Combating Aging ~ De Grey on Gerontechnology

Aubrey De Grey sums up why and how to combat aging...

Revolutionary Ventures ~ Bold Transformations!

My MIT Media Lab colleagues Ed Boyden, Joe Jacobson, Adam Marblestone, Desiree Dudley and I are co-hosting an upgraded and basically new incarnation of our Neurotech Ventures class -- now called Revolutionary Ventures -- this Fall 2015 at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon September 10th from 2-4pm.

While we emphasize a variety of emerging technology domains including neurotechnology, imaging, cryotechnology, gerontechnology, and bio-and-nano fabrication, this course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- anything ranging from entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units to new research centers or universities, even the creation of new disciplines and entire industries!

Oldest Person ~ Rectangularization of Mortality!

David Goldenberg at FiveThirtyEight writes Why The Oldest Person In The World Keeps Dying...

"The cutoff for mortality has remained relatively firm. Robert Young, a guy with a remarkable name considering he’s the senior claims researcher for the Gerontology Research Group and the senior gerontology consultant for Guinness World Records, refers to this phenomenon as the “rectangularization of the mortality curve.” People are getting older on average, but the oldest are still dying around the same age as ever. Thus, when one of them does take over as the oldest, she doesn’t have much time left. The average age of the oldest-ever people has increased over the past 40 years from around 112 to around 114."

Plus lovely ageless infographic... Of course, that plot doesn't show "rectangularization" -- for this we need the actual Mortality Curve which is discernibly rectifying...

Self/less ~ Mind Transplant & Longevity Film...

Watch Self/less trailer! Reminds me of Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil...

Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Minds, Money, MIT

My MIT Media Lab colleague Ed Boyden and I are again co-hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall 2014 at the Media Lab starting this Thursday afternoon September 4th from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world. Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

R.I.P. Hal Finney ~ Cryptocoder Extropian...

WIRED's Andy Greenberg writes Bitcoin’s Earliest Adopter Is Cryonically Freezing His Body to See the Future...

"Hal Finney, the renowned cryptographer, coder, and bitcoin pioneer, died Thursday morning at the age of 58 after five years battling ALS. He will be remembered for a remarkable career that included working as the number-two developer on the groundbreaking encryption software PGP in the early 1990s, creating one of the first “remailers” that presaged the anonymity software Tor, and -- more than a decade later -- becoming one of the first programmers to work on bitcoin’s open source code; in 2009, he received the very first bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto. Now Finney has become an early adopter of a far more science fictional technology: human cryopreservation, the process of freezing human bodies so that they can be revived decades or even centuries later." [...] Fran Finney says that her husband had no illusions about the certainty of his resurrection. But until his final moments, he put his faith in the progress of technology. “He never said to me, ‘I will come back.’ But he told me, ‘I hope to be back.’"

Photographer Max Gerber captured Hal and Fran last year...

Until ~ Gibb asks Who Wants to Live For Ever?

io9's Robbie Gonzalez asks Do You Really Want To Live Forever? spotlighting Barry J Gibb's short film Until...

"[Life extension is] the biggest change confronting humanity in the 21st [Century] world; it's much bigger than climate change. Make no mistake, this is humanity's greatest success. It's not, as some people believe, an unfortunate experiment in human survival that has gone disastrously wrong – when you hear some people talk about The Burden of all these old people around you it feels like this is something we never wanted to happen. Well, of course we wanted it to happen, because people, actually, don't like dying."

Oldest Living Things ~ Rachel Sussman's World!

Rachel Sussman spotlights Oldest Living Things 2,000 years+ old! Thanks to Kottke for spotting!

Alcor ~ Cryonics Facility Tour & CEO Interview...

Singularity weblog's Nikola Danaylov and colleagues visited Alcor Life Extension Foundation and created video tour plus interview with CEO Max More...

Tech's Next Feats ~ On Singularity & Abundance

Seb at Lifeboat spots PBS's Tech's Next Feats...

Curing Aging ~ de Grey on Healthy Longevity!

Thanks to Johnny Boston at H+ for spotlighting Galactic Public Archives interview with a genial modern-day Merlin, Dr Aubrey de Grey, on addressing the world's most important problem -- the diseases and ravages of aging -- via Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence or SENS... This is especially important in light of the neo-luddite anti-gerontechnology movement festering in our society, for instance Daniel Callahan's screed in the NYTimes On Dying After Your Time.

Transhuman ~ Docu on the Future of Humanity

Thanks to IEET for spotting Director Titus Nachbauer's documentary Transhuman which asks Do you want to live forever?

"It will become possible this century to upload your mind into a computer [thru] radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition"

MIT Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Money+Minds!

My MIT Media Lab colleague Ed Boyden and I are again co-hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon 5 September 2013 from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world.

Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

Life Begins at Rewirement ~ Uploaded Elderly?

io9 spots Life Begins at Rewirement short film on uploading the elderly as alternative way of future nursing care... See also Behind the Scenes...

2045 ~ Envisioning Development of Humanity...

Global Future 2045 initiative -- international social network for social innovation. Here's promo video for last year's congress and broader vision for future... And here's lead impressario Dmitry Itskov...

End of Aging ~ de Grey on the Key to Longevity...

FORA spots The End of Aging: Aubrey de Grey's Key to Longevity...

MIT Neurotechnology Ventures ~ Minds+Money

My MIT colleague Ed Boyden and I (with Rutledge Ellis-Behnke in Germany) are again hosting our Neurotechnology Ventures class this Fall at the Media Lab starting Thursday afternoon 6 September 2012 from 2-4pm. This course is all about envisioning, planning, and building ventures -- both entrepreneurial startups and intrapreneurial product-lines or business units -- to bring neuroengineering innovations to the world.

Compelling venture themes include Neuroimaging, Neuromarketing, Neurology/Psychiatry Screening & Diagnosis, Mood & Behavioral Influencing, Rehabilitation, Neurosurgery, Neuropharmacology, Brain Stimulation, Prosthetics, Sensory and Motor Augmentation, Regenerative Neuromedicine, Learning, Memory & Cognitive Influencing, and more.

Robot & Frank ~ Embracing the Future, Bot by Bot

Trailer for Robot & Frank movie...

Bionic Bodies ~ BBC on Better, Stronger, Faster

Nice BBC series on Bionic Bodies asking Can you build a human body? and hearkening back to one of my favorite 1970s SF TV shows on Building the Six-Million-Dollar Man...

"...looking at how bionics can transform people's lives. We will meet a woman deciding whether to have her hand cut off for a bionic replacement and analyse the potential to take the technology even further, enhancing the body to superhuman levels. The series continues [...] with a look at some of the earliest prosthetics from ancient Egypt. Technology has always strived to match the incredible sophistication of the human body. Now electronics and hi-tech materials are replacing whole limbs and organs in a merger of machine and man."

Final Words ~ Last Things Said Before Death...

Moving piece by Kerry Egan in CNN Belief blog...

"I am a hospice chaplain. I visit people who are dying -- in their homes, in hospitals, in nursing homes. [...] What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? [...] Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally. They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not. And sometimes, when they are actively dying, fluid gurgling in their throats, they reach their hands out to things I cannot see and they call out to their parents: Mama, Daddy, Mother."

Read the rest, heartwrenching stuff including Kerry's discussion of her learning experiences and personal faith beliefs. I'm not of her creed but I honor her humanity and admire her goodness. In any case, I personally think dying and specifically death due to aging are the ultimate genetic disease -- a devilish DNA defect we all inherit from ancestors who were never naturally selected for longevity, nevermind immortality. Maybe with enough investment in life sciences and biotechnology we can end this scourge?