I think we take it for granted. I hope at least some people will say, one, you know, yeah, it's too soon. We've gone from it's totally normal to die in your mid 60s to if you get toYour mid 60s without having a big ticket cancer or something like that, you're probably going to live a lot longer. Yeah. There's so much to say. And I want to dive into the science a little bit more because there's a lot of interesting things there that intersect with what happened with the mRNA vaccines. But just to stay on the kind of societal point of view on all of this.
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.