"Death is an inconvenient obstacle on the road to immortality"
The title of this post was recently offered up as a pity quote on the Gerontology Research Group mailing list:
"Death is an inconvenient obstacle on the road to immortality."
The spirit in which this is intended is evidently that an army of biogerontologists and supporters should marshal, march, and trample death beneath their sandaled feet - to leave it broken in the dust upon the road that leads to rejuvenation biotechnology and agelessness.
That trampling will undoubtedly happen, albeit far from soon enough. If you stop to think about this for a moment, however, you might conclude that the defeat of death should not in fact be the conceptual focus of efforts to extend the healthy human life span. Let's try an analogy here:
The ground is an inconvenient obstacle on the road to flight.
Fail at flying, and a harsh encounter with the ground is your fate - in much the same way as death by aging is the fate that awaits us should we fail to achieve the technologies capable of repairing the biological damage of aging. Yet heavier than air flight wasn't achieved though a focus on the ground: the early aeronauts and their supporters didn't raise funding and convince the public of the viability of heavier than air flight through "defeat the ground!" campaigns. Their eyes looked up, to the skies, to rapid travel across land and ocean, to daring acts and barnstorming.
Returning to physical immortality - meaning the state of agelessness attained through biotechnology and diligent repair - then we might see that the grail here is life achieved, not death denied (or trampled). It is living, being healthy, able to plan ahead for decades without fear, to not be faced with inevitable pain, suffering, and frailty. These points are the focus.