Frontiers of Aging

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

Aubrey de Grey pointed me to an Australian ABC Radio National show on religion and radical life extension. Here is the summary:

Living longer fascinates us today as much as it ever did. The modern elixirs of life are the special foods and fad diets while the cosmetics industry profits more than ever from our desire to look young. Scientists too, are in on the act as they always have been, though now they have a new weapon - genetic engineering - which promises to be able to cure and prevent the processes in our cells that lead to ageing and death - and to increase our life-spans dramatically. Like magic and alchemy before it, modern science may be on the verge of solving the long quest for immortality. But what if it's our mortality that makes us human? Encounter this week explores the frontiers of ageing.

The RealPlayer audio file can be downloaded here. I'm sure we all know where I stand on the "mortality that makes us human" point - so far as I'm concerned all that mortality makes us is dead. It's hard to be human, or much of anything for that matter, when you're dead. I have nothing against people who want to age and die, but please respect our right to engineer longer, healthier lives for those who want them!