane flight and suddenly the gate for the flight and its on-time status are visually projected onto the ticket. In a related example, Mistry meets someone at a party and information about the person, such as their blog address, interests, and occupation are projected onto the person for Mistry to view.
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A phone keypad is shown projected onto any surface, such as the palm of a hand, instantly turning the hand into a touchscreen phone.
Gestures can be converted into computational actions. By drawing a circle on one’s wrist, a virtual watch displaying the time is suddenly projected onto the wrist. By formulating the hands and fingers into a square shape, a camera was instructed to take a photo of the scene in front of Mistry. Several photos taken in this fashion were later projected onto a wall and then sorted, enlarged, and rotated simply through a series of hand gestures in the air.
The following video shows this exciting technology in action:
As stunning as these demonstrations are, they only scratch the surface of what will become a new digitally enhanced, augmented human reality in the coming years…
The first known report of a brain tumor resulting directly from neural stem cell therapy was published yesterday. The report is a fresh reality check against worldwide hopes for life saving stem cell therapies that seem just on the horizon; a stark reminder that success will not be easy. It is also an example of the dangers faced by patients when they venture off to countries all over the world to receive treatments that are untested, unproven, and unregulated. In spite of this, stem cell therapy offers hope for major medical breakthroughs and research of the therapy must continue unabated.
The patient in question was a boy suffering from a rare genetic disorder, ataxia telangiectasia (AT), characterized by severe degeneration of the brain region that controls movement and speech. Beginning in 2001, the boy went to Moscow for several treatments in which fetal neural stem cells were injected into the brain and the fluid surrounding it. The hope was that these neural stem cells would somehow help the boy to regenerate neurons that had been destroyed by AT.
In 2005, four years after the treatment, tumors were found in the boy’s brain and spine. A biopsy of tumor cells from the boy’s spine confirmed that their origin was from the fetal neural stem cells from the treatment in Moscow.
Critics of stem cell therapy, especially embryonic based therapy, will be quick to point at this case as an example of the dangers posed by the therapy, but this sort of thinking is flawed. Stem cell therapy offers the hope of treatment for several of today’s most debilitating diseases and it should be pursued with our greatest urgency and effort. As this incident clearly demonstrates, however, the path toward success is not without risk and there is still much we have to learn.
A trial to test the safety and effectiveness of gene therapy to cure or alleviate HIV in patients has seen promising results according to a paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Medicine. When the therapy was used on 74 patients it was shown to be safe and appeared to reduce the ability of the virus to damage the patients’ immune systems. Although the results represent a notable milestone, the therapy still requires significant refinement and readers are advised to resist the hype associated with this story at other news outlets.
HIV harms its victims by systematically infecting and destroying the cells that make up the immune system, leaving them unable to defend themselves against what would normally be harmless infections. HIV sufferers currently must take a daily cocktail of medication called highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) to defend themselves against the virus. HAART is plagued with high costs, a daily treatment regimen, and serious negative side effects to patient health. Gene therapy holds the promise of one day completely curing patients with a once only treatment.
In the trial, 38 HIV-1-infected adults had their blood (i.e. bone marrow) “upgraded” with a gene that was expected to thwart HIV’s normal ability to destroy cells of the human immune system. The remaining 36 patients in the 74 patient trial were given a placebo. The gene therapy appears to have had some success in stopping HIV from destroying CD4+ cells, a vital component of the immune system, as evidenced by higher levels of CD4+ cell counts in adults that received the therapy. Even 100 weeks after the trial, patients that received the therapy still showed elevated CD4+ cell counts, demonstrating the long term effectiveness of the therapy.
After 48 weeks the researchers found there was no statistically significant difference in the amount of HIV circulating in the blood of the two groups of patients. This is not unexpected, as the gene therapy is not designed to attack HIV directly or to limit its pervasiveness within the body, but rather to stop it from infecting and destroying the vital cells of the immune system.
Medical News Today has one of the less hyped reports on the trial. From the report:
For the study, Mitsuyasu and colleagues took blood stem cells (CD34+ hematopoietic progenitor cells) from the patients in the treatment group, modified them to carry an enzyme called OZ1, and then reinjected them back into the patients. OZ1 targets two proteins that stop HIV replicating itself.
The trial was double blinded, so neither the patients nor the health care team treating them knew whether their stem cells carried the active enzyme or a placebo.
Although the therapy in this trial showed some success in limiting HIV’s ability to attack the immune system, the success was far short of what is needed. The problem is likely related to the fact that only part of the patients’ blood system was upgraded with the new gene instead of all of it. Researchers need to develop theories and techniques to completely upgrade the entire blood system with the new gene. They will then need to run exhaustive trials to test and develop these improvements.
Although the near term (3-5 years) prospects for this therapy seem limited, the longer term (10-20 year) prospects look very promising! Researchers know what they need to do, they just need to get better at doing it.
Image source
Did you know that for ten years now it has been possible to transplant a donated hand (or a pair of them) to a person who has lost one or both of their hands? Earlier the hub reported on the amazing fact that re-attaching severed limbs such as arms and legs has been commonplace for decades. Today we reveal that not only is hand re-attachment possible, but in the last ten years hand transplantation has seen significant success in roughly 40 patients worldwide.
The source for most of this story comes from handtransplant.com, a website showcasing the success Jewish Hospital and its partners have achieved with hand transplants since they pioneered the world’s first long term hand transplant in January 1999.
As with all organ transplants (hearts, livers, and even hands) one of the greatest challenges a patient faces is organ rejection, a process where the immune system attacks the new organ as a foreign invader. For decades now we have had the medical means to fight organ rejection, although the treatment is error prone, requires the patient to stick to a rigourous regiment of drugs, and is plagued with several negative side effects.
Even assuming the problem of organ rejection can be contained, the problem of properly attaching the tiny veins, arteries, and other parts of the body to the new organ is quite a challenge. New advances in microsurgery have greatly enhanced our ability to overcome this challenge, paving the way for the hand transplants of today. Here is a crude outline of the procedure:
The surgeon will progress with tissue repair in the following order: bone fixation, tendon repair, artery repair, nerve repair, then vein repair. The surgery can last from 12-16 hours. In comparison, a typical heart transplant takes six to eight hours and a liver transplant, eight to twelve hours. Typical post-operative complications include blockage of the blood supply, infections and rejection.
Want to learn more? Check out this detailed video of one man’s experience with a double hand transplant:
Image: source
Last year we reported about the latest efforts to create the next generation in prosthetic arms. Without a doubt the most exciting feature being developed for this new generation of arms is their ability to interface directly with the patient’s brain, allowing the patients to operate the arm simply by thinking. Today the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) has announced that it has made significant progress in making these brain controlled prosthetic arms a reality.
The major advance behind these prosthetic arms is a surgical procedure called Targeted Muscle Reinnervation (TMR) that reassigns the nerves that once controlled the patient’s arm and hand to the patient’s pectoral muscles. Hand and arm signals from the patients brain can then travel into the pectoral muscle and be fed into a computer, which converts the signals into inputs for the prosthetic arm. This transfer of brain intentions into signals that can control a robotic device is known as Brain Computer Interfacing, or BCI.
Creating the ultimate prosthetic arm is a daunting challenge, requiring an interdisciplinary collaboration across many fields to achieve success. The BCI advances used in this prosthetic arm would be useless without accompanying advances in robotic arm agility and function present in the project’s DEKA robotic arm. We reported on the DEKA arm last year.
See the prosthetic arm in action in the video below. Remember, this arm is being completely controlled by the patient’s thoughts. Note the electrodes on the pectoral muscle where the brain’s signals have been surgically re-routed for capture:
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