The Other 300

We've all heard of The 300 - the funky new movie that profiled the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 vastly outnumbered Spartans who fought against the Persians, allegedly numbering over 1 million. (Who was counting, she asks vaguely?)

There is another 300, though, named in honour of these original 300. It is an interesting little group, and actually only numbers 149 as yet. They are the donors to the MPrize of the Methuselah Foundation, which supports research to repair and reverse the damage of aging. In short, they are looking for immortality. They have an interesting spokesman in the person of Aubrey de Grey. Dr. de Grey was educated at Cambridge, and was the topic of a fascinating documentary called Do You Want to Live Forever? Seems he received his BA in Computer Science in 1985, and then started to research the biology of aging. He was given a PhD by Cambridge under "special circumstances" (which requires evidence of "...a significant contribution to scholarship", but does not require a student to either attend classes, perform experiments, or be examined on a research derived dissertation.) Seems his book, The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging was enough for Cambridge. Hmmm.

While perusing the Methuselah Foundation website, I took a look at their donor page (as any good fundraiser would), to get to know these 300. I was astonished to find that my tax dollars have been freely given to the Foundation! It seems the Alberta government wants us to live forever - an intriguing solution to our current labour shortage. Here are the Alberta donors I found:

Law Society of Alberta ($50)
Calgary donors ($20)
Alberta Transhumanist Foundation ($79.33)
UofA PhD student ($25,180 pledged - $3423 donated)
UofA Post-Grad Studies ($854)
UofA Office of Research ($4696)
UofA Faculty of Science ($854)
Canadian Institutes of Health Research ($4269)
AB Advanced Education and Technology ($1707)
AB Health and Wellness ($8539)
AB Heritage Fdn ($6724)

Do I want to live forever? Well, I don't. But we are already living much longer than our ancestors, so why can't we extend a healthy life span even further? Healthy is the key word. And who is researching the potential societal implications of this possibility? No one, as usual. If scientists think they can do it, they feel justified in doing it. They really do need a niggly social scientist at their side asking the hard questions, like Why? For whom? What now? and What do we do when...?

Oh, and while we are on the numbers, this is Bast's 100th post. Hoo-rah!

Comments

Sarah Elaine said…
Congrats on your 100th post.

As for the whole immortality thing, personally I think it'd get kinda boring after a while.

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