Sunday, November 15, 2009

Training to Be Young Again

How about training to be young again? In the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a man regresses from an old man into a baby. Rather than just growing into an adult how about switching gears to be young again?
Do you remember what it was like to be young? so carefree? happy? hopeful? Your heart beats differently. No bills to worry about. No worries about invisible invaders called germs. All the stress that goes hand in hand with growing up. What if we could pick what we can forget? like selective amnesia?
And if we can regress like in the movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, who will take care of us? Interestingly, the Dali Lama monks believe in reincarnation and they take it as so far to take care of a child believed to be an incarnate of someone deceased. Perhaps, these monks have been preparing for the day when reincarnation is made possible through science. Maybe science is not exactly what they expected but the idea of living forever and how to deal with immortality is the same.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Complete Human Genomes on the Cheap

An entire human genome can be sequenced now for less than $5,000, down from $20 million a few years ago. This trend suggests prices will be negligible to the point procedures will become routine. Affordability dictates how soon we can expect individualized medicine, nutrition, ancestry tracing, cures for diseases, genetics design and engineering, and even physical immortality.