Tag Archives: cure

Forging the Future (series)

Filmed across North America, Europe, and Australia, and mastered in 4K, this six-part series focuses on the most exciting disciplines in popular science today.

Each episode features a deep dive into: Artificial Intelligence, Achieving Immortality, Living Off the Earth, Genetic Engineering, Cyborg Technology, and creating a Disease-Free World with the Human Microbiome.

By showing how the most cutting-edge technologies work across these fields, the series reveals the real-world impact they will have, and the hopeful futures they will create—and which this series dramatically reveals—for humanity and the planet.

Through immersive, ‘you are there’ filmmaking, each episode presents the most esteemed technologists and scientists in action at the world’s most advanced facilities—including those at elite institutions like Harvard University, MIT, Columbia University.

To overcome some of our greatest challenges, they are using gene-editing technologies to fight life-threatening genetic disorders, using Artificial Intelligence to develop robotic consciousness, creating outside-the-box treatments that can reverse ageing, or even using Computer-Assisted Telepathy that gives a person control of another person’s body!

Forging the Future offers unique, first person perspectives from some of the most respected scientists today, as they help to create a better future for everyone.

Episode 1 Cyborg Revolution won the 2021 Gold Award at the New York Festivals TV and Film for Best Science and Technology episode, and Episodes 4 and 5 (Life off Earth and Disease Free World) both won Finalist Awards. Details here, here and here.

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Episode 1 – Cyborg Revolution

We’ve all seen Cyborgs in Hollywood blockbusters. But it turns out these fictional beings aren’t so far-fetched. In fact, this episode features a true-to-life cyborg, who at four months of age, was the youngest American to be outfitted with a myoelectric hand. And at one ground-breaking engineering facility, engineers are developing biotechnologies that can even further enhance high-tech like this by giving mechanical prosthetics something incredible: the physical sensation of touch!

Other engineering firms are gearing up powerful exoskeletons that both rehabilitate and enhance the power of the human body… improving the lives of those with paralysis and transforming the work force.

But the real pivot is getting machines inside the body. An out-of-the-box ‘transhumanist’ featured in the episode installs a chip inside a person’s hand. It works as a key that unlocks doors, literally and figuratively.

However, brain-machine integration poses the biggest challenges, and the biggest rewards. Cutting-edge neuroscientists and technologists reveal how computer chips can directly interface with the human brain in ways that not only rehabilitate, but which can also ‘read thoughts’ in real-time.

Remarkably, a breakthrough technology called ‘Computer Assisted Telepathy’ is achieving the impossible. Through a test subject’s mind only, she’s able to control another person’s body. Technologies like these will pave the way toward the Cyborg Revolution.

  

 

Episode 2 – Hyper Intelligence

Everyone has heard about Artificial Intelligence (or AI), but very few people know what it is or how it actually works. This episode brings this otherwise abstract topic to life by visiting the most cutting-edge engineering firms where innovative technologists are using AI to transform machines into thinking robots.

Leading institutions are preparing robot rovers and flying drones to navigate through unmapped territories, in order to save lives in bold Search and Rescue missions. By ‘mapping as they go’, these thinking machines generate their own intelligence—allowing them to self-navigate without human input. Additionally, some technologists are coordinating swarms of drones to operate and collaborate together—all with the explicit ambition of improving the efficiency of farming and increasing food production.

Though the news media often reports on how machines could cause unemployment, that’s not what AI inventors in this program are saying. In fact, their AI-driven robots are using machine-learning to work better with humans. Through observation, AI robots are learning to anticipate the actions of human co-workers, keeping people safer in the workplace – and making it more productive.

Some scientists in this show are even developing AI robots that are achieving the beginnings of robotic consciousness. By comprehending their own self-image, they are able to learn about their environment, make decisions, and navigate the space around them – just as  human babies do. Other engineers are taking this technology even further to develop real-world Androids – that is, robots that look, feel, and act like people.

Becoming consultants, advisors, and even friends, these Androids will ultimately help individuals adjust to realities of the human condition.

 

Episode 3 – Human Immortality

If you thought Human Immortality was just a concept in science fiction, this episode reveals how it will become science fact. For some scientists featured in this program, achieving Immortality is not a question of ‘If’. The real question is ‘When?’.

One scientist shows how she is making lab-grown organs called ‘ghost hearts’ that not only grow quickly, but that can be accepted in any host’s body without rejection—ending the agony for those waiting for organ transplants. Another biologist is looking at Immortality at the microbiological level. In his lab, he’s identified the ‘longevity gene’ (called SIR2) that can slow the ageing process, and which holds the key that will unlock our ability to better control the rate at which we age. One gerontologist is unearthing the immortal secrets of lobsters, who never stop growing and naturally live up to the astonishing age of 122 years. Inspired by how their bodies regulate cellular division, he’s developing cutting-edge medications that will boost human longevity.

Incredibly, one pioneer is creating a unique medical cocktail that can even reverse ageing. Medical techniques like these could pave the way to Human Immortality.

  

 

Episode 4 – Life Off Earth

If you thought The Space Race peaked with the Apollo missions, wait until permanent research bases on the Moon and Mars start cropping up.

The New Space Race to get humans to Mars is heating up, and this episode presents the visionaries who are making this future possible. Once exclusively financed by governments, private companies are now developing the means of living in outer space.

On the cutting edge of this Copernican Revolution is the Dream Chaser—a new, high-flying space shuttle that will ferry researchers to inflatable research habitats in outer space. But creating permanent habitats in the toxic environments on the Moon and Mars is a serious undertaking. Scientists and engineers take these threats to human life very seriously. One engineer is creating advanced, reusable spacesuits that makes mobility and dexterity less bulky, and more feasible in gravity-free environments.

Other engineers featured in the episode are helping in these efforts by developing high-tech drills and pressurization chambers that allow for the excavation of the most crucial resource for the survival of humanity: Liquid Water.

These are just a few parts of the complex efforts needed to establish habitats on alien planets.

One firm is developing habitats that are 3D printed with Martian soil, and will be pre-built before astronauts arrive. But one of the boldest endeavours lies in creating a living, breathing ecosystem that, through plant growth, generates oxygen and food for the first permanent settlers on the Moon and Mars.

An ambitious research project—30 years in the making—is providing the ‘ground-truth’ of how to create an Earth-like Biosphere in outer space… providing a road map for how humanity will survive and even thrive in the life-threatening conditions of other planets.

 

Episode 5 – Disease-Free World: The Microbiome

To create a disease-free world, scientists are pushing the envelope in every conceivable corner. This episode features the most cutting-edge scientists out there—including Nobel-prize winners—who are harnessing the power of what’s called “The Microbiome.”

The Microbiome is the full array of the trillions of microorganisms that live in or on the human body, which help it function. By understanding the Microbiome as a kind of ecosystem, scientists are using innovative techniques to discern the microbes’ various functions in the body as a whole.

Incredibly, through revealing the function of one particular micro-organism, one scientist has been able to cure Stomach Cancer. But other scientists armed with this knowledge are attempting the unthinkable: namely, to increase the presence of microbes across the body by intentionally infecting people with more infectious agents. The reason? Increasing microbial diversity in the body boosts its immunity, and helps people fight disease from the inside out.

Radical methods like these are leading to breakthrough remedies, from the erasure of life-threatening infections like C. Difficile, to ending Asthma and Obesity. Innovative research like this will inform the biotechnologies of the future, and in turn create a disease-free world.

 

Episode 6 – The Rise of Genetic Engineering

Genetic Engineering extends far beyond the controversial news headlines that obsess over ‘designer babies’. In the science community, gene-editing tools like CRISPR and PRIME editing will do nothing less than save the planet.

Methods like this allow scientists to alter and ‘re-program’ the genetics of living organisms.

This episode shows scientists at large using gene-editing technologies to revolutionize the food supply chain, bolstering food crops to prevent famines, and even speed up reforestation efforts that will reverse global warming. Genetic Engineering in farm animals is helping scientists to ‘select’ desirable traits, like physical features and gender. Incredibly, one scientist is using gene-editing technologies to resurrect the DNA of extinct species, like the Wooly Mammoth!

Despite some public concern, gene-editing is definitely a cause for hope in the fight against genetic disorders in humans. It’s already reversing a type of congenital blindness in children. And with the hyper-precision afforded by PRIME editing being prepared for clinical trials, a much more hopeful world will be revealed for families in the future.

Ayahuasca: Expansion of Consciousness

Ayhuasca: Expansion of Consciousness, tells the story of Ayahuasca, from its emergence in the Amazonian Forest, to its popularity with the Santo Daime religion, and on to its arrival in urban centres. 

Combining scientific, religious and anthropological perspectives on the use of Ayahuasca in modern society, and in parallel with the director Fausto Noro’s own healing process, Ayhuasca: Expansion of Consciousness provides for the first time, a holistic, yet balanced view of this controversial subject.

Burzynski: Cancer Cure Cover Up

Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-up is the story of a pioneering biochemist who discovered a unique and proprietary method of successfully treating most cancers. This documentary takes the audience on a near 50-year journey both Dr. Burzynski and his patients have been enduring in order to obtain FDA-approved clinical trials of Antineoplastons. Defying the face of skepticism, legal attacks from state and federal agencies, and a powerful propaganda campaign to stop Burzynski – this doctor and his patients are still going strong.

Due to the continued failed efforts of state and federal agencies in their attempts to stop Burzynski from continuing to treat patients and expand his research, special interest groups have since launched a relentless propaganda campaign against Dr. Burzynski, and his supporters and patients, in hopes  that this game-changing innovation never reach the open market.

The primary reason that the cancer industry and its regulatory agencies fear the approval of Antineoplastons is purely economical.

If Antineoplastons were FDA-approved for just one cancer type this would mean that anyone of any age diagnosed with any type of cancer could legally insist their oncologist provide them with Antineoplastons “off-label”.   Given the gentle and nontoxic nature of these medications, most people would begin to opt for Antineoplastons as a first line of defense against their cancer instead of first choosing life-threatening yet profitable chemotherapy and radiation.

Burzynski: The Cancer Cure Cover-up investigates this hidden cancer treatment and the decades of failed lawsuits the US government and FDA have pursued in order to try to silence him.

Beautiful Faces

Beautiful Faces offers a compelling look at one of the world’s most remarkable hospitals, the disfigured young patients to whom it offers new lives, and the team of surgeons, physicians, and medical professionals who believe it’s the best place in the world to practice their unique, life-transforming craft.

You’ll come away convinced that health-care can be affordable, humane, and excellent, and that every one of us deserves a face with which we can bravely meet the world.

Hospital General Gea Gonzalez, located in Mexico City’s frenetic Tlalpan district, is surrounded by a high metal-barred fence, its entrances guarded by policemen carrying automatic weapons. On any day, literally thousands of impoverished Mexicans wait patiently for services, often for many hours, yet the hospital’s plastic and reconstructive surgery unit.

It is a hospital that ably demonstrates that even the very poor can receive excellent medical care at costs that don’t bankrupt health-care systems and that everyone can be offered the basic human right of a normal face.

Beautiful Faces interweaves the stories of patients and their families who come to the reconstructive plastic surgery unit at Hospital Gea Gonzalez seeking physical transformations that will renew their own and their loved ones lives with the personal stories of the enormously talented medical professionals whose work is both their passion and their gift to humankind.

The film chronicles the remarkable community of caregivers and care-receivers who come together on the hospital’s fascinating fourth floor, and who profoundly influence each others lives. From Dr. Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, the beloved patriarch whose demands for excellence from his subordinates remain exacting, to four-year-old Sebastián Castillo, whose irrepressible enthusiasm for life helps him cope remarkably with the challenges of Crouzon’s syndrome, Beautiful Faces is a mosaic of stories–the richly visual tales of people who meet in a singular place and who collectively understand that in valuing individual lives and striving to make them better, we value all of humanity.

Beautiful Faces ultimately demonstrates that, in many ways, the distinction between patients and caregivers is only an illusory one, and that much more than cutting, sawing, and sewing, the essential task of the hospital is the freeing of the human spirit. It is work that allows doctors and patients alike to look comfortably in the mirror and understand that they are vitally important members of the human family.