From the Progress-in-the-Universe Department here at QC Plaza (with apologies to Click and Clack): In two posts today, FuturePundit notes that (i) we’re starting to see the same power-dive of costs in biotechnology as we did in electronics, and that this is going to lead to unimaginable improvements in medical capabilities, including the ability to rejuvenate aging bodies — along with other consequences such as a rising retirement age:
[From here:] Genizon has used improvements gene chip technology to speed up their genetic studies by more than an order of magnitude. … [Researchers] can now collect more data and more quickly. These boosts in productivity are going to produce discoveries and effective treatments for diseases which have long been incurable.
[From here, quoting junk bond king Michael Milliken:] In 1974, it cost $100 million to sequence a gene. Today, it cost $3, and by 2013, it will be 3 cents.
… The electronics revolution is being repeated in biotechnology.
Just as the discovery of antibiotics made many infectious diseases suddenly curable the same will happen with diseases aging. Got a bad heart? Grow a new one or send gene therapy in to instruct your cells in how to repair themselves. Bad liver or bad kidneys? Again, grow replacements or fix them. All the problems that must be solved to reach that point are solvable. Therefore we will solve them.
People who do not see this biotechnological revolution in rejuvenation on the horizon are akin to someone in 1965 saying that of course computers must take up whole rooms and that we’ll never have desktop computers which are many orders of magnitude faster than 1965 mainframes. We are going to gain the ability to manipulate cells and genes on a level that will allow us to repair our aged bodies. There’s nothing about the nature of physical reality that precludes our developing the ability to do this.
Some traditionalist Christians think humanity is “depraved” and that we live in a “broken” world. I’d like to see their explanation for this.
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