The most important meme that healthy life extension advocates are currently working to spread runs something like this:

The current aging research establishment is far too conservative regarding the near future potential of fully funded longevity research, and their conservatism is damaging the prospects for this funding. The human body is merely a very complex machine and aging is just another medical condition. Aging can - and should - be addressed just like any other chronic, progressive, fatal medical condition. New technologies and knowledge mean that high levels of funding for directed anti-aging research will produce radical gains in healthy life span quickly enough to benefit those of us reading this today.

Over the mid to long term, greater adoption of this meme and related ideas will mean greater research funding and greater pressure for progress and legitimacy in longevity research. You can see Ray Kurzweil hard at work propagating his version of this meme in recent media appearances.

Scientists believe that in the future people will be living for ever - because they will find the key to eternal life.

They believe death is merely an engineering problem to be solved and are developing an organisation called the Institute of Biomedical Gerontology to find that key.

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted the internet would rise to global dominance when it was still an obscure government communications network in the 1980s, says immortality is on the horizon.

To date gerontology has largely been a cautious and conservative field dedicated to understanding the biology of ageing. But the new immortalist movement takes a wholly different perspective.

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His optimism is based largely on biotechnology showing the kind of exponential progress that created the information technology revolution, New Scientist reports.

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"We're 20 years away from the golden era of nanotechnology," says Dr Kurzweil. "I didn't just start making predictions yesterday."

Most mainstream gerontologists, however, are circumspect. "Research on the biology and genetics of ageing is currently at a similar state to cancer research 20 years ago," says Dr Howard Jacobs, a geneticist at the University of Tampere, Finland.