Transhumanism at the Global Spiral
The February 2009 issue of the Global Spiral is a collective reply by transhumanist writers to earlier disparagement from conservative religious thinkers. A piece by biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is amongst the articles: "What is realistic is to work toward anti-aging medicine as an engineer would take on an engineering problem: repairing and reversing aging and making the damage already caused by metabolism harmless. ... Two thirds of all deaths worldwide, and about 90% of all deaths in the developed world, are from causes that only rarely kill young adults. These causes include Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and most cancers. They are age-related because they are expressions of the later stages of aging, occurring when the molecular and cellular damage that has accumulated in the body throughout life exceeds the level that metabolism can tolerate. Moreover, before it kills them, aging imposes on most elderly people a long period of debilitation and disease. For these reasons, aging is inarguably the most prevalent medically-relevant phenomenon in the modern world and the primary ultimate target of biomedical research. ... Unfortunately, the regenerative medicine approach to combating aging is not yet being adequately pursued by major funding bodies: only a small number of laboratories worldwide are funded (either publicly or privately) to develop therapies that could rejuvenate aged but otherwise undamaged tissues."
Link: http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10688/Default.aspx