Re: Optimism [hall's merchants of immortality]

From: Brett Paatsch (bpaatsch@bigpond.com)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2003 - 03:23:44 MDT

  • Next message: paatschb@optusnet.com.au: "Re: Optimism [Was: flame wars]"

    Spike writes:
    >
    > From: Brett Paatsch
    >
    > ... part way through Stephen Hall's Merchants of Immortality...
    >
    >
    > I saw MoI in Border's the other day and it surprised
    > me that I had seen no discussion of it on extropians.
    > Perhaps it was discussed during the time I was losing
    > a lotta my email? Brett, has Stephen Hall any insight?

    Yeah, I got something out of it. And I agree with Mez's
    comments.

    Just a few things that come to mind include the extent to
    which characters like Michael West founder or Geron
    and more recently of ACT have actually been walking the
    extropian talk. He's the closest thing to a full blown
    "Extropian" entrepreneur I've seen, in terms of the scale of
    his vision, the people and resources he was able to put
    together his political and media savvy, obvious ego and
    frankly sometimes what seemed to be a manic personality.

    I liked the guy as he was portrayed in the book as a sort of
    exemplar of extropic moving and shaking. But also saw
    in the book warnings of having such egos pushing their
    own applecart.

    Other significant insights for me. If either the Clinton-Lewinsky
    affair had not occurred (undermining Clinton's moral standing)
    or Bush had not "won" the election against Gore then it is very
    likely that the stem cell legislation in the US today could be far
    more liberal. The book warns of the irresponsibility of talking
    of certain cures. But it is undeniable that if cures do result later
    rather than sooner because the machine gets moving later
    rather than sooner than the cost in human lives (real human
    lives not potential ones) will be enormous.

    As Mez said this is not really a book about life extension,
    genetics and anti-agings techs. Indeed it covers the period
    up until early 2003 before Clonaid claim to have produced
    a clone and after september 11. It looks at stem cell
    politics particularly in the US but also harkens back to the
    right to life politics and suggests a continuum.

    I would heartily recommend it as a good read to those who
    wonder as I do to what extent such non-direct technical
    aspects as intellectual property regimes and politics can
    resist what many folks with a transhuman mindset seem
    to see as the irresistible march of technologies whose time
    has come.

    To me the book showed that science is a social enterprise.
    The new dispensations around Intellectual property where
    discovery rather than innovation is driving biotech patents
    probably has slowed down the rates of progress in stem
    cells. Also the book makes clear how politics can close
    down progress in a field substantially.

    Robert Bradbury and I have on occasion wondered to
    what extent progress being stopped in one country like
    the states simply causes good technologies with strong
    drivers (like people wanting cures and to live better lives)
    to simply work around. To me, how well, the drive to
    provide what markets want and technology may be
    able to supply on the one hand with the desire to effectively
    close down research that is not well understood in society
    is an open question. But it is a critically important question.

    I'd happily recommend to all extropes interested in how
    IP and politics might impact the role out times of certain
    technologies to take a look at this book.

    One thing I recall is a comment by Pederson an embryologist
    that developmental biologists (embryologists) have been all
    dressed up with not place to go now in terms of being able
    to study human embryology for almost 20 years. Mouse
    embryological development is sufficiently different to human
    embryological development that not being able to do study
    in humans is really seeming to be a serious problem for
    us developing basic understanding.

    On the other hand, the book is in a time period. 6 months
    have passed. Britain can create embryos for research so it
    looks like the basic fundamental knowledge of developmental
    biology will get a chance to be explored anyway.

    I have no doubt personally that politics in the US has slowed
    down embryonic stem cell understanding perhaps as much
    as two years. I feel it would be prudent for extropes and
    transhumanists to be as aware as possible of the social
    and political ramifications of technologies. It really seems
    possible (though not definite) to me that mankind may not do
    sufficient research on human subjects to get the benefits for
    curing diseases let along radically extending life for another
    couple of generations. I'd like to call extropes and
    transhumanists not to the technological battlements but to
    deeper political and media savvy. The technology is going
    to be the *relatively* easy part imo. The real fronts are
    the political and intellectual property fronts. The speed limits
    on change on these two fronts are quite separate (and slower)
    to those on the technological front.

    Another point made in the book is that there are a number
    of gerontologists and respected scientists like Steve Austad
    and Leonard Hayflick (and around 49 others) who seriously
    doubt that immortality will ever be achieved.

    I would agree I think with Robert Bradbury here (but Robert
    can speak for himself) that Austad and probably Hayflick are
    worth listening too, AND that aging is a very complex
    series of phenomena. I do not think immortality as opposed to
    life extension of more than say 15 years or more will be
    achieved by fixing individual genes and addressing individual
    diseases like cancer, Parkinsons, Alzheimer's, stroke, diabetes
    etc, although these are definitely things worth fixing. But and
    this is the point, a better approach to attacking the anti-aging,
    problem has been suggested by Aubrey de Grey and this better
    (in my view approach) has not been addressed by Hayflick
    or Austad.

    Aubrey would take an engineering approach to the whole problem
    rather than a fix the series of things that appear to be broken.

    I'd really love to see Aubrey discuss the ideas in his paper
    "An engineer's approach to the development of real anti-aging
    medicine ( http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/manu16.pdf)
    with the likes of Hayflick and perhaps especially Steve Austad.

    I think Hall's point backed by the paper by Hayflick which
    Austad supported is solid. The conventional approaches to
    anti-aging are NOT going to lead to immortality or even
    serious extension of life-spans soon, but Aubrey's approach
    is more daring. Alas it is probably also a harder sell.

    >From a PR standpoint I am a big fan of Aubrey's Methuselah
    Mouse project to change the popular mindset that aging is
    immutable. But there is a comment in the back of MoI where
    Hall quotes Ali Brivanilou of the Rockefeller "the difference
    between mouse embryological development at the molecular
    level and human development was "night and day". "Everything
    that we know about the mouse, (embryologically), we already
    know is not true for humans".

    This gets me thinking we are learning a lot, but we are not
    learning a lot about human embryology particularly quickly
    and without the capacity to do some basic research radical
    life extension may remain a pipedream for the present
    generation. Sure there is the Chinese. Sure there are possible
    work arounds and political climates can change. But it
    would be a huge mistake in my opinion to think that anything
    like radical lifespan extensions are going to fall automatically
    into the laps of either this generation or the next one or even
    the one after that. Fact is the future is still very much up for
    grabs.

    Regards,
    Brett Paatsch

    [Sorry about the length of this. As anothor extrope,
    maybe Mike Butler, said once, unfortunately I haven't
    got the time to shorten it at present]

     
     

     



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