Would you choose immortality?

This article is a transcript from my podcast, Professor Andy Miah Faces the Future. Tune in at your favourite podcast provider.

In case you haven’t heard, over the last 20 years or so, a number of scientists have been working on the problem of death. Now, I guess you could say that everyone’s working on this problem, in some way. Whether it’s through the food you eat, the exercise you do, or the risks you choose not to take, death avoidance is a persistent part of our lives, even if we’re not always consistent on seeking to minimize the chances of it happening. After all, we are a species that likes to smoke, eat too much, climb mountains, and even defy gravity.

So, it’s probably fair to say that, while most of us don’t really want to die, we also want to live life to the fullest, so that we feel we have made our time on Earth worthwhile. But these scientists are trying to stop all that.

And it was around 20 years ago that I became familiar with a community of people who wanted to treat ageing as a disease, not something we should accept, but something we should seek to eradicate.

Broadly speaking, the specialism in science where these questions are rife is called biogerontology and the aims of people working in this area are pretty broad. Not all of the scientists will claim to be pursuing immortality, but in my…