New Hope for Alzheimer's Patients?

Working with mice, researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine are reporting a dramatic discovery in the search for a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). They treated Alzheimer’s-prone mice with a drug called bexarotene, which is already FDA-approved and available as the anti-cancer drug Targretin®.

The result, reported in the February 10 issue of Science, is nothing short of stunning. Bexarotene appeared to dissolve the excess brain-harming amyloid beta in the mouse brain. Amyloid beta (Aβ) is produced naturally in healthy brains, mouse and human. But when Aβ builds up and forms deposits, it seems to interfere with the function of the brain, including the formation of new memories.

Researchers found that just six hours after administering bexarotene, 25% of the excess Aβ was cleared from the brains of the mice. After 72 hours, 75% of the Aβ plaque was gone and the behavior of the mice was observably different. For more on these finds, take a look at this video released by Case.

So now the big question is this: If bexarotene works like this in mice, will it work the same way in human beings with AD? According to Gary Landreth, professor of neurosciences at Case and lead author of the study, that question is already researched. “We need to be clear; the drug works quite well in mouse models of the disease. Our next objective is to ascertain if it acts similarly in humans. We are at an early stage in translating this basic science discovery into a treatment,” Landreth said in a press release issued by Case.

One interesting point about bexarotene is that it does not act directly on Aβ. What it appears to do is to stimulate the expression of gene, apolipoprotein E or apoE. Bexarotene seems to switch apoE back on to a healthy level, which produces a protein that helps clear Aβ from the cells of the brain.

This discovery about bexarotene is truly exciting news in the field of Alzheimer’s research. In the final sentence of the report in Science, the authors conclude cautiously that “The ability of bexarotene to rapidly reverse a broad range of deficits suggests that…[it] may be of therapeutic utility in the treatment of AD…”

If you know someone dealing with AD—and who doesn’t?—this is a promising advance. It is critical, however, to stress that there are still key questions that must be answered before this finding changes the way AD is treated.

On the positive side, part of the excitement is that bexarotene is already FDA-approved. What about side effect? As the study puts it, bexarotene has “a favorable safety profile.” In other words, we already know that this drug is reasonably safe for human use.

But will it work? And if so, how long will it work in an individual AD patient before the benefits of the drug are no longer strong enough to off-set the progression of the disease?

Time will tell. For now, however, there’s new reason for hope in the face of one of our most dreaded diseases.

The article entitled "ApoE-directed Therapeutics Rapidly Clear β-amyloid and Reverse Deficits in AD Mouse Models” is published in the February 10 issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Religion and Nanotech: Problems Ahead?

Chris Toumey has just posted a nice summary of research on religion and attitudes toward nanotechnology. Toumey is a cultural anthropologist in the University of South Carolina NanoCenter, and what he reports is pretty sobering.

Toumey’s study summarizes seven recent research projects that explore the relationship between religious beliefs and attitudes toward nanotechnology. He cites a study by Brossard et al. entitled "Religiosity as a perceptual filter: examining processes of opinion formation about nanotechnology", which found that the "strength of religious beliefs is negatively related to support for funding of nanotechnology.”

One thing that concerns religious people about nanotechnology, Toumey says, is its possible link to transhumanism. He writes that “many religious persons worry that nanotechnology will contribute to re-defining human nature in ways that are amoral or dangerous.”

Underneath the fear of nanotechnology is a more fundamental fear of transhumanism. Religious people, says Toumey, “sense that transhumanist values are the enemy of religious values, and that nanotechnology, especially nanomedicine, is implicated in a transhumanist agenda.”

Toumey claims that of the seven studies he reviewed, six identified the religious objection to transhumanism as the basis for worries about nanotechnology. Not all six use the term “transhumanism,” but all refer explicitly to a deep anxiety that nanotechnology poses some sort of threat to human nature. Toumey writes: “Six of the seven religious reactions include a concern that nanotech will contribute to changing our sense of what it means to be human, and that this is clearly undesirable.”

All the more reason for religious scholars to take up the challenge of transhumanism and to disarm some of the anxiety. For me, at least, transhumanism is not to be feared. It is to be criticized theologically, not because it seeks to use technology to enhance human beings but because it sets its sights too low, or so I try to argue in Transhumanism and Transcendence.

A more complete version of Toumey’s review—"Seven Religious Reactions to Nanotechnology"—will appear in the December issue of NanoEthics.

New Book on “Transhumanism and Transcendence”

My latest book is Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement. It is a collection of essays from leading Christian theologians responding to various aspects of transhumanism and of the growing potential for technology to “enhance” human beings. The book is on display for the first time at the book exhibits at the American Academy of Religion, 19-22 November 2011 in San Francisco. The publisher is Georgetown University Press.

On the back cover of the book, Philip Clayton comments:

This is the most important Christian debate on transhumanism that I have ever read. Those who prefer fawning acceptance or frightened rejection of human enhancement can find simplistic monographs aplenty. But if you want to think theologically about the transformation of humanity through technology—what's already here, and what lies ahead of us—this collection is mandatory reading.

I wrote the first and the last chapters of the book, framing the argument and summarizing the findings.
The eleven chapters in between are written by established scholars and younger thinkers, some of whom were finishing doctoral studies on transhumanism just as the book was being written.

Michael Burdett, for example, drew upon his studies at Oxford in writing about Francis Bacon, N. F. Fedorov, and Teilhard as early examples of transhumanist thinking. David Grumett, an emerging expert on Teilhard, follows Burdett with a deeper look at this pioneering theologian and scientist.

J. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates drew upon her doctoral work to criticize transhumanist thinking on gender, while Stephen Garner and Todd Daly provided fresh thinking about themes of cyborgs and extended lifespans in traditional Christian theology. Michael Spezio, a theologian who does advanced research in neuroscience, engages some of the projects of the Defense Advanced (DARPA).

Established scholars such as Ted Peters, Karen Lebacqz, Gerald McKenny, Brent Waters, and Celia Deane-Drummond also contribute chapters to this book. While all of them raise criticisms of transhumanism and of the growing use of technology for human enhancement, all recognize that transhuman poses a challenge for Christian theology.

Here’s one way to think about the challenge. Religion promises but technology delivers, so who needs religion anymore? For example, Christian theology holds up a promise of some form of life beyond the present. Technology, on the other hand, sees aging as a problem to be overcome, and it sets out to slow or even reverse it.

Whether it will truly succeed is, of course, debatable. But that’s not that point. The key question is where we place our hopes and what form of life do we hope for.

Through technology, transhumanists hope to transcend the limits of our biology. But is this the truest and highest form of human transcendence? It is not that technology is rejected or feared. But does teach us to settle for too little?

Archaic Interbreeding? So What?

Later this week, I will be speaking at the University of South Florida—Saint Petersburg in their lecture series, a Celebration of the Genome.” My topic is “Finding the Human in the Genome.”

I start with the obvious: Our knowledge of human biology is increasing rapidly, thanks in large part to the Human Genome Project. We can now compare the DNA of one human being with another and ask questions about similarities and differences. We can compare human DNA with the full genomes of chimps and other species.

Most interesting to me is that we can also compare the genome of anatomically modern humans with that of extinct forms of humanity, such as Neandertals or their recently discovered cousins, the Denisovans. What we have found is that in a real sense, they are not extinct at all because their DNA lives on in us.

That leads to something less obvious but more profound. The more we know about human biology, the less we know about human nature. Put another way, the more information we have, the less confident we are that we really know what we mean when we talk about “humanity.”

So what is going on here? Does it really bother anyone—besides me, that is, and perhaps only because I am, after all, a “theologian”? I am asking myself this question a lot these days. Does it really matter that our ancestors interbred with Neandertals and Denisovans and, as time will probably tell, many other forms of archaic humanity?

So what’s the big deal? In some ways I guess it’s like the high school student who runs a paternity test and learns that daddy isn’t daddy.

Or maybe it’s more like this. Years ago, I remember hearing Kári Stefánsson speaking to a roomful of scientists and introducing deCODE Genetics, the Iceland DNA database. He explained the reasons for the project, such as excellent health records, small genetic diversity, and superb genealogical records going back 1,000 years. We Icelanders need to sell more than fish, he said. We want to mine our DNA for all kinds of gene-disease information. Then Stefánsson mentioned that the information sometimes disproved the genealogies. Everyone laughed when he said: “We are not responsible for what our Viking ancestors did back then during the long Icelandic winters.”

Is that it? Is that all that’s happened here, just some forced revisions of the family tree? So what if my ancient ancestors were not exactly what I thought? It happened, after all, some 40,000-100,000 years ago. I am not responsible.

But I am affected. My biology is different from what I once thought. Perhaps I am healthier as a result of the ancient interbreeding, as at least one report has suggested.

More than that, I am coming to see human beings as biologically more diverse and more complicated that we once thought. The diversity part is a bit scary. We have not done well as a species in dealing with our differences.

The complexity part—that’s more of a mystery than a fear. I don’t claim to hear the voices of my Neandertal ancestors calling out from my DNA or reverberating through my metabolic processes. At least not yet.

Resveratrol and Human Enhancement

The debate over human enhancement may just have entered a new phase. Resveratrol, the natural compound found in red wine, has now been shown to improve the metabolism of human beings. While the word "enhancement" does not appear in the published report, the research will almost certainly be read by many as evidence that the use of resveratrol enhances human health and may even increase the human lifespan.

In the more prosaic language of the report, the news is simply this: Resveratrol, the natural compound found in red wine, has now been shown to improve the metabolism of human beings.

In the 2 November 2011 issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers in the Netherlands and Switzerland report that a 30-day course of resveratrol brought about significant improvement in the basic metabolic functions of obese men.

Research using animals has shown that resveratrol can have a number of benefits related to how the body uses energy. In some species, resveratrol has been shown to increase average longevity. In other experiments involving lab animals, a reduction of 30-50% in calorie intake below what the animals normally eat has been shown to benefit the metabolism and extend the lifespan. Others studies show that resveratrol seems to mimic the effects of calorie restriction.

Now come hints that resveratrol may have some of these same effects on human beings. In the Cell Metabolism article, researchers report that the men who received the 150mg/day dose of resveratrol showed a number of changes that mimic what happens with calorie reduction. 150mg is about 100 times the amount of resveratrol found in an ordinary glass of red wine.

One of the researchers, Patrick Schrauwen, commented on the study in a press release issued by Maastricht University in the Netherlands: “We saw a lot of small effects, but consistently pointing in a good direction of improved metabolic health.” The study was concluded after 30 days, and so long-term benefits or side-effects are not known.

In particular, no one knows whether resveratrol has the capacity to extend the human lifespan. But the positive results published on 2 November will surely intensify the debate over the effects and the ethics of resveratrol.

In this study, resveratrol was administered to men who were obese but otherwise healthy. One way some bioethicists distinguish between morally legitimate “therapy” and morally questionable biomedical “enhancement” is by insisting that medicine must stick to treating those with disease. It is unethical, these bioethicists argue, to “enhance” people by using medicine to benefit those who are not sick. Their views are challenged by others who believe that technology should be used for human enhancement.

While this study may have observed that moral limit of treating only those with a “disease,” there is little reason to believe that the metabolic benefits of resveratrol are limited to those who are obese. On the contrary, there is every reason to think that this study will be used by advocates of human enhancement. In particular they will see this as the best evidence yet that resveratrol can be used to extend the human lifespan.

My prediction is that this study will encourage more widespread use of resveratrol. Most who use it will be seeking some form of enhancement if not an increase in longevity.

The article, “Calorie restriction-like effects of 30 days of resveratrol (resVidaTM) supplementation on energy metabolism and metabolic profile in obese humans,” appears in the 2 Nov 2011 issue of Cell Metabolism, where it is available free to the public.

Stem Cells Research and Christian Ethics

President Obama has opened a new era for stem cell research in America. He has asked the National Institutes of Health to draft new funding guidelines that will make federal research dollars available to US stem cell researchers without imposing unnecessary restrictions.

The restrictions were imposed on August 9, 2001, by Pres. George W. Bush. He approved the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research (something that outraged the religious right at the time), provided the cells were derived before the moment he gave the speech. Since then, the number of qualifying cell lines has shrunk while the number of new, unfunded lines has expanded.

Very few of us ever could grasp the moral difference between an embryo destroyed before August 2001 and one destroyed afterward. And most Americans favor embryonic stem cell research if it uses cells from embryos already created for fertility clinics but unused and ready to be destroyed anyway.

What's not so well known is that several religious groups support the Obama position. Jewish scholars are very clear in their support, as are experts in Islamic law. Christians are of course divided. The Vatican clearly opposes any use of embryos, but not all individual Catholics agree. Some Protestant denominations--the Presbyterian Church (USA), for example, or my own United Church of Christ--have gone on record supporting this research.

In the next few months, it will be interesting to see whether the NIH draft provides for funding for stem cell research on cell lines derived from embryos that were created especially for research. Here, more Americans are opposed, and NIH might be wise to draw a line: Offer funding for lines from donated embryos but not from embryos created expressly for research. Drawing the line at that point would also rule out cloning or nuclear transfer, since any cloned embryo is by definition created for research.

In the meantime, congratulations to Pres. Obama for recognizing the promise of this field of research, the moral complexities that lie ahead, and the need to set aside the artificial limits of the past while working toward consensus on the moral vision that guides the future.