X-Message-Number: 14008
From: "James J. Hughes" <>
Subject: Sydney on Alcor Conf
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 20:40:48 -0400
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0006/26/text/world11.html
Scientists aim to take sting out of death
Date: 26/06/2000
Sydney Morning Herald
The experts are predicting technologies that will let us reverse the aging
process and replace body parts. Gerard Ryle reports from a conference on the
future of medicine.
THE conversations at Carmel-by-the-Sea were extraordinary.
A doctor was talking about cloning body parts - kidneys, teeth - and putting
them into diseased human bodies. A scientist was explaining a new form of
medicine where tiny machines would be inserted into people to repair aging
skin cells.
A 51-year-old librarian expressed the hope she would live well into the next
century.
The consensus was that soon we should all be able to live for a very long
time - and possibly even forever - if only we could find a way to replace a
clapped-out brain.
The fourth Alcor Conference on Life Extension Technologies, held a tee-off
away from the United States Open golf tournament at Pebble Beach,
California, dealt with concepts that used to be in the realms of science
fiction.
The keynote speaker, K. Eric Drexler, an expert on nanotechnology, said
medicine was about to be revolutionised by machines so small you could fit
1,000 of them on a pin head.
Mr Drexler, the chairman of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, a
non-profit educational organisation formed to prepare people for advanced
technologies, said these machines should be able to repair damaged human
cells one at a time.
In the case of skin cells, the technology, when it arrives, could therefore
reverse the aging process by rebuilding each skin cell at an anatomically
perfect level.
Mr Drexler talked about a technology that may not be invented for another 40
years, but a cloning expert, Michael West, seemed to offer more immediate
medical breakthroughs. He said that recent advances in cloning might have
found a way to reverse some of the worst effects of aging.
Dr West, who heads the company Advanced Cell Technology, said that by using
the technology that brought us Dolly the sheep it might soon be possible to
grow human body organs to match an individual by using cells from that
individual's body.
For instance, if a person needed a new set of kidneys or teeth the
technology would take cells from that person and "grow" the necessary body
parts using a human pre-embryo.
He believed you could take a cell from a patient, even a very old patient,
and put it back into an egg cell. By erasing the cell's memory it could
become a "time machine" and be transformed into any part of the human body.
This method could be used to make brain cells to treat Parkinson's disease
or perhaps skin cells to treat facial aging.
Ralph Merkle, of Zyvex, one of several new nanotechnology-oriented companies
in the US, said estimates varied on when nanotechnology would become
available.
So far, he said, it was just theory that we could build machines so small
that they in turn could be programmed to build molecule-sized surgical tools
and perform repairs to parts of the human body. The reality might be another
40 years; it could also be just 10.
"It wasn't until President Clinton announced the national technology
initiative in January, where he promised half of a billion dollars towards
the development of nanotechnology, that everyone started to take this
seriously.
"That initiative has increased interest among private investors, and we are
seeing a dramatic shift [in private funding for research] from a few years
ago."
Mr Merkle said the theory of nanotechnology - building machines on a
molecular level - had been around since 1959, when the Nobel Prize-winning
US physicist Richard Feynman delivered a speech titled "There's Plenty of
Room at the Bottom".
"What we are doing is not developing a particular product," he said. "What
we are doing is developing a manufacturing capability to facilitate
molecular structures. How long that will take is difficult to say.
"When we do get this technology working we will be able to build molecular
surgical tools, and that is going to make an immense difference because the
disease in cells is largely caused by damage at the molecular level, but
today's surgical tools are too big to deal with it."
Mr Drexler's presence at the conference - he has become something of a media
recluse - could be explained by the fact that it was organised by the Alcor
Life Extension Foundation.
He is on the scientific advisory board of Alcor, best known perhaps as the
largest US cryonics foundation. At its freezer facility in Scottsdale,
Arizona, 38 dead people, including one Australian, are in suspended
animation awaiting a miracle of future technology to bring them back to
life.
Mr Drexler told the conference that nanomedicine might be able to reverse
some of the damage done to the body through the imperfect science of
cryonics if a miracle of the future arrived and the "patients" were revived.
ALCOR lists 12 Australians among its about 500 living members worldwide.
All, including Mr Drexler himself, have made arrangements to have their
bodies frozen and taken to Arizona after they die.
Alcor's spokesman and immediate past president, Stephen Bridge, said almost
half of the 150 people who attended the conference a week ago were Alcor
members.
"Alcor is not just about placing people into suspended animation to bring
them back in the future," he said. "It is partly about extending human life,
trying to prevent death, or at least delay it as long as possible.
"I don't know about using the word 'cheat' when we talk of death. That is a
common phrase, but it sort of implies that some higher force demands that we
die and that if we don't we are somehow cheating, we are not playing fair.
"But I think that all the progress in medicine and the history of the human
race has been to live longer and healthier, and I don't know why using our
intelligence for that should be thought of as cheating."
Mr Bridge said the vast majority of people who attended the conference were
medical doctors or had PhDs.
"There is an immense market out there for this. You only have to look at the
amount of vitamins and other substances being sold already, with an emphasis
on trying to keep young.
"I don't know that everybody would be interested in an indefinite life span,
but I think very few people, if you asked them do they want to die next
Sunday, would say, 'Oh sure.' At the moment I certainly don't want to die
next week or next year or in the next 50 years.
"And I could imagine myself not wanting to die quite a bit beyond that as
well."
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