I think the last third of life is going to be a really tricky area because you're dealing with people who have very firm views of what they want and don't want out of life. We need to figure out what is meaningful to a society that maybe doesn't have the kind of scarcity or disease that we face right now. And that's a big project. Is there, this is what I keep coming back to. One of the things that I've written a lot about immortality and other things is reminding people that along with vaccines and smartphones and the internet, we also have a very important tradition of innovation in terms of building new institutions. You couldn't eradicate smallpox without inventing something
Last month, longtime New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter released a brand new audiobook with our friends at Pushkin. It’s called “Higher Animals: Vaccines, Synthetic Biology, and the Future of Life,” and it’s an inspiring account of the emerging field of synthetic biology — a field where scientists combine chemistry, engineering, and computer science to develop new drugs and therapies for treating diseases of all sorts.
This month, Steven Johnson, a frequent guest on this show and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is publishing a brand new audiobook of his own. It’s called “Immortality: A User’s Guide,” and it was produced by ... us! (You can get a copy here.) The premise is this: we might well be on the cusp of a revolution in the science of aging and we are not prepared for the consequences.
You can see the overlaps, right?
So we decided to get Steven and Michael on the horn to talk about breakthrough technologies, radical life extension, and the future of our species.