The Broad, Long Avenue of Progress Ahead
This Times Online columnist gets it; wrong in the details of the science that will most likely liberate us from age-related degeneration, but right in the grand scope of what is possible: "Until 1828 it was believed that life, with its so-called 'vital forces', owed nothing to science, but in that year Friedrich Wohler synthesised urea in the test tube. Since then, chemistry's invasion of biology has been unstoppable. So it is not science fiction, it is inevitable, that within our children's lifetimes, molecular biologists will tweak the human genome. If we can re-create existing bacterial genomes, we will be able to create new improved human ones. The ills that flesh is heir to are many, but thanks to DNA chemistry they will be abolished. Diseases such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy will be eliminated as thoroughly as smallpox. And the greatest ill of all - ageing - will also be conquered. It was Sir Francis Bacon, the Father of the Scientific Method, who wrote in his Valerius Terminus of 1603 that the purpose of science was the 'discovery of all operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice' - and immortality is possible."
Link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3254111.ece