[extropy-chat] TechnologyReview joins anti-transhumanists

[David McFadzean]

title: Do You Want to Live Forever?
source: 
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/02/issue/feature_aging.asp?p=0
author: Sherwin Nuland

quote:
If we are ever immolated, it will be by the efforts of well-meaning 
scientists who are convinced that they have our best interests at heart. 
We already know who they are. They are the DNA tweakers who would 
enhance us by allowing parents to choose the genetic makeup of their 
descendants unto every succeeding generation ad infinitum, heedless of 
the possibility that breeding out variety may alter factors necessary 
for the survival of our species and the health of its relationship to 
every form of life on earth; they are the biogerontologists who study 
caloric restriction in mice and promise us the extension by 20 percent 
of a peculiarly nourished existence; they are those other 
biogerontologists who emerge from their laboratories of molecular 
science every evening optimistic that they have come just a bit closer 
to their goal of having us live much longer, downplaying the 
unanticipated havoc at both the cellular and societal level that might 
be wrought by their proposed manipulations. And finally, it is the 
unique and strangely alluring figure of Aubrey de Grey, who, orating, 
writing, and striding tirelessly through our midst with his less than 
fully convinced sympathizers, proclaims like the disheveled herald of a 
new-begotten future that our most inalienable right is to have the 
choice of living as long as we wish. With the passion of a single-minded 
zealot crusading against time, he has issued the ultimate challenge, I 
believe, to our entire concept of the meaning of humanness.