From my other blog, MichaelMcGaulley.com.
My technothriller, A REMEDY FOR DEATH: Playing God with Body, Soul, and Bio-tech, is about just that: finding a way to overcome aging and death. In the story-line, we explore issues including regenerative medicine, growing replacement human organs and other body parts, other elements of the bio-tech revolution, and reversing the aging process . . . as well as some of the medical and legal ethical issues involved.
The core issue is this: What if the terms of life have changed . . . for a certain super-wealthy, well-connected elite? What if today's emerging bio-tech and regenerative medical technologies--including the ability to regrow and implant body parts and organs--offer the chance for another whole go-round in life to a select, secretive few?
Intriguingly, this Financial Times also explores that issue, though from a different perspective: "How much longer can we extend life? We just don't know," says Oskar Burger, lead researcher on a pr0ject at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
Dr. Burger's work focuses on how average human life expectancy has lengthened in large part because of relatively mundane things such as better access to clean water, better agicultural technology, and, of course, antibiotics.
But what if we take those kinds of advances, then combine them with other bio-tech research (only some of which has been tried with humans)? But then that would raise other problems: will those added years be happy and productive? What about the effect on retirement funds? What about the generational chasm that could develop between the "new" 30-year-olds, and the real 30's who are still working?
Here's the link to that article in the Financial Times: "Scientists claim 72 is the new 30" But, warning: you will need to register to get the article (free) , but, frankly, I have never encountered a more cumbersome enrollment procedure. I had to go through it three times, feeling as I did that I was caught in an endless loop --- one of those computer traps that you can't escape from and yet can't finish the job. (The term comes from Po Bronson's Silicon Valley novel: The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest.)