 This is the first in a series of interviews with individuals in the life extension and cryonics movement. We start off with an interview with Ben Best, president of the Cryonics Institute.
What is your philosophy toward life? |
|||
More and more researchers now agree that radical human life extension is only a matter of time. Aging is a biochemical process and humans will learn how to intervene in it and slow it down. Abolishing aging is theoretically possible. It is a goal that is not quite within reach yet, but it will be one day. The question is, will it arrive in time? Or will you perish on the threshold of the era of much longer and healthier human life? |
|||
While you were reading this sentence, a dozen people just died, worldwide. There. Another dozen people have perished. I think this is an outrage. I want to tell you why I think so, and what nanomedicine can do to help.
Let's look at the dimensions of the human holocaust that we call "natural death." |
|||
Death is not a topic that people like to think about, and that is just as true of healthy life extension advocates as anyone else. We have to recognise, however, that the future of healthy life extension (regenerative medicine, stem cell therapies, understanding the biochemical processes of aging, and nanomedicine, to name a few fields) will not arrive soon enough to benefit everyone. Many people are too old, or suffer from other conditions that will kill them before cures can be developed. This is an unpleasant reality that we must face. |
|||
|
|||
There are five broad categories in which I hope you could pigeonhole any argument you can find in opposition to radical life extension; there’s the appeal to nature, there are undesirable psychological consequences to radical life extension, that there are undesirable social consequences, that the desire for life extension comes from questionable ambitions and skewed priorities, and we are also going to talk about the fallacies used to argue against life extension. |
|||
