January 12th, 2005
SENS Website Updated
The bioconservatism discussion over at the Immortality Institute is getting interesting. You should take a look. Aubrey de Grey used this as an opportunity to preview the latest updates to his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence website - a fair amount of new material has been added based on the discussions and experience of the past year.
OK, my site is fully updated. I rushed it a bit for our new friend, so readers are welcome to mail me with bug reports. Oh, and feedback on the text is OK too....
I read the good professor's article on the MIT technology magazine. He is a real fascist. He warns about the threat of "untrammeled personal liberty" and who the individual must exist within the context of current societal relationships and obligations. Hitler says many of the same things in "Mein Kampf".
I will say more about the good professor. He is a former surgeon and bioethic professor at Yale medical school.
I have a good friend in the medical field who tells me that the major medical schools prefer liberal arts applicants rather than those with technical background. Insiders tell him that the real reason for this is that the professors do not want to be bothered by hard questions about molecular biology and that many of them really do not understand biology (because they themeselves are liberal arts majors). This fits the good professor to a "T". His denegration of Aubry's technical background and lack of understanding of the complexity of biology fits this pattern.
Also, realize that much of the surgury done in this country is unnecessary and that almost all bypass surgury results in brain damage to the patient.
If this guy says that the SENS therapies are impossible, there is no question that not only are they possible, they are likely quite soon.
On reflection, the good professor is not only wrong, but he and other "bio-conservatives" are evil, plain and simple.
Let me explain:
As you no doubt know, we live in an ever changing economic envirionment. Companies and entire industries come and go. People get "downsized". They must reinvent themselves and either find new jobs or start their own busineses.
This situation places a premium on physical and congitive functionality, not to mention having the open-ended future to have as a goal. It is this ability to always bounce back from being knocked down (economically speaking) that is precisely robbed from you by the aging process. It is easier for a 30 year old to study to get a PhD than it is for someone who is 50 or 55.
By actively working to prevent the development of the biomedical technology to cure aging, bio-conservatives, like our good professor from Yale, are working to deny the rest of us the economic opportunites that people like him take for granted. Persummably he is a fully tenured professor at Yale. He never has to look for a job, start a business, or compete in the economic system in any other manner. Having full congititive and physical functionality is not an issue for him, personally.
Immortality (i.e. agelessness) is really about freedom. It is also about opportunity and having control over your destiny, both personal and financial, which is the only meaningful freedom. Immortality is the tool to achieve this freedom.
By working to deny us these tools, bioconservatives are working to deny us the freedom to control our own destiny. In this manner, evil is the only word that is sufficient to describe these people.
Bioconservatives should be denouced for for the evil they are.