(Don’t you just love the 2010s?)

From New Scientist:

THE world’s first xenotransplantation treatment – where animal cells are transplanted into humans – has been approved for sale in Russia.

The treatment, developed by Living Cell Technologies in New Zealand, is for type 1 diabetes. It consists of insulin-producing pig cells coated in seaweed, says Bob Elliott of LCT.

…

LCT’s treatment involves surgically implanting the replacement cells into the pancreas. The “seaweed” coating is alginate, which prevents the immune system from attacking the foreign cells.

In Russian trials, eight people with type 1 diabetes received the treatment in June 2007, while continuing to have daily injections of insulin. After a year, six showed improved blood glucose control and were able to lower their daily dose of insulin. Two of them stopped injections entirely for eight months. One person left the trial and another showed no improvement, which LCT believes was due to problems inserting the cells into the pancreas.

Remember that scene from The Abyss, well it’s coming soon to a reality near you.

Here’s The Independent, with more details:

Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.

The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.

By using oxygen suspended in liquid, divers would no longer have to worry about decompression sickness – the often fatal condition known as “the bends” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood under the immense pressures of deep water bubbles out as we rise. It could potentially allow them to descend to far greater depths than is currently possible.

Thanks for the tip-off Lonesamurai!

Here’s an interesting piece of design fiction, via BLDGBLOG.

Dunne & Raby, commissioned by Design Indaba as part of Protofarm 2050 for the ICSID World Design Congress in Singapore, have come up with an interesting solution for our “need to produce 70% more food in the next 40 years”.

In short, turn more things into food.

So far we have not really embraced the power to modify ourselves. What if we could extract nutritional value from non-human foods using a combination of synthetic biology and new digestive devices inspired by digestive systems of other mammals, birds, fish and insects?

As such, a group of people take their fate into their own hands and start building DIY devices. They use synthetic biology to create “microbial stomach bacteria”, along with electronic and mechanical devices, to maximise the nutritional value of the urban environment, making-up for any shortcomings in the commercially available but increasingly limited diet. These people are the new urban foragers.

Foragers is about the contrast between bottom-up and top-down responses to a massive problem and the role played by technical and scientific knowledge. It builds on existing cultures currently working on the edges of society, who may initially appear extreme and specialist – guerrilla gardeners, garage biologists, freegan gleamers etc. By adapting and expanding these strategies, they become models to speculate on what might happen in the future

The video is as a crazy as the concept might seem.  But is it so crazy it just might work?

From Inhabitat:

Sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest of places. Case in point: scientists have just created a new super strong material based on the plaque found in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains. The new substance isn’t exactly the same as the plaque that causes the tragic disease, but it has a very similar chemical structure that is then coated with an additional protective layer. The tiny spheres that result are microscopic and when put together, form a printable substance that is tougher than steel, twice as tough as Kevlar and the hardest microscopic organic substance on Earth.

Thanks to vertigojones for the tip!

Previously:

• Aimee Mullins’ TED Talk: How my legs give me super-powers

Via disinfo.com, a machine that prints layers of cells mixed with fibrinogen, type 1 collagen and thrombin has been reported by technologyreview.com.

The system, which lays down cells with the same fluid-based inkjet technology used in many printers, could print large swathes of living tissue directly onto the injuries of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Covering burns and related wounds is of critical importance because, the scientists note, “any loss of full-thickness skin of more than 4 cm in diameter will not heal by itself.”

See also:

• Mass Produced Artificial Skin

• Synthetic skin

Hat-tip to @catvincent!

From Science Daily:

Researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center have reached an early, but important, milestone in the quest to grow replacement livers in the lab. They are the first to use human liver cells to successfully engineer miniature livers that function — at least in a laboratory setting — like human livers. The next step is to see if the livers will continue to function after transplantation in an animal model.

…

To engineer the organs, the scientists used animal livers that were treated with a mild detergent to remove all cells (a process called decellularization), leaving only the collagen “skeleton” or support structure. They then replaced the original cells with two types of human cells: immature liver cells known as progenitors, and endothelial cells that line blood vessels.

The cells were introduced into the liver skeleton through a large vessel that feeds a system of smaller vessels in the liver. This network of vessels remains intact after the decellularization process. The liver was next placed in a bioreactor, special equipment that provides a constant flow of nutrients and oxygen throughout the organ.

After a week in the bioreactor system, the scientists documented the progressive formation of human liver tissue, as well as liver-associated function. They observed widespread cell growth inside the bioengineered organ.

The ability to engineer a liver with animal cells had been demonstrated previously. However, the possibility of generating a functional human liver was still in question.

via The Grumpy Owl (Who has a much more humorous take on this)

From Italy Magazine:

Italian surgeons have achieved another medical first during a double hand transplant operation carried out on 52-year-old Carla Mari in the San Gerardo Hospital in the city of Monza [Lombardy].

Although this is not the first time that a double hand transplant has been carried out in the world, it is the first time that a new, anti-rejection technique involving cells from the patient’s own bone marrow has been used.

These cells were re-introduced into the woman’s body during the 24 hours following the operation. Dr Andrea Biondi of the San Gerardo “Cell Factory” told Corriere della Sera that these cells act, in a way that scientists do not yet fully understand, on the body’s immuno-suppressive system. In the coming days signora Mari will also receive a transplant of adipose tissue, again from her own body, and a skin graft from her back.

Signora Mari, who is married with two children, had undergone amputation of her hands and feet because she was suffering from sepsis, a whole-body inflammatory state with infection. The artificial hands with which she was fitted were causing her distress and she was placed on the list for hand transplants in 2008. On Monday night, a 58-year-old woman who died in Cremona became the donor.

(Pix by marcogiannini)

Previously:

• the man with the transplanted hands
  

I was trying to ignore this one, but it seems to be the story of the day.

Thankfully, the reaction far and wide seems to be one of incredulity, or else I’d have to have a long slow cry over a glass of scotch regarding the state of the internet.  As it is, I’ll stick to the scotch.

Ryan Singel over at Wired’s Threat Level broke the story* regarding the latest horror to target our kids in the US – of course I’m talking about iDosing.

That’s right, your standard binaural beats are being packaged by at least one clueless Oklahoma school district and ratings-starved, journalist-devoid local CW affiliate as the newest cyber-danger to cyber-come from cyber-space to cyber-molest your cyber-children under your very own cyber-nose.

Which is to say, that if you live in Oklahoma, your tax dollars are paying for someone at the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics to actually be worried that kids are “getting high” off of music and noise and that it will lead them to harder non-cyber-drugs.

ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

I normally try and restrain myself on here, but I’m out of ways to wittily articulate the tax-dollar supported stupidity on display here, so I’ll try and make this brief.

If you are a school board member/Oklahoma narcotics officer/journalist/parent concerned that there are now cyber-drugs going in the ears of innocent children, I’d encourage you to do one of two things:

Step 1: Get on the internet and make a vague attempt to educate yourself.  Yes, we all know that Chris Hanson has told you that the internet is a living meat-pyramid of pedophiles, but really, it’s not that bad.  If you don’t at least have a clue regarding cyber-anything, how are you supposed to know a cyber-drug if you see it?   And if you’re on the official drug enforcement end of things you have no right to enforce cyber-jack-all without knowing what the hell you’re actually cyber-doing.

And if you can’t be bothered to do the 5 minutes of looking to realize this has been around for ages, and is a technique on CDs, in music, and in movies and not just on shady ripoff websites designed to make a quick buck off of the fact that you won’t let your kids have the good shit, then we move on to the next option:

Step 2: Go fuck yourself. Seriously, if you’re actually, really concerned about iDosing, then you are in fact not tall enough to ride this ride and are a contributing factor to why we can’t have nice things. Stop letting waxen-faced local news personalities fill your head with fear – which might be hard since it is the drug they’re peddling and it’s probably your drug of choice – and check yourself…

…before you wiggity-wreck yourself, or make a goddamn ass out of yourself in front of your kids and the rest of the world.

Merciful Vishnu, wait till they get a load of the the Brown Note.

[*Actually the first time I ever saw it was over on Technoccult, but every panic on the internet makes everything new again.]

[Via Wired: Threat Level, Technoccult]

For the discerning biopunk, presenting vat-grown couture.

Via ecouterre comes “BioCouture, an experiment in growing garments from the same microbes that ferment the tasty caffeinated beverage”:

More pix over on BoingBoing.

Here’s the teaser trailer for a forthcoming documentary “exploring mankind’s journey to ‘play jazz with the universe’… it is a story of our ultimate potential, the reach of our intelligence, the scope of our scientific and engineering abilities and the transcendent quality of our heroic and noble calling.”

How about a round-up post showing a few ways in which (if we can survive long enough) we just might get to live forever?

First off, scientists! have created stretchy artificial skin:

Scientists at Spain’s University of Granada have created artificial skin with the resistance, firmness and elasticity of real skin. It is the first time artificial skin has been created from fibrin-agarose biomaterial. Fibrin is a protein involved in the clotting of the blood, while agarose is a sugar obtained from seaweed, commonly used to create gels in laboratories. The new material could be used in the treatment of skin problems, and could also replace test animals in dermatological labs

They say perfect for burn victims, I say skin-covered body mods would be neat too.

Speaking of DIY efforts, how about an interview in the Economist about DIY BIO?

It will surprise few of you that DARPA is still bent on creating super-soldiers, or in this case making them super-survivors.

Lastly, this TEDMED Talk from 2009 on regenerating organs is just… whoa:

Previously:

• TED Talk: Suspended animation is within our grasp

To Age or Not to Age profiles the science of aging, it also addresses some of the moral, religious, practical and economic implications of increased, lifespan. Who will have access to the medicine? Who will benefit from the breakthroughs? Will the price of these compounds make this a drug for the elites?

This has had very limited screenings so far, but if you’re in, or near, Paris you can see it on the 29th.

The TED Talk that blew everyone away this year; not only have they figured out how to induce a form of suspended animation in humans, it’s already in clinical trials!

thanks for the tip-off Rusty!

Criminally under-appreciated Canadian director Vincenzo Natali (Cube) is making a welcome return to the big screen, with Splice.

This clip seems to be the online footage at the moment. 

In fact, the film’s yet to be picked up for distribution – so keep an eye out at your local film festival, it might be your only chance to see it.

You can, however, watch this interview with Natali, where he talks not only Splice, but also his plans to adapt JG Ballard’s High Rise:

Outlaw Biology, present by the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and Art/Sci, presented a symposium, workshop and exhibition this weekend.

A symposium exploring new forms of public participation in biological research, raising questions and cultivating ideas about how life could and should be studied. Panelists will address issues including do-it-yourself biology, open source science, at home medical genetics, bio-art, and novel ethical engagements with science at the cutting edge. Event schedule includes: Friday, a panelist discussion with artists, scientists and normal people; Saturday, workshops and an open-house exhibition throughout.

A tentative list of workshops and exhibitions included:

1. Bioweathermap, Jason Bobe. With field-trips to the UCLA Arboretum and Hammer Museum (in cooperation with Machine Project

2. Learn to Design a DNA-based nanostructure using cadnano software, Philip Lukeman

3. Paint colorful microbes – luminescent, fluorescent, and pigmented – on do-it-yourself solid media. With a little time and luck, we’ll preserve the painted results in epoxy, like microbiological paintings in amber, Mackenzie Cowell

4. SKDB: Learn to use software tools for open source manufacturing and bioengineering, Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz

5. Use of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus strain ADP1 as a DIY bioengineering platform, David Metzgar

6. Ars Synthetica: Have an informed, ethical, and open dialogue on the emerging field of synthetic biology, Gaymon Bennett

7. Extract DNA from Strawberries, CSG Staff

8. Lactobacillus Plasmid Recovery and Visualization for fun and profit, Meredith L. Patterson

9. DIY Webcam Microscopy. Join us for a worldwide webcam hacking event and make your own 100x USB microscope for less than $10. We’ll provide the webcams and a live internet feed from other workshop locations across the world, from Bangalore to Australia. Find out more at diybio.org/ucam

10. Velolab, See the first Bicyclized Mobile Biology lab, Sam Starr

From The Telegraph:

Researchers in the Netherlands created what was described as soggy pork and are now investigating ways to improve the muscle tissue in the hope that people will one day want to eat it.

No one has yet tasted their produce, but it is believed the artificial meat could be on sale within five years.

Vegetarian groups welcomed the news, saying there was “no ethical objection” if meat was not a piece of a dead animal.

…

The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.

The project is backed by the Dutch government and a sausage maker and comes following the creation of artificial fish fillets from goldfish muscle cells.

Which begs the question: if it’s cloned human tissue, is it still cannibalism?

Perhaps soon instead of just having them endorse food, we’ll actually be eating celebrities.

Until then, let them eat cupcakes:

thanks to Nora Wainwright for the tip-off!

See Also:

• Cocoon – the cooker that grows it’s own meat

From Yahoo! News:

An Italian who lost his left forearm in a car crash was successfully linked to a robotic hand, allowing him to feel sensations in the artificial limb and control it with his thoughts, scientists said Wednesday.

During a one-month experiment conducted last year, 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello felt like his lost arm had grown back again, although he was only controlling a robotic hand that was not even attached to his body.

…

Petruzziello, an Italian who lives in Brazil, said the feedback he got from the hand was amazingly accurate.

“It felt almost the same as a real hand. They stimulated me a lot, even with needles … you can’t imagine what they did to me,” he joked with reporters.

While the “LifeHand” experiment lasted only a month, this was the longest time electrodes had remained connected to a human nervous system in such an experiment, said Silvestro Micera, one of the engineers on the team. Similar, shorter-term experiments in 2004-2005 hooked up amputees to a less-advanced robotic arm with a pliers-shaped end, and patients were only able to make basic movements, he said.

Experts not involved in the study told The Associated Press the experiment was an important step forward in creating a viable interface between the nervous system and prosthetic limbs, but the challenge now is ensuring that such a system can remain in the patient for years and not just a month.

via Joshua Ellis

In this provocatively titled lecture, from the very aptly named Festival of Dangerous Ideas , Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration:

…examines the nature of human beings as products of evolution, in particular their limited altruism, limited co-operative instincts and limited ability to take account of the future consequences of actions. He argues that humans’ biology and psychology are unfit for the kind of society we live in and we must either alter our political institutions, severely restrain our technology or change our nature. Or face annihilation by our own design.

Which is a nice way of saying he makes a strong case for meddling in the genes of our children, and more importantly, can now identify just which ones to tweak.

This is nugenics kids, and it’s shit scary.

(OK, it would be slightly less creepy if he wasn’t wearing his suit jacket like a cape)

Watch on and be afraid;  sooner or later a Government somewhere is going to try this!

The QnA starts mid-way through the second video and is particularly good, in that most of the questions you will have are actually asked by the audience.

thanks to my buddy The Dingo Strategy for the tip-off!

Related:

• Nick Bostrom on existential risks and posthumanity

Researchers are no longer limited to creating artificial bladders or kidneys:

Researchers have engineered artificial penises in rabbits, using cells from the animals, who then used their new organs to father baby rabbits.

The work takes scientists closer to making other complex solid organs such as livers using a patient’s own cells, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

It provides a tailor-made transplant, said Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, who led the study.

“Once the tissue is there, the body recognizes the tissue as its own,” Atala said in a telephone interview.

Atala focused on the penis because he is a pediatric urologist, who has specialized for years in disorders and congenital defects of the bladder and sexual organs.

“That was the inspiration for this work. We are seeing babies born with deficient genitalia all the time. There are no good options,” Atala said.

He is also a specialist in regenerative medicine, which uses the body’s own cells to repair damage. In this case, Atala’s team used ordinary cells, not the stem cells often used in such research.

Via reuters.com.