Reminders
This short post at Business Insider serves as a reminder of two items. Firstly, the author notes that 'Silicon Valley billionaires are pouring money into gene research and modifications' - and I wish that were the case! There are very few philanthropists and investors amongst the wealthy of the technology industry who are doing this, and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison are outliers in having devoted millions to this end. Journalists who cover the tech industry sometimes wake up momentarily to see instances of the comparatively rare funding of longevity science - and then assume it to be more commonplace than it is. In fact, progress in this field is absolute limited and determined by the lack of funding for programs like SENS: the path ahead is very clear, and availability of funds for the research and development is the bottleneck. The second point is illustrated by glancing at the article comments, in which we can see that it is still very much the cultural norm to decry efforts to extend healthy life - and to be expected to decry efforts to extend healthy life, to conform to this view or suffer censure. Consider this for a moment: we still live in a society in which the mainstream view is that people must suffer horribly and die on schedule, and to do anything about that is wrong. Personally, I blame much of that required-attitude-in-public on the pervasive influence of Malthusian, hair shirt environmentalism, coupled with some of the less pleasant aspects of human nature in all of us. For the foreseeable future this is the great act of persuasion we must undertake: convince a large segment of the population to agree in public that we can use biotechnology to do away with the suffering of old age, and that we should use biotechnology to do away with the suffering of old age.
Link: http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-death-is-a-problem-that-can-be-solved-2012-2