From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 08:44:09 MDT
At 10:20 AM 6/7/03 -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>There is a program which not only fails to keep you young indefinitely,
>but which contains design dependencies upon the failures.
In my original post to which you objected I stated clearly:
>how about finding
>something *else* that's specific to tumor cells and damaging *that*, and
>leaving the immortality fix alone?
Granted that was snide and abbreviated, but I think the generalization is
obvious. Of course the current blind watchmaker kludge has reached a local
optimum for brainy creatures with no scientific-technical culture. But we
clean our teeth and go to dentists without fearing some genetically fated
doom when we tamper with the evolved phenotype and its homeorhetic
trajectories. As Robert pointed out, many nonmitotic tissues never hit
their Hayflick limit anyway. Let's find markers (some are already known,
after all) for neoplastic cells and zap them on a targeted basis.
Damien Broderick
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