High-Tech Daydreamers Investing in Immortality

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2003 07:19:14 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] High-Tech Daydreamers Investing in Immortality
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High-Tech Daydreamers Investing in Immortality
By JAMES GORMAN
<<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts/01AGE.html?th>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts/01AGE.html?th>

CAMDEN, Me.  Aubrey de Grey took the stage of the Camden Opera House,
tugging at a beard worthy of Methuselah, to tell his listeners that they
could triumph over death.

Mr. de Grey was not selling an afterlife or a metaphor. He is a geneticist
at the University of Cambridge, in England, and his prophecy was
straightforward if hard to believe: Getting old and dying are engineering
problems. Aging can be reversed and death defeated. People already alive
will live a thousand years or longer.

He was at pains to argue that what he calls "negligible senescence," and
what the average person would call living forever, is inevitable. His
proposed war on aging, he said, is intended to make it happen sooner and
make it happen right. He subscribes, it seems, to the philosophy
articulated by Woody Allen: "I don't want to achieve immortality through
my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."

This notion of getting in on the ground floor of immortality was
apparently appealing to the roughly 500 people who came in mid-October to
this coastal town of big yachts and small gift shops about 70 miles
northeast of Portland to attend Pop!Tech, an annual technology conference.
They were ready for the Next Big Thing. After all, many of them were
present at the creation of the last one, the spread of the personal
computer and the explosive growth of the Internet.

Stephen M. Case, the founder of AOL, was here, as were John Scully and
Robert Metcalfe, who started the conference seven years ago. Mr. Scully
was the chief executive of Apple, after he had left PepsiCo. Mr. Metcalfe
invented the Ethernet and founded 3Com, among a few other achievements,
before he became a venture capitalist. Other, lesser known entrepreneurs
and investors, along with dot-com veterans, a gaggle of journalists and
the merely curious, also attended to look for new ideas or promote them,
and to use the gathering of thinkers and talkers as a guide to what's
next.

The answer was clear. Now that the giddiness and glamour of the killer app
and ultimate hand-held gizmo have passed into memory, it is biology that
beckons. The possibility of making money out of biotech is of obvious
interest. But the more exciting question in the air was not so much where
to put your money as what to think about. Differentiating between vision
and fantasy would come next.

Many in the audience seemed unafraid of amending the presumed laws of
nature. When Juan Enriquez, from the Harvard Business School, displayed an
X-ray of a chicken with three wings and asked who believed that this sort
of research ought to continue, about two-thirds of those in the audience
raised their hands. This was before they knew its purpose, which is to
understand how to regenerate damaged tissues for human beings.

Mr. Enriquez said he was surprised, as well he might be. It is not often
you find 300 people ready to vote for extra limbs, no matter the reason.

Other speakers addressed the importance of stem cell research, ocean
exploration, a crisis in the patent system, the soul-deadening effect of
suburbs, and the mode by which the Earth will die.

For audacity of imagination, though, Mr. de Grey was matched only by Joe
Davis, a molecular artist from M.I.T. with a peg leg and a devilish glint
in his eye, who, with the help of scientists at Harvard and M.I.T. has
made art of DNA by inserting coded messages into the genes of bacteria. He
does not work only with DNA. He also pointed out that drawings sent into
space, presumably for curious extraterrestrials, lacked anatomically
correct female genitalia. He has not been able to remedy that, but he did
record vaginal contractions and translate them into a radio broadcast.

He also provided instruction in basic biology using a DNA model made of
garden hose to great effect. All in all it was a perfect atmosphere for
Mr. de Grey, whose campaign against death has something of the feeling of
an Internet start-up. On one hand he is promising the world. On the other,
the underlying science and technology are real, Mr. de Grey argued. And
the business plan is, if nothing else, bold.

Yet without true expertise in some very sophisticated biology, it was hard
to know how far away from the mainstream he was.

Mr. de Grey is probably several steps ahead of the avant garde in his
conviction that the 4,000- or 5,000-year life is right around the corner.
But extending the average human life to 150 years is commonly discussed.
And some gerontologists say there is no theoretical limit to the human
life span.

Mr. de Grey's ideas were not completely new to people who have been
pondering cyborgs and artificial intelligence for years. "I think, and
I've thought this for a long time, that we live, roughly speaking, in the
last generation of human beings," said Whitfield Diffie, chief of security
for Sun Microsystems, a pioneer in encryption, and a freewheeling thinker
often sought after for such conferences as a speaker. He was just visiting
this year and said he was fascinated by the grand claims for the
biological century, which he views as probably too conservative.

<snip>

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