Northern California Alcor Meeting
This meeting will take place on Sunday, July 15th at 5:00 pm. The primary purpose of this meeting will be to get to know others in the area who share a similar attitude towards cryonics and other related fields.
Meet Texas Alcor Members and Supporters
Meet your fellow Alcor members and supporters in Texas. The first meeting will be at the home of Shannon Vyff on June 4th at 8:00pm.
This will be an evening social with a guest speaker presentation, along with wine, h’orderves and desserts.
Location:
2011 Lantana Dr.
Round Rock, TX 78664
Date & Time: June 4th, 8:00pm
Guest Speaker: Ben Best president of Cryonics Institute, having just attended the Suspended Animation Conference in Florida and the American Aging Association Annual Meeting in San Antonio, will be giving an overview of the current research in Cryonics and Biogerentology in general.
Board of Directors Meeting
There will be a Board of Directors meeting for JUNE Saturday, June 2, at 11:00 am Arizona time. All are welcome to attend. The meeting usually takes one to two hours, and is followed by a buffet lunch.
May Board Meeting Results
There was discussion of the following topics:
Newsweek article challenges definition of death
Newsweek has published an interesting article about the shifting definition of death in the medical profession and how cells die. Click here to read it.
7th Alcor Conference – Registration Now Open
7th Alcor Conference
Scottsdale, Arizona
Hilton Scottsdale Resort
October 5-7, 2007
Join us to discover the world’s leader in the most ambitious life extension endeavor ever: cryonics. Learn about the cryopreservation process and present-day technology, cryonics research underway at Alcor, the possibilities for revival of cryopreserved individuals, and more.
Attendees will hear from an exciting array of speakers, gain tips for living longer and hear from the Kronos Science Laboratory about their human aging measurement experiment.
Registration includes a tour of the Alcor Foundation.
Register by July 31, 2007, for the special early bird rate of $295.
Want to Sponsor the Conference?
Staff Scientist Hired
We would like to welcome our newest staff member, Dr. Duncan MacLaren. Dr. MacLaren has completed his first week of work at Alcor and is diving energetically into our research.
Duncan has long been interested in curing aging. His life since 1980 has involved developing tools to find out how humans work, and he has studied several sciences from physics and chemistry to the whole-person biological level. Until recently he was focused on reversing aging and has had some success there; but due to a near death experience in his family, he has shifted his focus to cryonics, so that once the anti-aging field has matured, we can restore our patients to healthy, youthful life.
Duncan has Bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry, Biochemistry-Biophysics, Chemical Engineering, Mathematics, and English from Oregon State University. In 1996 he received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UCLA while in the laboratory of Steven Clarke. He co-founded Vivogen in 2000, a company focused on gerentology research and genetic testing.
PUBLICATIONS
C. Ryttersgaard, S.C. Griffith, M.R. Sawaya, D.C. MacLaren, S. Clarke, and T.O. Yeates. Crystal structure of human L-isoaspartyl methyltransferase. Journal of Biological Chemistry, (2002), 277, 10642-10646.
D.C. MacLaren, T. Toyokuni, S.R. Cherry, J.R. Barrio, M.E. Phelps, H.R. Herschman, S.S. Gambhir. PET Imaging of Transgene Expression. Review. Biological Psychiatry, 48 (5), (2000) 337-348.
H.R. Herschman, D.C. MacLaren, M. Iyer, M. Namavari, K. Bobinski, L. A. Green, L. Wu, A.J. Berk, T. Toyokuni, J.R. Barrio, S.R. Cherry, M.E. Phelps, E.P. Sandgren, S.S. Gambhir. Seeing is believeing: Non-invasive, quantitative and repetitive imaging of reporter gene expression in living animals, using positron emission tomography. Review. J. Neuroscience Research, 59 (6), (2000) 699-705.
S.S. Gambhir, J.R. Barrio, M.E. Phelps, M. Iyer, M. Namavari, N. Satyamurthy, L. Wu, L.A. Green, E. Bauer, D.C. MacLaren, K. Nguyen, A.J. Berk, S.R. Cherry, H.R. Herschman. Imaging adenoviral-directed reporter gene expression in living animals with positron emission tomography. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A , 96, (1999) 2333-2338
D.C. MacLaren, S. Sharfstein, S.S. Gambhir, N. Satyamurthy, et al. Repetitive, Non-invasive Imaging of the Dopamine D2 Receptor as a Reporter Gene in Living Animals. Gene Therapy, 6 (1999) 785-791
S.S. Gambhir; J.R. Barrio; L. Wu; M. Iyer; et al. Imaging of adenoviral-directed herpes simplex virus type 1 thymidine kinase reporter gene expression in mice with radiolabeled ganciclovir. J Nuclear Med, 39 (11), (1998) 2003-2011.
H.R. Herschman, S. Sharfstein, S.S. Gambhir, D.C. Maclaren, S. Cherry, A. Srinivasan, N. Satyamurthy, J.R. Barrio, and M.E. Phelps. In Vivo Imaging of Gene Expression Associated with Cell Replication. J Nuclear Med, 38(5), (1997) 250.
E. Kim, J.D. Lowenson, D.C. MacLaren, S. Clarke, and S.G. Young, Deficiency of a protein-repair enzyme results in the accumulation of altered proteins, retardation of growth, and fatal seizures in mice. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 94, (1997) 6132-6137
D.C. MacLaren, and S. Clarke, “Rapid Mapping of P1 Clones: The Mouse L-isoaspartyl/D-Aspartyl Methyltransferase Gene”. Genomics, 35, (1996) 299-307
D.C. MacLaren, and S. Clarke, “Expression and Purification of a Human Recombinant Methyltransferase that Repairs Damaged Proteins”, Protein Expression and Purification, 6, (1995) 99-108.
D.C. Maclaren, C.M. O’Connor, Y. Xia, M. Mehrabian, I. Klisak, R.S. Sparkes, S. Clarke, and A.J. Lusis, “The L-Isoaspartyl/D-Aspartyl Protein Methyltransferase Gene Maps to Human Chromosome 6q22.3-6q24 and the Syntenic Region of Mouse Chromosome 10”, Genomics, 14, (1992) 852-856.
D.C. MacLaren, R.M. Kagan, and S. Clarke, “Alternative Splicing of the Human Isoaspartyl Protein Carboxyl Methyltransferase RNA Leads to the Generation of a C-terminal -RDEL Sequence in Isozyme II”, Biochem. Biophys. Res. Commun., 185, (1992) 277-283.
D.A. Stams, T.D. Thomas, D.C. MacLaren, D. Ji, and T.H. Morton, “Empirical and ab Initio Estimates of the Stabilities of Fluorine-Containing Cations”, J. Am. Chem. Soc., (1990) 1427-34.
T.X. Carroll, D. Ji, D.C. MacLaren, and T.D. Thomas, “Relativistic Corrections to Reported Sulfer 1s Ionization Energies”,J. Elec. Spec., 42 (1987) 281-284
April Board Meeting Results
There was discussion of the following topics:
– Duncan MacLaren has accepted the position of Staff Scientist. More information on Duncan will be posted to Alcor’s website shortly.
– Joel Anderson is a contractor currently working on getting LabVIEW online for Alcor. LabVIEW is a computer programming language for instrument control and data acquisition, and is being used for automating our new advanced cryoprotective perfusion system.
– On April 5, 2007, Alcor cryopreserved its 76th patient. The patient arrested unexpectedly, so the stabilization and transport were difficult and long. Given this, the cryoprotection itself went better than expected, and we likely reached cryoprotectant concentrations needed to vitrify the brain. More details regarding this cryopreservation will be available in the near future.
– Several new projects are underway to increase applicants, members and streamline paperwork requirements for membership.
Board of Directors Meeting
There will be a Board of Directors meeting for MAY this coming Saturday, May 5, at 11:00 am Arizona time. All are welcome to attend. The meeting usually takes one to two hours, and is followed by a buffet lunch.
Location:
Alcor Life Extension Foundation
7895 East Acoma Drive Suite 110
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
Phone: (480) 905-1906
2007 Training Session in the United Kingdom
On May 5th-7th, Tanya Jones Alcor’s Chief Operating Officer, will be in the United Kingdom to instruct people interested in learning about or joining the emergency first response team in the United Kingdom. There will be presentations of the emergency techniques and procedures employed by Alcor’s first responders and mannequins will be provided for hands-on practice.
This is also a great opportunity to just observe a training session and meet other Alcor members and supporters.