Today I had a pleasant and erudite discussion with Adam Alonzi regarding the feasibility and desirability of attaining indefinite longevity in our lifetimes, as well as Death is Wrong and its impact.
References
– Adam Alonzi’s YouTube Channel
– Adam Alonzi Reads Death is Wrong
Read the excellent new review by science-fiction author and literary essayist Robert W. Franson of Death is Wrong. The review is published on Mr. Franson’s website Troynovant, which offers extensive literary and philosophical analysis.
Here is an excerpt: “Death is Wrong is a short book, clearly written and easy to read. I like the personal approach: it doesn’t talk down and is quite accessible. A striking concept presented quite reasonably and supported matter-of-factly. There are apt quotations from a variety of thinkers, including several of my personal heroes of modern times: Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Friedrich Nietzsche. These people and some scenes from nature are nicely illustrated by Wendy Stolyarov. For readers who want a little more about the background concepts, there is a brief Appendix discussing the seven basic causes of senescence, such as cell loss and atrophy. There are some links for further learning. It’s a good book, entertaining and thoughtful, and certainly gives us a challenge to think about.”
For all that I think it isn’t an efficient path forward, one likely to produce meaningful results in moving the needle on human life spans, there is considerable interest in testing combinations of existing drugs and various dietary compounds in mice to see if healthy life is extended. I expect that as public interest grows in the prospects for aging research to move from being an investigative to an interventional field, wherein researchers are actively trying to treat aging, we’ll only see more of this. There is certainly a sizable portion of the research community who think that the the best path ahead is in fact the pharmaceutical path of drug discovery in search of ways to slightly slow the aging process. To their eyes slightly slowing the aging process is all that is plausible, and adding five healthy years to life by 2035 would be a grand success. Google’s Calico initiative looks set to take that path, for example, which I is why I’m not all that hopeful it will produce meaningful results in terms of healthy years gained and ways to help the old suffer less.
There is a considerable overlap between researchers aiming to gently slow aging via drug discovery and researchers whose primary motivation is still investigation, not intervention: to produce a complete catalog of metabolism and how it changes with age, and it’s someone else’s problem to actually use that data. So we have, for example, the Interventions Testing Program at the NIA. This program was long fought for by researchers tired of the lack of rigor in most mouse life span studies, and the people involved are essentially engaged in replacing a lot of carelessly optimistic past results with the realistic view that very little other than calorie restriction and exercise actually does reliably extend life in mice if you go about the studies carefully. This is good science, but it isn’t the road to extended human life spans: it instead has much more to do with understanding the process of aging at a very detailed level. That task is vast and will take a very long time even in this age of computing and biotechnology.
To my eyes the right way to go is the repair approach: build the biotechnologies needed to repair the forms of cellular and molecular damage produced as a side-effect of the normal operation of metabolism, and which clearly distinguish old tissues from young tissues. If you want rejuvenation of the old, a path to adding decades to healthy life, and to eliminate all age-related disease, then repair is the way to go. Fix the damage, don’t just tinker with the engines of life in ways that might possibly slow down damage accumulation just a little. This strategic direction can allow researchers to largely bypass the great complexity of the progression of aging and focus instead on fixing things that are already well known and well cataloged. But I say this a lot, and will continue to do so until more than just a small fraction of the research community agree with me.
Back to mice and lifespan studies: in this day and age institutional research is far from the only way to get things done. Early-stage research is becoming quite cheap as the tools of biotechnology improve, and the global economy allows quality scientific work to be performed in locations that are lot less expensive than the US or Western Europe. We have crowdfunding, the internet, and a supportive community, which means that any group of ambitious researchers can raise a few tens of thousands of dollars and set an established lab in the Ukraine to running a set of mouse lifespan studies. So that happened back in 2013, and has been ongoing since then despite the present geopolitical issues in that part of the world. It is perhaps worth noting that this is the same group that found no effect on longevity from transfusions of young blood plasma into old mice. The studies mentioned below used pre-aged mice, starting at old age as a way to try to discover effects more rapidly, an approach that is fairly widespread.
I am a little mouse and I want to live longer: updates
Quote:Dear contributors, we wish you a happy New Year! We are sorry to be taken by a very-expected but very time-consuming c60 lifespan study to digest the data in a way to make the long report we had announced. So, for the New Year and in order for you not to wait longer, please find at least the main results so far:
1) 23 months old C57BL6 mice received a mixture of 6 therapies that had already been reported to extend the lifespan of mice: Aspirin; Everolimus (mTOR inhibitor, similar action as rapamycin); Metoprolol (beta blocker); Metformin (anti-diabetic drug); Simvastatin (lowers LDL cholesterol); Ramipril (ACE inhibitor).
The drugs were given in the food, at doses that had been reported to extend lifespan … when taken individually. Some people are given that combination of medicines so we hoped that the drug interaction would not be too damaging, and we had wondered if some lifespan synergy within some of these drugs could lead to an overall high lifespan (e.g. if the different drugs improve different functions). But we observed a lifespan reduction in males and in females.
2) In the food of some remaining females we mixed low doses of 4 medications against cardiovascular conditions: Simvastatin; Thiazide (lowers blood pressure); Losartan potassium (angiotensin receptor blocker, lowers blood pressure); Amlodipine (calcium channel blocker, lowers blood pressure).
The question was: taken at a low-to-medium dose, could these drugs that many aged persons take have some overall preventive effect? We transposed to mice an ongoing polypill clinical trial in the UK, using a basic human-mouse conversion scale. Again, a decrease in lifespan was observed.
3) Adaptations of the first combination of drugs actually extended lifespan!
We started at age 18 months instead of 23 months, reduced the dose (as a function of weight) and gave a) the 6 compounds b) ‘only’ aspirin+metformin+everolimus. The results are to be analysed in greater details as we haven’t analyzed the latest data yet. Also, whatever the refined analysis, we would already like to indicate that it would be good to reproduce the experiment in some other conditions, e.g. hybrid mice; in particular as the mortality rates of these mice was higher than the first series (but in a consistent way that supports the life extending effect).
4) Ongoing C60 experiments
After many difficulties in setting the experiment (cross-border transportation in current geopolitical times, checking absorption in mice/ detecting C60/correct source of C60, administration tried in food and replaced by gavage, training for gavage and various measures) we have transposed the popular lifespan test with c60 fullerenes reported in rats by Baati et al. to mice (CBA strain, common in the lab) and with more animals (N=17 per group). There are three groups (gavage of water, of olive oil, of C60 dissolved in olive oil), there are … a lot of health measures and a lot of gavage (at the beginnings of the experiment as administrations are first very frequent and then gradually less frequent). Given that the experiment starts with mid-aged animals, the results are expected for the beginning of 2016.
The original C60 results from a few years back were greeted with some skepticism in the research community, given the very large size of the effect claimed and the small number of animals tested. There was, I think, also a certain annoyance: now that someone had made what was on the face of it an unlikely claim of significant lifespan extension via administration of C60, then some other group was going to have to waste their time in disproving it. We’ll see how that all turns out, I suppose. This is science as it works in practice.
At some point the broad structural classes of research illustrated by the Interventions Testing Program and this crowdfunded mouse study will meet in the middle, and the process of funding and organizing scientific programs will be a far more complicated, dynamic, and public affair than is presently the case. I think this will be for the better. All that we have we owe to science, and a majority of the public thinks all too little of the work that will determine whether they live in good health or suffer and die a few decades from now. The more they can see what is going on, the better for all of us in the end, I think.
This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
I rarely write obituaries, because once you start where do you stop? Perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand lives are lost every day, most due to aging and its consequences, and it isn’t just the few people you happened to exchange emails with who are worthy of notice. Yet monuments are at root a selfish undertaking on behalf of the living, and we can easily bury ourselves in mourning and symbolism. Ultimately one has to ask: is this an initiative about death or is this an initiative about life? The world has too many thinly disguised death cults. Cruelly, even after yet another individual in one’s personal circle of vision succumbs to the frailty of age, all of our lives go on as before. We’re still here with the same old to-do list in front of us – or at least we will be until we are not. But that is rather the point: we want to eliminate this part of the human condition, build the medical technologies to repair the breakages that cause aging and thus prevent all of its attendant suffering and death.
I’ve long admired the oldest people in this community. They participate with no hope at all of benefiting personally from the technologies they support: that is true altruism. It will be, I’d think, twenty years under even the best of circumstances before comparatively crude first generation rejuvenation treatments as envisaged in the SENS proposals become available. If you are in later life it is vanishingly unlikely that you will survive for long enough to benefit meaningfully from present research. Yet that research must happen. Someone must be first to benefit, and someone must be last to miss out.
So we get to this news from the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), providing notice of the death of their founder and organizer in chief Stephen Coles, a researcher and advocate for longevity science. This had been expected, I think, given the details of his ongoing public battle with cancer. He took full advantage of having a rough timeline at the end to ensure a good cryopreservation:
Quote:Dr. Stephen Coles passed away in Scottsdale on December 3 of complications of pancreatic cancer and was cryopreserved. He was 73. Scottsdale is where Alcor is, and Steve had traveled there last week to be close to the cryonics foundation.
He tracked the oldest people in the world for over 20 years, and published the most recent five years of his research in the journal PLoS ONE. Dr. Coles performed autopsies on 12 “supercentenarians,” people who are 110 years old or older, more than any other pathologist, and determined TTR Amyloidosis as a predominant cause of death.
For as long as I’ve been involved in advocacy, Coles has networked with fellow researchers and gathered data on late age survival. With his connections as a hub the GRG mailing list became a cosmopolitan watering hole at which gerontologists, other researchers, and advocates with many varied views on aging and medicine debated points and rubbed shoulders. In recent years Coles’ own work helped to shape the SENS Research Foundation strategy of funding potential treatments for TTR amyloidosis, a condition in which misfolded transthyretin builds up in solid masses to clog blood vessels and organs. This condition may be a true final limiting factor on human life span, killing those who survive everything else. Or at least it will be until therapies exist, and the development of those therapies is presently underway – though, as always in matters related to aging, with too little funding for truly rapid progress.
Cryonics is the sensible choice for anyone finding themselves in Coles’ position. It is the only presently available shot at making death a hiatus rather than oblivion, and it is one slice of the grand self-destructive tragedy of the modern human condition that next to nobody chooses this path. Preservation of the fine structure of the brain means preservation of the mind, and given continued storage a patient can wait for as long as needed for future molecular nanotechnologies capable of restoring a cryopreserved individual. That isn’t impossible, just very hard. But instead all those lives, all those individuals, are lost.
To change this state of affairs many more respected people at the hub of their own networks of influence must make a very public choice to be cryopreserved. This is really no different than the sort of effective advocacy needed to change the present public disinterest in living longer lives through rejuvenation therapies. If we want to see a world without frailty and disease in aging then more people have to speak out and act accordingly: we don’t lack the ability to get to this goal, but rather lack the widespread will to do the job. Each of us can only be the one person in this parade, of course, but congratulations and thanks should pass to Coles for choosing to be that one on both fronts.
And that must stand in place for the numerous obituaries and mentions I could have written in recent years. As the community grows there are ever more older members and so more people vanishing over time from the mailing lists and blogs. But what can you do? Fifty years ago you could do nothing but wish. Today, however, you can make a material difference: support the research, support the organizations, help to speed our progress towards the day on which people stop suffering and dying of old age.
This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
Today Wendy Stolyarov and I had an excellent second interview and conversation with Roen Horn of the Eternal Life Fan Club. We discussed our recent activities related to the life-extension movement, the impact of “Death is Wrong”, and many philosophical and practical ideas surrounding the pursuit of indefinite longevity.
Watch the recorded interview here.
Yesterday, I had occasion to spend six hours or so in the emergency room of a medical center largely focused on treating serious conditions that are most prevalent in old people. A part of that experience by necessity involved listening to the comings, goings, and conversations of those present. These are not private places: they are typically divided visually by screens but with no way to avoid overhearing the staff and patients. The people there are generally not too concerned about privacy in the immediate sense in any case, having far more pressing matters to focus upon.
So, by proxy, one gets to experience small and somewhat wrenching slices of other people’s lives. It is very easy for even those who follow aging research and speak up for rejuvenation treatments to forget just how hard it is to be very old. It’s one thing to know about the catalog of pain, suffering, and loss of capabilities, the conditions we’d like to find ways to turn back, and another to watch it in action. It is, really, a terrible thing to be frail.
A fellow was brought in a little while after I arrived, a 90-something man who looked a lot better on the exterior than perhaps your mental picture of a 90-something individual might be. Tall, and surprisingly lacking in wrinkles stretched out on the rolling gurney under blankets, a mess of cables, and an oxygen mask. That he had fallen was what I heard from the conversation of the medics, and was in pain. He cried out several times as he was moved from the gurney. It took some time and care to do it without hurting him more, given his weakness.
He seemed confused at first, but that was just my misperception: you try being 90 and in pain some time and see how well you do while you’re being moved around and told to hold this and let go of that. The fellow answered the bevy of questions the receiving staff had for him, but the thing that caught at me was the time he took with the answers, and the questions he just missed. He was coherent, even quite sharp at times, not on any more painkillers than a handful of Tylenol, as I later heard, but he clearly struggled with something that we younger folk all take for granted: parse the question, find the information, form up a reply and speak it. Cognitive ability in all these areas becomes ever less efficient with old age, and there’s something hollowing about hearing what is clearly a capable guy set back for a dozen seconds by a short question about one of the details of his fall. The medic repeated the question a few times and in different ways, which was clearly just making the information overload worse.
It sticks with you to be the observer in this situation and clearly and suddenly realize that one day that faltering older person will be you, trying and often failing to force your mind into the necessary connections rapidly enough for the younger people around you. I know this, but knowing it and having it reinforced by being there are two very different things. An aged person is no less intelligent, far more experienced, wiser and all the rest, but the damage to the structure of the brain that occurs even in those without dementia means that making use of all of that in the way it deserves is near insurmountable.
The fellow’s 60-something daughter arrived a little later to provide support and fill in more of the details. A story was conveyed in bits and pieces: that he was near blind now, and just about too frail to walk safely, even with a frame. The blindness explained a great deal of what had sounded to my ignorant ears as confusion in the earlier part of the fellow’s arrival: we assume all too many things about those around us, such as the use of sight in an unfamiliar environment, or the ability to walk, or think quickly – and all of this is taken from us by aging. The fellow lived with his wife still, and she was of a similar age to him. His wife was not there because she herself was too frail to be undertaking even a short trip at such short notice. That seemed to me a harsh blow on top of the rest of what old age does to you. At some point you simply cannot do everything you’d want to as a partner. You are on the sidelines and at the point at which your other half is most likely to die, you are most likely unable to be there.
In this case the fellow was in no immediate danger by the sound of it. By good luck this was in no way likely to be a fatal accident, but rather another painful indignity to be endured as a part of the downward spiral of health and ability at the end of life. Once you get to the point at which simply moving from room to room bears a high risk of accident, and this is by no means unusual for a mentally capable person in their 90s, then it really is just a matter of time before you cannot live for yourself with only minimal assistance.
When talking with his daughter while he waited on a doctor and medical assistants to come and go with tests and updates, the fellow was much faster in his responses, though this was interrupted by a series of well-meaning but futile attempts to ease his pain by changing his position, each as much an ordeal as the move from the gurney had been. The conversation between father and daughter had the sense of signposts on well-worn paths, short exchanges that recapitulated the high points of many discussions that had come before. She wanted her father to move into an assisted living facility, and this fall was the latest in a line of examples as to why it was past the time for this – she simply could not provide all of the support needed on her own. She wasn’t even strong enough herself to be able to safely get him back up on his feet after a fall. He was concerned about cost and the difficulties of moving, uncertainties and change. They went back and forth on this for a while. “We have to accept that it’s just going to be more expensive as we get older,” she said at one point, and he replied “I think you’re getting the picture now,” and laughed. There wasn’t much to laugh about, but we can all do it here and there under these circumstances. I believe it helps.
I walked out of there after my six hours of hurry up and wait was done. They were still there, and whenever it is he leaves to go home it is unlikely it will be on his own two feet. But this is a scene I’ll no doubt be revisiting at some point in the future, some decades from now, playing the other role in this small slice of life. What comes around goes around, but I’d like it to be different for me, and more importantly to be different for millions of others a lot sooner than my old age arrives.
Which leads to this: why does Fight Aging! exist? Why do we do this? Why advocate, why raise funds for research programs into ways to treat aging that may take decades to pay off? We do this because we can help to create a future in which there will be no more emergency rooms like the one I visited, no conversations about increasing disability, no pain, and no struggles to answer questions as quickly as one used to. No profound frailty. All these things will be removed by the advent of therapies that can effectively repair the causes of aging, curing and preventing frailty and age-related disease, and the sooner this happens the more people will be spared.
This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
This composition by Mr. Stolyarov depicts the most important challenge facing humankind during all of its existence – the imperative of freeing individual humans from the ghastly and unconscionable fate of eventually ceasing to exist. Indefinite physical life in this world is not only possible with sufficient advances in scientific knowledge and medical technology – it is also supremely desirable, and we who are alive now should work to attain it as early as we can.
As outlined by Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation, there are only seven primary types of damage involved in human biological senescence – which leads to death:
1. Extracellular junk
2. Extracellular crosslinks
3. Dysfunctional cells
4. Intracellular aggregates
5. Mitochondrial mutations
6. Nuclear mutations
7. Cell loss/atrophy
This led Mr. Stolyarov to compose a work where there are seven variations on the same theme – with the theme representing the consistent, unyielding human effort to defeat death and achieve indefinite longevity.
Every time that a variation on the theme is played, this represents one of the causes of death finally being overcome by human ingenuity. Accordingly, the melody becomes more jubilant and determined as the composition progresses, because there are fewer perils awaiting man and the amount of the task remaining is reduced.
Once the seven variations are complete (which corresponds with the attainment of indefinite life), the coda of the work is meant to evoke the last line of John Donne’s sonnet, “Death, Be Not Proud”: “And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”
John Donne was not himself a physical life-extensionist (he was alive too early), but the last line of his poem is an excellent motto for life-extensionists to adopt as we spread awareness of the need and urgency of defeating this greatest of all perils.
This composition was remastered using the Finale 2011 and Finale 2014 software. It is written for organ, two pianos, harpsichord, timpani, a brass section, and a strings section.
Download the MP3 file of this composition here.
See the index of Mr. Stolyarov’s compositions, all available for free download, here.
Read more about the quest for indefinite life in Mr. Stolyarov’s book Death is Wrong.
Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational high culture to others.
Note from the Editor: The Rational Argumentator strongly supports this matching fundraiser and encourages all readers to donate any sums of money to the SENS Research Foundation, in order to accelerate the basic research into and the development of cures for the debilitating diseases of old age. I personally made a donation of $100 on October 4, 2014, knowing that its impact will be tripled through a 2-for-1 additional contribution by the generous donors who established the matching fund. This is the time to leverage our resources and ensure that this literally vital research gets done as soon as possible. I am grateful to Reason of FightAging.org for his tireless efforts in advocating for life-extension research and spearheading campaigns to attract the funding that this area of science urgently needs.
~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator, October 4, 2014
***
It is that time again, and our 2014 matching fundraiser started October 1st 2014. From now until the end of the year, December 31st 2014, we will match the first $50,000 donated to the SENS Research Foundation with $2 for every $1 given. These funds will help to speed progress in ongoing scientific programs conducted in US and European research centers, their ultimate aim being to repair and reverse the causes of frailty and age-related disease.
The SENS Research Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charity and all US donations are tax-deductible. Donations from most European Union countries are also tax-deductible, though the details vary by location. Please contact the SENS Research Foundation to find out more.
The Matching Fund Founders Ask You to Join Us
Who are we? We are Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, David Gobel of the Methuselah Foundation, Dennis Towne, Håkon Karlsen, philanthropist Jason Hope, Michael Achey, Michael Cooper, and Reason of Fight Aging! We are all long-time supporters of SENS research aimed at rejuvenation through repair of the known root causes of aging. The few types of cellular and molecular damage that accumulate in all of our tissues cause progressive dysfunction and eventual death for everyone – unless something is done to stop it. This cause is important enough for everyone to do their part, and for us that means putting up a $100,000 matching fund we want you to help draw down: for every dollar you donate, we will match it with two of our own.
Even Small Donations Make a Meaningful Difference
Early stage medical biotechnology research of the sort carried out at the SENS Research Foundation costs little nowadays in comparison to the recent past. The cost of tools and techniques in biotechnology has plummeted in the past decade, even while capabilities have greatly increased. A graduate student with $20,000 can accomplish in a few months what would have required a full laboratory, years, and tens of millions of dollars in the 1990s. All of the much-lamented great expense in modern medicine lies in clinical translation, the long and drawn out process of trials, retrials, marketing, and manufacturing that is required to bring a laboratory proof of concept into clinics as a widely available therapy.
The SENS Research Foundation is focused on early stage research, following a plan that leads to technology demonstrations in the laboratory. With a proof of concept rejuvenation therapy the world will beat a path to their doorstep in order to fund clinical translation. The real challenge is here and now, raising the funds to get to that step. A few tens of thousands of dollars means the difference between a significant project delayed indefinitely or that project completed.
To pick one example, last year the community raised $20,000 to fund cutting edge work in allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes, a potential cure for the issue of mitochondrial damage in aging. That was enough to have a skilled young researcher work on the process for two of the thirteen genes of interest over a period of months. It really is that cheap given an existing group like the SENS Research Foundation with diverse connections and access to established laboratories.
Your donations make a real difference.
Spread the Word, Tell Your Friends
Don’t forget to tell your friends about this fundraiser. Talk to your community, online and offline. Consider running local events to help meet our goal of raising $50,000 from a grassroots community of supporters. The more people who know about the prospects for near future therapies resulting from rejuvenation research of the sort carried out by the SENS Research Foundation, the easier it becomes to raise funds and obtain institutional support for these research programs in the future.
Launched at /r/Futurology and in Conjunction with Longevity Day
Take a look at the generous spirit displayed at /r/Futurology, the futurist Reddit community, when given the chance to help. Scores of people there have already donated modest sums to the cause in response to our fundraiser: many thanks to you all!
The 1st of October marks the launch of this fundraiser, but it is also the International Day of Older Persons, and the International Longevity Alliance would like this to become an official Longevity Day. This year, just like last year, groups of futurists around the world will be holding events to mark the occasion, and this includes the scientists and advocates present at the 2014 Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging.
Download the 2014 Fundraiser Posters
The full size graphics here are large enough for 24 x 36 inch posters, but are also suitable for page-sized fliers. The original Photoshop files are available on request, but are a little large to put up here. Make as much use of these as you like – please help to spread the word and help this fundraiser to meet its target.
Color design, 3600 x 5600 pixels suitable for 24 x 36 inch posters, 11.3MB
Color design, 2400 x 3600 pixels suitable for letter size, 6.3MB
Blue design, 7200 x 10800 pixels suitable for 24 x 36 inch posters, 13.1MB
Blue design, 2400 x 3600 pixels suitable for letter size, 3.8MB
This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.
I am pleased to report that, through late August and September 2014, the momentum of Death is Wrong has continued.
An excellent and entertaining recent interview of me was done by Leonardo Nunes Ricucci on La República Democrática de Leo, where we discussed Death is Wrong, transhumanism, indefinite life extension, risk management, and related topics. You can listen to the podcast and download an MP3 file of the episode here.
On September 6, 2014, Roen Horn of the Eternal Life Fan Club interviewed Wendy and me about Death is Wrong and related arguments for life extension and technological progress. The interview was extensive, and many subjects were discussed. Watch it here.
Here is the video trailer that was posted two days in advance of the interview.
Roen has been doing excellent work in recording his Death is Wrong book giveaways on video. Here is a quick video of his second giveaway of a book to a family with four children.
The book has continued to play a role in discussions of longevity and future remedies to the ravages of senescence. Here is a great post by Will Muessig of Unity Politics, mentioning Death is Wrong and refuting Ezekiel Emanuel’s deeply fallacious recent article about why age 75 is a good age to die.
I am also pleased to have had my thoughts included in “Cyborgs: The truth about human augmentation” – an excellent new article by Frank Swain on BBC Future. Mr. Swain had previously interviewed me about Death is Wrong, which led to his article “How to live forever” being published by BBC Future in April 2014. This time Mr. Swain asked me to help debunk common myths about human augmentation, and was happy to share my vision of “a future in which a thousand augmented flowers bloom” and in which augmentations will help people live longer, more fulfilling lives as well.
The continued infusion of the ideas of indefinite life extension into publicly prominent discussions was one of my key aims in writing Death is Wrong. Just like our book-distribution campaign, this aim is being fulfilled right now, and it will hopefully keep paying cultural dividends to the longevity movement for months and years to come.
On September 6, 2014, Roen Horn of the Eternal Life Fan Club interviewed Gennady Stolyarov II and Wendy Stolyarov on the subject of their illustrated children’s book Death is Wrong and related arguments for life extension and technological progress. The interview was extensive, and many subjects were discussed. Watch it here.
Here is the video trailer that was posted two days in advance of the interview.
