Cryonics returns to its New York roots on November 23 when Alcor New York organizes its first Alcor New York Symposium. Attend the most ambitious cryonics event in NYC in decades and learn about brain cryopreservation, molecular repair, and rejuvenation biotechnologies.
This symposium will feature 3 presentations by staff of Advanced Neural Biosciences about its neural cryobiology, revival, and deep learning research.
There are only a few tickets left. Register using the link below:
https://1stalcornewyorksymposium.splashthat.com/
Speakers announced so far:
Dr. Pedro Magalhaes – Will We Cure Aging in My Lifetime?
People
have always sought eternal life and everlasting youth. Recent
technological breakthroughs, and our growing understanding of ageing,
have given strength to the idea that a cure for human ageing can
eventually be developed. Hundreds of genes are now known to regulate
ageing in model organisms and can increase longevity by up to 10 fold
and retard the process of ageing as a whole in animals. In addition, a
large number of potential longevity-extending drugs already exist.
Studies of species with exceptional longevity or disease resistance,
like naked mole rats that are resistant to cancer or bowhead whales that
live over 200 years, may also help treat and prevent human diseases.
Here, I will discuss recent advances in longevity science and human
applications on the horizon. The scientific prospects of eradicating
human ageing within the foreseeable future will also be discussed.
Dr. Regina R. Monaco – Low-Dose Pharmacological Interventions to Facilitate Healthy Aging – Reduction of Cancer Risk
As
we grow in our understanding of aging as a series of biochemical
pathways and systems undergoing programmed entropic degradations, which
may be reversed, re-entrained, stabilized, minimized, maximized, turned
off or on, or otherwise healthfully intervened in, we gain more and more
tools to assist this process to maintain a healthful equilibrium. One
important intervention to extend healthy life span is to use
pharmaceuticals or neutraceuticals to reduce your probability of having
cancer.
In this talk I present and discuss several low dose
pharmacological interventions which have been shown to have strong
ant-cancer properties, we well as some other benefits such as reduction
of chronic inflammation. I will review the mechanisims and anti-cancer
benefits of low-dose therapy of the pharmaceuticals metformin,
naltrexone, aspirin, and for women, tamoxifen (breast cancer). I will
also discuss benefits of targeting and inducing apoptosis (killing) to
remove a percentage of senescent cells using rapamycin, and
neutraceuticals fisetin, and quercitin, with or without dasatinab.
Ben Best – NAD+ Restoration and Senolytic Therapy
Ben
Best has subjected himself to two age reversal therapies: (1) senolytic
therapy (therapy to eliminate senescent cells using dasatinib and
quercetin) and (2) NAD+ infusions (to restore NAD+ to youthful levels).
He has also attended several conferences dealing with these subjects as
well as studied and written about them, the results of which he will
provide in his presentation.
Chana Phaedra – An Introduction to Brain Preservation Optimization
Vitrification
has the advantage that it does not need different cryoprotectant
protocols for different cell- and tissue types. Vitrification of the
brain does presents two distinct challenges: low tolerance to ischemia
and poor blood-brain barrier permeability of cryoprotectants. In this
presentation I will review the history of brain cryopreservation, the
status of brain cryopreservation research, and future directions.
Aschwin de Wolf – Revival of “Straight Frozen” Patients
Freezing
of the brain without cryoprotectant (a “straight freeze”) is considered
the worst cryopreservation scenario but there is a paucity of
ultrastructural evidence how the straight frozen brain actually looks
like. Aschwin de Wolf will review electron micrographs of the straight
frozen brain (under a variety of conditions) and will discuss how
“medical cryobots” will prepare the brain for molecular repair and infer
the original non-frozen state from the damaged state.
Michael Benjamin – Alcor Meta-Analysis
Several
attempts have been made to create quantitative case outcome
methodologies in cryonics. Advanced Neural Biosciences has embarked on a
comprehensive meta-analysis of all Alcor patient cases, an endeavor
whose goal is to develop, experimentally validate, and refine a
quantitative cryopreservation evaluation methodology. Michael will be
presenting some preliminary statistics gathered during Phase 1 of the
study so far.
Dr. Ralf Spindler – Functional evaluation of brain preservation protocols
Currently,
reversible vitrification of whole brains is limited by neurotoxicity of
the very concentrated vitrification solutions involved. Here, an
automated assay is described which has proven to quantify synaptic
connections in live-cell neuronal networks by a high-content confocal
imaging method. Since it is known that synaptodentritic damage,
especially the decrease in number of synaptic connections, correlates
with cognitive decline the assay could be used to evaluate brain
preservation protocols.
Dr. Roman Bauer – Computational Biology Methods for Tissue Cryopreservation
In
contrast to most other biomedical fields, tissue cryopreservation has
remained relatively untouched by computational techniques.
State-of-the-art cryopreservation still predominantly relies on
trial-and-error and large numbers of experiments for the determination
of protocol parameters. Roman Bauer will review milestones in
computational and mathematical work towards better cryopreservation
protocols, and will discuss how he sees future automated
cryopreservation technologies maximize post-thaw tissue quality.
Dr. Emil Kendziorra – Professionalization and Scaling of Medical Biostasis
With
only a few thousand members world-wide, medical biostasis has stayed a
very small field, albeit being around for decades. In Europe the topic
has been even more niche. The EBF (European Biostasis Foundation) based
in Switzerland, has recently set out to fundamentally change this
situation with four main areas of activity – sign up / stand-by,
storage, research and long-term asset management. Emil Kendziorra will
present the core activities to professionalize medical biostasis and
scale the field.
Dr. Robin Hanson – Hidden Motives Help Explain Why Cryonics Isn’t Popular
The
usual pro-cryonics argument frames it as medicine, to be evaluated in
terms of its technical ability to prolong life. However, though they are
unaware of it, for most people medicine is more about showing that they
care than about prolonging life. Robin Hanson reviews the evidence that
many big areas of life are driven by hidden motives quite different
from what people usually say, and then tries to apply this insight to
help us understand why so few people actually choose cryonics.