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Most people are astonished when I tell them that I would like to live forever. "Would that not get extremely boring after a long time?" many of them ask. I respond, "Being dead - sensing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing - would be far more boring. Besides, one is dead forever; once one is dead, one cannot simply recognize the misfortune of one's situation and decide that one will not be dead anymore." An absence of everything is far more boring than a presence of anything.

Rocky collected money for the Mafia. A typical bagman, he was immersed in the material world of fast cars, quick cash and getting ahead by butting heads. One day, he was shot in the chest and left for dead on the street. He survived, though, and lived to tell of an experience that changed his life. "He described a blissful, typical near-death experience—seeing the light, communicating with a deity and seeing deceased relatives," says Bruce Greyson, a U.Va.-trained psychiatrist who interviewed Rocky after the shooting. "He came back with typical near-death aftereffects. He felt that cooperation and love were the...

Immortality is within our grasp . . . In Fantastic Voyage, high-tech visionary Ray Kurzweil teams up with life-extension expert Terry Grossman, M.D., to consider the awesome benefits to human health and longevity promised by the leading edge of medical science--and what you can do today to take full advantage of these startling advances. Citing extensive research findings that sound as radical as the most speculative science fiction, Kurzweil and Grossman offer a program designed to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you should be in good health and good spirits when the more extreme...

The latest from the wacky world of anti-senescence therapy DEATH is a fact of life—at least it has been so far. Humans grow old. From early adulthood, performance starts to wane. Muscles become progressively weaker, cognition fails. But the point at which age turns to ill health and, ultimately, death is shifting—that is, people are remaining healthier for longer. And that raises the question of how death might be postponed, and whether it might be postponed indefinitely. Humans are certainly living longer. An American child born in 1970 could expect to live 70.8 years. By 2000, that had increased to...

(CBS) How’s this for an offer you can’t refuse: how would you like to live say, 400 or 500 years, or even more and all of them in perfect health? It’s both a Utopian and a nightmare scenario but there are those who say it is well within the realm of possibility. Though we live longer and healthier lives than our grandparents, 100 is more or less the outer limit because, catastrophic disease aside, we just plain wear out. But 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer talked to one scientist who says that’s old-fashioned thinking, that sometime in the next 20...

The first person to live to age 1,000 probably will turn 60 in 2006. Within 20 years or so, we'll have treatments for aging. Medicine will repair the damage that already has occurred in people who are in their 80s. They'll live on and on with healthy bodies and sharp minds.  

"I think it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely." -- Aubrey de Grey Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century. By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can’t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the...

In 1998 a scientist at the California Institute of Technology discovered a gene that could extend the life of fruit flies by 30%. He dubbed it the Methuselah gene after the Biblical prophet who lived to 969. Now a self-taught gerontologist believes our mortality could one day be similarly extended. At a conference at Queen's College, Cambridge, this week, Aubrey de Grey, a 41-year-old Cambridge computer scientist, told a research audience that there was no reason why people should not live to 1,000. It sounds like science fiction, but for all that Dr de Grey has been dismissed as a...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - How much would you pay to be immortalized as a zombie in a Stephen King novel or a good guy in a John Grisham thriller? King and Grisham are among 16 authors selling the right to have a character in a book named for the buyer to raise money for the First Amendment Project, a California-based nonprofit group that promotes freedom of information and expression. Details of exactly what each author is offering have been posted on Internet auction site eBay and the auctions will be held between September 1 and September 25, the group said...

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich. These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT. 'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson...

Time may indeed be on your side. If you can just last another quarter century. By then, people will start lives that could last 1,000 years or more. Our human genomes will be modified to include the genetic material of microorganisms that live in the soil, enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time and which they can’t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives, or opt for an older look if they get bored. Of...

Some scientists predict that today's children will be able to live for more than 1,000 years. Is immortality just around the corner? Bryan Appleyard peers into a hair-raising future without death Somewhere in the world today lives a child who will change everything. Imagine this child is called Sally. Today is her 11th birthday. She lives in Esher in Surrey. Her parents are happy and wealthy. All her grandparents are old, alive and well. I’ve given her this background for specific reasons. Sally is a girl because women live about five years longer than men. She is 11 because, at...

By JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press Writer WELLESLEY, Mass. - Ray Kurzweil doesn't tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn't take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else. As part of his daily routine, Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his "tactile sensitivity." Adjustments are made as needed. "I do actually fine-tune my programming," he said. The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might...

The discovery of death may well be the defining moment in the evolution of our species. The knowledge that our existence is circumscribed, that it cannot be taken for granted, brought about our fall from grace, our loss of innocence. The fact of Death is the cornerstone on which all human knowledge is built. It is the source of our greatest anxiety, and of our greatest inspiration. It is a fact that even today most, if not all of us, continue to refuse to accept. That refusal has led us to search for a "work-around". It has led us to...

Controversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever? On this glorious spring day in Cambridge, England, the heraldic flags are flying from the stone towers, and I feel like I could be in the 17th century—or, as I pop into the Eagle Pub to meet University of Cambridge longevity theorist Aubrey de Grey, the 1950s. It was in this pub, after all, that James Watson and Francis Crick met regularly for lunch while they were divining the structure of DNA and where, in February 1953,...

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000. Here, he explains why. Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today. I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing. It is not just an idea: it's a very...

The Ultimate Good How you can experience the ultimate good Copyright © 2004 "A new political configuration is about to be born. Whether that new configuration will include a reconstituted Democratic Party or a new and as yet unknown third party is not clear. But one thing is certain, the deconstruction of post 1960s liberalism and with it the old Democratic Party has now past the point of no return." -- Kirt Sechooler Introduction What is the ultimate good? Is it a new car, a new home, a vacation or a cure for cancer? No. These are goods that the...

The curious case of the catatonic biogerontologists The SENS strategy as described here purports to have all the characteristics that should make it persuasive: it's detailed, it's thorough and it's all firmly based on established experimental work in the various relevant areas of biology. So, you may well ask, where's the catch? Why, on all the many documentaries on aging that remain so popular, don't my colleagues come out and advocate the work that I advocate? There are three main reasons why most mainstream gerontologists remain so conspicuously absent from the growing band of vocal advocates of the SENS approach...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links and visual aids; please visit it in order to access those links.) SENS is a practical, foreseeable approach to curing aging because all the types of metabolic side-effect whose accumulation is (or is even hypothesised to be) eventually pathogenic are amenable to repair (or in some cases obviation, i.e. disruption of the mechanism by which they become pathogenic) by techniques that, according to the experimentalists who have performed the key work on which those techniques build, can (with adequate funding) probably be implemented in mice within a decade or so. There...

(Note: The original article is replete with in-text links; please visit it in order to access those links.) What is Engineered Negligible Sensecence? "It's not a very catchy name, is it?" you may be thinking. Yes, I know -- "Engineered Negligible Senescence" has ten syllables and is not the world's most memorable, or indeed self-explanatory, phrase. But it is a good name for our ultimate goal, honest -- as well as SENS being a catchy acronym. Here's an explanation. I'm afraid it starts with a rather long preamble, but trust me, it's worth it. First, let's be precise: our ultimate...