The Immortality Institute's Life Extension Conference is coming up in Atlanta on November 5th 2005. The Institute represents one of the more dynamic offshoots of transhumanist culture in recent years; the conference promises to be a worthwhile event. The film Exploring Life Extension will get its first public airing - it will be interesting to see how Bruce Klein and the rest of the film crew distill hundreds of hours of interviews with members of the healthy life extension community into the essence of what we stand for and aim to achieve.

The Immortality Institute's science documentary, Exploring Life Extension, aims to create a realistic impression of the modern scientific pursuit of Life Extension. The documentary includes interviews with authors from the Immortality Institute's book, The Scientific Conquest of Death, plus more than 80 other individuals working to advance life extension.

The conference speakers include biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, biologist Michael Rose, Max More of the Extropy Institute, as well as representatives from the transhumanist end of the general artificial intelligence and cryonics communities. For those of you in the Eastern and Central US who have not yet had a chance to meet Aubrey de Grey, the driving force behind the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, this is a golden opportunity.

You can register directly from the conference page, just scroll down for the form.

The Immortality Institute founder, Bruce Klein, is a strong advocate of pushing out the boundaries in public discussion of healthy life extension. The Institute has a provocative name and step-right-to-the-end-goal mission statement, and quite deliberately so. I've pointed out the benefits of this sort of strategy in the past: provided you are discussing scientifically sound propositions, your wider community has little to lose and much to gain over the long term. Physical immortality - in the sense of vulnerable agelessness - is sound science; we know of no obstacles beyond our own considerable lack of understanding and capabilities when it comes to our cells, medical technology and related fields.

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Posted by Reason at September 16, 2005 12:52 AM | TrackBack (0)