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M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000
Reason writes "William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences (the 'father of regenerative medicine') has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and Dave Gobel - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved! Read the press release here."
There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.
If you figure out a way to make people life forever or at least a very long time, you can only make them pay for it once. If you discover a way to make people live an extra decade, they'll pay through the nose for it, eventually die, move on and you'll have a new generation of customers.
It's just like medications and diseases. It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES. It's in their interest to research and discover medications that make living with a disease tolerable or prolong your life with the disease rather than eradicate it.
Wow, only 1million bucks to the person who cures natural death? No wonder why nobody is in a rush. You can make more money engineering bio weapons for the states. ;p
A conclusion you reach based on what? Plenty of medical treatments that started out expensive are widely available now.
Hell, that's true of technology in general, not just medical technology. Think about flying from New York to Shanghai on a schoolteacher's salary in the 1930s, when the term "jet set" actually referred to air travel. Should money have not been spent on the aviation infrastructure we all enjoy today, since it was just a bunch of vain bastards using it at first?
Only big companies and the military could afford early computers. UNIVAC was clearly no use to starving kids in Africa, so for the betterment of humanity we really should have put a stop to that line of research and put those scientists to work in soup kitchens instead. We'd all be so much better off now.
After all, if it benefits one rich person a decade or two before it benefits ten poor people, it should never be developed and all eleven people should suffer. Or at least that seems to be the logical result of what you're saying.
If you'd rather skip using any treatments that were initially high-priced, that is of course your prerogative.
It got that way partly because the math on which it was founded [men living to 60 if they are really lucky, women not working and popping off at 75] has been overturned by medical advances so now there's a shitload of oldsters who need a check every month.
boy would immortality or anything like it mess our society up!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
You need an analogy to make it all clear.
:)
:)
I will play for you the most wondrous song that you have ever heard. It will be a song to stir the soul, and make the angels weep in joy for the beauty of it all.
But, here's the catch. I will now renege on my promise and play you only a small part. A fraction of a part. A fraction of that fraction.
This fraction has been rendered so short, that all beauty has been stolen. There is no context, there is no continuance. You will never be able to appreciate the song at all from this snippet, but only get a sense of what majesty you had the possibility to experience.
Tell me: out of the million million fractional slices of this wondrous song of the Ages - which should I play you?
Oh, wait. You don't know; you can't know. And there is almost no point in experiencing it, if that is all you will get.
Life's something like that
Alternatively, people may just be happy to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon doing nothing, and would appreciate the opportunity to have a million more of those rainy Sundays to spend in exactly the same way
1. The 9/11 attack didn't affect me at all, except for making me annoyed with the networks for pre-empting my normal TV shows for weeks with endless repeats of the same footage with nothing new to add, and with the FAA for the even longer lines at airports.
Oh, and I'm also annoyed with congress and Bush for using it as an excuse for ramming through all of that unconstitutional civil rights-robbing legislation, and the war in Iraq, and,
OK, 9/11 did affect me, but not in the "life-affirming" sense.
I mean, more people die each year on our nation's highways than did in the 9/11 attack.
2. I have always wanted to live a good life.
It's just that, when I was younger, I thought that 100 years or so would be enough.
Now that I am closer to 100, I believe otherwise.
When I was 18, I didn't expect to live past age 30.
I fully expected that the USA and USSR would eventually have their nuclear war, and that almost everyone would die.
I was quite surprised, pleasantly so, that I made it to 50.If medical science discovered a cure for your condition, wouldn't you like to live longer?
There's so much to see, so much to do.
But, if you want to give up at 50, then fine for you, if that's really what you want.
As for me, I'm not going without a fight.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana