You also end up in the situation our major pharmacuetical companies are in. You've got all the low hanging fruit, now you are looking at obscure targets. And areas with diminishing returns. Like curing Alzheimers so the person can live another 2 years before they die of old age.

Not surprisingly Pharmacuetical company revenues are now falling, and look set to fall for the foreseeable future. Which I predicted based simply on the low hanging fruit argument. Compare that to the boom of the 80's then the commercial success in the 90's mainly on those 80's drugs.

Even if we cured all disease and cancer and everything we are trying for we'd only add 12 years to the average human life expectancy. And for most people those 12 years would be during their elder years, like living to 92 instead of 80. Not exactly breathtaking, and not exactly something people are going to be eager to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for.

On the other hand our medical industry needs to make the jump to all sorts of adult stem cells, gene therapy, extracellular junk breakers, inside cell cleaners, and so forth. I imagine there are many types of extracellular cross links, all needing different chemicals to break them, and taking those chemicals for perhaps months. Each drug you took could cost thousands and people would pay it.

Same with adult stem cells, extracting, testing for the purest, making millions, re-implanting in the right place.. this is something that will take thousands of researchers constantly improving and hundreds of thousands of workers to carry out.. And that is just for one organ of the body!

Its pretty obvious to see this could employ millions upon millions of people, be worth trillions in sales.. say a portfolio of 100 treatments to ameriolate aging damage.. each one by itself having a small but significant rejunivation impact. But together rejuvinating a person from the age of like 75 to say 35.

Big scary thinkers like Henry Ford build economies and change the world. His company directly employed 1 million people at the peak.

[Posted by: aa2 at February 23, 2008 7:46 PM]

Yes, it's fun to dream about being a doctor with a treatment so effective. The hit or miss nature of medicine and it's philosophy of fixing only after the damage is done was incredibly demotivating to me. So maybe I could do neuroscience, i thought.I read an article from a professor about how being a scientist sucks because the demand for researchers is very low (not of course computer science/engineering). And with all my hope drained, I realized I wasn't brilliant anyway and no amount of motivation could change that.

OF course, I am not an active immortalist. But I applaud the effort.

[Posted by: Matthew at February 25, 2008 8:43 PM]