Nanotechnology and Life Extension, Updated
Chris Phoenix, co-founder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, dropped me a line to remind of past updates to the version of his essay "Nanotechnology and Life Extension" over at the Longevity Meme. After updating, I feel I should remind you folk that the article is just as good a read today as it was when first penned:
A few thousand years ago, people lived about thirty years. From their point of view, we have already extended our lives to an amazing degree. However, from where we stand today, we can see that we still have a long way to go. Some people still die in their 40's from cancer, heart attack, stroke, and infections. This is tragic, and frustrating. Today's medicine is only somewhat able to deal with these and other conditions--and it has barely started to attack the problem of aging. But we can see light at the end of the tunnel.Fifty years from now, what causes of death will be preventable? That depends largely on the technology we will have available, so let's start by projecting some technology trends. Gene sequencing and identification will be as easy as a blood sugar test. Medical devices such as artificial hearts and insulin pumps will be implantable and well-integrated with the body's natural demands. Surgical instruments will be more delicate and less destructive; what today is "major surgery" will be done with an office visit. Computers will be millions of times faster than today's machines. Last but not least, we will probably have the ability to build strong, useful, complex machines out of individual atoms and molecules. This is called "nanotechnology" or simply "nanotech", and it will make us healthier in several important ways.
The prospects are bright for the decades ahead - if, that is, we can get our act together to leap the first hurdles in the fight to cure aging.
Technorati tags: life extension, nanomedicine, nanotechnology
Great article! It's good to account for the possibility of leapfrogging biotech approaches to life extension with nanotech approaches. It's not as if there's a technologically unavoidable series of predetermined steps that must be undertaken in order to achieve a cure. Like any cure, there are futuristic-sounding solutions, and immediately-feasible-sounding solutions, and in retrospect, sometimes the former terms out to be successful, but sometimes the latter.