A somewhat random collection of links for you folk today; my attention is wandering far and wide. Let's start with a fairly content-free piece of research promotion via News-Medical.net. These things, while somewhat frustrating, are a good indicator as to what those in the know really think about rates of progress and potential for funding. The latter is a fair proxy for general sentiment in the field and chance of success, if you play the averages.

The technique involves growing cells inside a 'non-reactive biocontainer' which, placed in rats, sees the cells mature into fully functional tissues and organs. Using this breakthrough technology, scientists at BOBIM have successfully produced sufficient tissue to replace a breast.

...

Professor Morrison sees the new approach having potential for repairing many other tissues and organs including muscle (skeletal and beating heart tissue), organoid (pancreas and liver) and glands (hormone secreting, pituitary and sinus).

Moving on, more commentary spurred the recent TransVision 2006 conference, courtesy of queerrel:

Even if the first human to live a 1000 years had indeed been born already, it would take some great amount of time before these technologies could be put to use to benefit the rest of the humankind. This in turn gives us a fair amount of time to solve the overpopulation problem, which, and I can't emphasize this enough, we'll have to solve anyway. So why wait till we've got everything figured out - I have faith in the on-going evolution of the creative spirit of the humankind, so to say.

Another lecturer pointed out the concern some seem to have of becoming very bored if having to live that long. "Well", he said, "if life is boring, then certainly death is going to be even more boring!"

Moving on again, a couple of posts on that recent BBC article that took a brief scan of viewpoints on radical life extension. Attila Csordas rightly notes the poll; while all online polls should be taken with a grain of salt, I don't think I'm imagining the trend of ever more support for ever more healthy life.

The supporters of life extension are not just transhumanists and the members of present day health and beauty establishment.

And more:

If we can make it to 1000, we will have achieved immortality. We won't have to worry about "illness"; we'll worry about altogether bigger threats such as the lifetimes of stars, the hard radiation of supernovae, the gnarled topology of spacetime, and, ultimately, the fate of the universe itself.

Even if you think Ray Kurzweil is way off in his predicted timescales, the technology of a hundred years from now is going to be most impressive. A thousand years on? Hard to think about except in the broadest terms of capabilities; physical immortality is certainly on that list. I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that it can't be done these days, rather the debate is over the very crucial matter of timing. How much, and how soon?

Technorati tags: life extension, medical research, tissue engineering

Posted by Reason at August 31, 2006 10:35 PM | TrackBack (0)