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I suppose I should mention again the Demos initiative "Better Humans? The politics of human enhancement and life extension"; those of us interested in healthy life extension should take a look at the following essays (in PDF format) from the collection:
You may find the rest interesting also. I've already had my say regarding Demos and this sort of school of supposedly positive bioethics in the latest Longevity Meme newsletter:
Demos, like so many other explicitly political ventures, has the air of operating in a world in which new technology simply falls from the sky or arrives by conveyor belt - ergo all efforts must go to simply responding to it. This is a nutty worldview, but one that is sadly all too prevalent. In fact, medical and healthy life extension technologies are far from certain, and the timetable for their arrival is even less determined. The future of our lives, of the length of our healthy life spans, is very much determined by what we do today - by how effectively we support medical research, and perhaps more importantly, the freedom to conduct medical research and make use of the resulting healthy life extension technologies.
This is not to mention the underlying assumptions of socialism that pervade the works, the most galling of which is that "society" (meaning anyone with political influence) has the right to stop progress in order for "society" (meaning bioethicists whose relevance and thus income depends on generating problems from thin air) to pontificate on what it all means. Such nonsense! Bioethics is the noise generated by various parasitic groups that thrive by slowing and blocking progress towards healthy life extension technologies. It's a sad thing that so many resources are wasted on building organizations and subcultures that contribute nothing of value, and are in fact incentivized to impede medical research.
Read through the Demos publications with this view in mind - you'll see that even supposedly positive, pro-research, pro-future bioethicists have little to add to actual progress in medical technology. They just damage it less than the luddites.
Technorati tags: bioethics, life extension
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Posted by Reason
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