Becoming Immortal Combining Cloning and Stem-Cell Therapy Why Become Immortal?

Becoming Immortal Combining Cloning and 

Stem-Cell Therapy

Why Become Immortal?

My guess is that the inspiration to become immortal is an extension of the

awe experienced merely contemplating human life.

What is the tie which conjoins these several aspects of mind [the

human and the infrahuman] so inseparably? What is it else than

“urge-to-live”? Human cognition may like the winged horse take at

times its flights toward the stars and forget earth. None the less it is

harnessed to life’s car, whose charioteer is “urge-to-live” sublimed

to “zest-to-live.” It and its fellow-steeds, endeavour, will, emotion,

passion or whatever else we call them pull under the same lash.3

Human life is so impressive that aging seems hardly worthy of it, and death

seems a criminal affront

To give the possibility of immortalizing human beings a realistic face so that it would be looked at seriously.

If you want to produce an immortal human being, you must produce an

immortal mind.

—Tom Ryan, Dublin Ireland

“Why do we have to grow up [and die]?”

Why did life evolve a dynamics in which living things are constantly exchanged? Why didn’t a

stasis evolve in which living things remained more or less constant?

Academic scientists are frequently at a loss when writing about the future,

about science’s products and applications in the future. The future seems

out of bounds for science, since it is the territory of uncertainty. Attempts by

scientists to take a hand in shaping the future have sometimes led to tragic

results, most notoriously, to the genocide practiced in Nazi Germany. On the

other hand, ignoring or being unconcerned with the future is blatantly irresponsible.

Therefore, like the star ship Enterprise of Star Trek fame, I intend

Becoming Immortal “to go where no one has gone before” and ask what

direction human biological change might take if human beings took charge

of their own destiny, setting aside evolution and development in the pursuit

of immortality.

excerpts from

Becoming Immortal

Combining Cloning

and Stem-Cell Therapy

Stanley Shostak