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1 Stud. Ethics L. & Tech. 1 (2007)
Medical Nanorobotics: Breaking the Trance of Futility in Life Extension Research

handle is hein.journals/selt1 and id is 94 raw text is: 




Freitas: Breaking the Trance of Futility in Life Extension Research


       Biogerontologist Aubrey  de Grey  (2007) has suggested that one of the
reasons we as a society invest so little in research on combating aging is because
we  are in an intellectual trance. We think the effort will be futile: aging is
immutable, so why try?
       A healthy skepticism can be a good thing but it is a major mistake to bet
against the irresistible force of inexorable technological progress. Over the next
few decades, it seems likely that a variety of purely biotechnological solutions to
many  of the major  types of age-related damage will be found  and will enter
general therapeutic practice, perhaps following the SENS program described by
de Grey  and Rae (2007). De  Grey's (2005) guarded  expectation is that all the
major types of damage will be reversed, but only partly so. In several cases this
incompleteness is because the category of damage in question is heterogeneous,
consisting of a spectrum of variations on a theme, some of which are harder to
repair than others. In the short term it's enough to repair only the easiest variants
and thereby reduce the total damage load a fair amount, but in the longer term the
harder variants will accumulate to levels that are problematic even if we're fixing
the easy variants really thoroughly.  Hence,  we  will have to improve  these
therapies over time in order to repair ever-trickier variants of these types of
damage.  I predict that nanotechnological solutions will eventually play a major
role in these rejuvenation therapies.
       In my view  (Freitas 2008), nanotechnology will play a pivotal role in the
solution to the problem of human aging.  It is true that purely biotechnological
solutions to many, if not most, of the major classes of age-related damage may be
found, and even reach the clinic, by the 2020s. However, we have no guarantee
that biotechnology will find solutions to all the major classes of age-related
damage,  especially in this time frame. If treatments for any one of the numerous
major sources of aging are not found, we will continue to age - albeit at a slightly
slower rate - and with no substantial increase in the average human lifespan.
       Medical nanorobotics, if it can be made to work, can unquestionably offer
convenient solutions to all known causes of age-related damage and other aspects
of human  senescence (Freitas 2008), and most likely can also successfully address
any  new  causes  of  senescence that remain  undiscovered  today.   Medical
nanorobotics is the ultimate big hammer in the anti-aging toolkit (Freitas 1998,
1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007). Its development - as fast as humanly possible -
is our insurance policy against the risk of a failure of biotechnology to provide a
comprehensive   solution to the problem  of aging.  Additionally, nanorobotic
medicine, once developed, may  offer superior treatments for aging, compared to
the methods   of biotechnology, as measured   by a  multitude of comparative
performance  metrics (Freitas 1999). If a 15-20 year  -$1 billion R&D   effort
launched today could result in a working nanofactory able to build simple medical
nanorobots in the 2020s (Nanofactory Collaboration 2007), then it seems likely


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