Category Archives: CRISPR

Dr. George Church: The Augmented Human Being

On very rare occasions, I write posts covering biological or medical subjects and breakthroughs that are either:

a) Groundbreaking, but entirely unrelated to a hair loss cure, or:

b) Potentially related to a hair loss cure (and grey hair reversal) in the long run.

This post on Dr. George Church falls under the second category.

Dr. George Church

I have discussed Dr. George Church a few times on this blog before. In my opinion, there is a good possibility that he will be known as one of the 10-20 greatest scientists the world has ever witnessed when all is said and done. Interestingly enough, Dr. Church got an F on one of his graduate program college courses at Duke University in 1976, and he has proudly posted that letter of rejection from Duke on his current Harvard University website.

Dr. Church was adopted as a child. In his own words, he has had “early-onset health problems (insurance companies take note): heart attack, carcinoma, narcolepsy, dyslexia, pneumonia, motion sickness.

Several days ago, a new interview (more like a speech) of Dr. Church was posted on YouTube, and I was very impressed by the range of subjects that Dr. Church covers in this video. The title of this video is “The Augmented Human Being.” Hopefully, this augmentation will imply a full head of hair for all, even though that is probably the last thing that Dr. Church is thinking of when he discusses things such as CRISPR and genetic therapy in the video.

It is quite revealing that the above video only had a little under 500 views when I embedded it in this post, despite being online for two days. In sharp contrast, the one week old gorilla enclosure video now has close to 11 million views. Dr. George Church could bring back that now dead gorilla back to life, just like he will the extinct woolly mammoth.

Dr. Church is currently 61 years old, but from the looks of it, I doubt that he will retire anytime soon despite his health problems. He is a vegan dyslexic narcoleptic workaholic.

During the past few months Dr. Church has been all over the news almost every single day. Some highlights:

Aldous Huxley increasingly looks prescient.

Cooling Caps to Reduce Hair Loss after Chemotherapy

Cooling caps to reduce hair loss after chemotherapy make the biggest wave in hair loss news this month.

Cooling Caps Hair Growth
Cooling Caps to Reduce Hair Loss.

Cooling Caps for Hair Loss

— Breast cancer patients often complain about hair loss being the most difficult part of chemotherapy. A good recent article on this issue. Note that Swedish made DigniCap cooling cap was FDA cleared early last month.

According to the company’s website:

“The NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines®), European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), and Cancer Australia recognize scalp cooling as a treatment recommendation to reduce the incidence of chemotherapy-induced alopecia for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.”

More on cooling caps and scalp hypothermia to reduce hair loss after chemotherapy treatments.

— Make sure to see my updated list of the best danduff shampoos in the world. There are many other options besides the renowned Nizoral.

— My post from last year on the ligature of scalp area arteries to prevent further hair loss was not too popular when it comes to number of reader comments, even though I thought it was a fascinating subject. Yesterday, someone named Peter Renardo posted an extraordinary account of his positive experiences after having this procedure done on himself 30 years ago! A must read as far as user comments go. Having said that, please do not ever get this procedure done.

— Perhaps not immediately relevant to hair loss research, but scientists have developed an algorithm that can predict the factors required to convert one human cell type to another. This could have major implications for regenerative medicine. More importantly, the creator of the computational algorithm, Dr. Owen Rackham, has made a publicly available site called mogrify.net on which you can find the cellular factors required for cell conversions. I tried doing the dermal papilla cell to hair follicle cell conversion, but got two different results. A user named “InBeforeTheCure” on hairlosstalk also tried the same thing and saw results that were different to my two results. More on this development here.

And now on to medical items of interest:

Who will finally get the Nobel prize for discovering CRISPR (a guaranteed event in most scientists’ minds)? Will they change the regulations and for the first time ever award more than three scientists?

— China was in the news a lot in 2015 due to it being the first to use CRIPSR on human embryos; creating genetically modified micropigs; using gene editing to create extra muscular dogs; and planning to soon open the world’s largest animal cloning factory.

— Maybe even more spine chilling. The somewhat creepy Dr. Canavaro might well be correct that a human head transplant (more accurately full body transplant) is possible within the next several years. Apparently a monkey head transplant was recently successful, although they only kept the animal alive for 20 hrs due to ethical reasons. This is real animal cruelty.

Printable organs are closer than ever. Perhaps a hyped up title.

Would you pay $100,000 to clone your pet? My answer is “no way” even if I was a billionaire.

Jason Silva on Transhumanism.