Thanks to writer Adam Bulger for a thoughtful piece on life extension and transhumanism.

Want to Live Forever?
The human-life-extension movement sees a glorious future for us all

Thursday, August 07, 2008

By Adam Bulger

...James Hughes, an administrator and instructor at Trinity College in Hartford, is a leading transhumanist theorist. The executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which he co-founded when he was the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association, Hughes has written several books on transhumanist ideas, including Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future.

It would appear that Hughes, a buttoned-down professor-type with a close-cropped goatee, is dealing with ideas better suited to science fiction than the real world. However, he traces transhumanist history back to old, earth-bound traditions.

“It goes back to the enlightenment, about 400 years or so,” Hughes said. “And when you go back to those original ideas, you see a number of things emerging, among them the notion that science and tech can be applied to human affairs, and things can be engineered and improved upon.”...





Slowing body degeneration is a modest goal, and doesn’t go far enough for some national anti-aging researchers. Aubrey de Grey, an energetic Englishman with a ZZ Top-length beard, is the chief researcher and evangelist for an anti-aging movement that views aging as a disease that can be cured, and cured soon.

“I think we have a 50 percent chance of getting there in around 25 years, so long as the early proof-of-concept work in mice is well-enough funded for the next 10 years or so,” de Grey said via e-mail.

Since 2003, de Grey’s organization, the Methuselah Foundation (named for the Biblical figure who supposedly lived 900 years), has offered a Methuselah Mouse Prize for researchers who extend the lives of mice. And the cash award is at $4.5 million.

IEET intern Ben Scarlato is also featured in the article:

Ben Scarlato is only 18, but has spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about staving off death. Scarlato and I sat on lawn chairs in the garden of his parents’ house in Ellington. As the wind rose around us, he told me he wants to live long enough to enjoy what he believes will be a streamlined, very efficient future.

“I guess my real motivation is the desire to not have a lot of clutter around me and just have one computer or one brain interface,” Scarlato said. “The more tangible advantage of the efficiency is that you could have better emergency responses and better human experiences.”

The noticeably thin Scarlato sported a Battlestar Galactica T-shirt and two bruises on his arms from a recent doctor’s injection. He has been researching life-extension methods, most notably the radically limited diet known as caloric restriction. Scarlato believes in the science behind caloric restriction (more on that later). It certainly helps that he views food as a necessary nuisance and not a pleasure to be savored.

“[Eating] kind of distracts me from whatever else I’m doing,” Scarlato said. “I’m kind of weird that way. I’m more concerned with my health than how things taste. I’ve always cared about maximizing my happiness.”