Tomorrow's People
A potentially interesting conference - with a live stream to the Internet promised - will be hosted by Oxford University's James Martin Institute in March 2006, entitled "Tomorrow's People: The Challenges of Technologies for Life Extension and Enhancement." It has the sound of an affair with modern luddite leanings (i.e. the hard work and uncertainty of progress is all but dismissed in favor of discussions of ethics, control, slowing things down, poorly assessed "risks," and the "need" for governance), but many of the speakers and panellists are scientists first and foremost, and a number were at the Second Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence conference. One would hope that these sensible folk can keep the bioethicists from turning the conference into an exhibition of bad bioethical behavior.