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Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0636.html
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Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death
A cure for aging may be found in the next fifty years. The trick now is to live long enough to be there when it happens. In his two new books, Ray Kurzweil has painted a clear picture of the future and provided a blueprint for how to get there.
Originally published in The
Futurist March-April 2006. Reprinted on KurzweilAI.net February
3, 2006.
This article is a response to Ray Kurzweil's feature in The
Futurist, Reinventing
Humanity. You can also read other responses to Kurzweil's article
by John
Smart, J.
Storrs Hall, Damien
Broderick, and Richard
Eckersley. Ray Kurzweil's response to Eckersley's comments can
be found here.
Click here
to read a PDF of the full feature.
I first met Ray Kurzweil in 1999 at a Foresight Institute meting
in Palo Alto. I was there to get some background information on
nanotechnology for a new book I was writing. As I stood in the lunch
line, a healthy appearing man in front of me was engaged in animated
conversation with a not nearly so healthy looking second man. Their
topic of conversation was vitamins and nutritional supplementation,
a topic of great interest to me, a nutritionally oriented M.D.
I joined the conversation, and the healthy looking man introduced
himself as Ray Kurzweil. Ray and I continued our dialog via email
after the conference ended, and a few months later, he flew from
his home in Boston to Frontier Medical Institute, my longevity clinic
in Denver, for a comprehensive longevity medical evaluation. In
Denver we performed a comprehensive battery of tests designed to
uncover any health risks he might still have so that together we
could better optimize Ray’s already very sophisticated program
for health and longevity.
From the beginning, it was obvious that Ray would be a unique patient.
I have many engineer patients in my practice (and Ray is an engineer
by training), so I am not surprised when a patient comes to see
me with a notebook of spreadsheets detailing various data extracted
from their daily lives: blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, blood
sugar levels, amount of exercise, etc. carefully tabulated for several
years. But all previous data collections I had seen, even those
organized into Excel and meticulously graphed, paled in comparison
to Ray’s. His data collection was so thorough and meticulous
that he could tell me what he ate for lunch on June 23, 1989 (as
well as for every other day for several years before that date or
since). And not only what he ate, but the number of grams of each
serving and calories consumed, as well as the number of calories
he burned that day through exercise – every day for decades!
As a result, it came as less of a surprise for me to learn that
Ray was taking over 200 supplement pills a day. Ray’s approach
had been to accurately assess his personal health risks and then
quite simply to “reprogram his biochemistry.” Ongoing
testing indicates that he is doing a remarkable job, as measurement
of his biological age in my clinic indicates that he is now almost
two decades younger than his chronological age, and all of his health
risks appear under optimal control.
Ray was already working on his new book, “The Singularity
is Near,” at that time, and I had just completed my first book,
“The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever.” It was
natural that our email dialog moved into discussion of the prospects
for truly radical life extension for people of all ages, including
older boomers like ourselves. As our emails multiplied into the
many thousands, we decided to organize the information and see if
we had the makings of a new book that we would coauthor. I created
a preliminary table of contents, Ray organized the information from
our emails and another 10,000 emails or so later, our joint book,
“Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” was
written in the midst of Ray’s writing of “The Singularity
Is Near.”
Ray felt that he was writing these books together as a unit and
that there was synergy between them. “The Singularity Is Near”
details Ray’s vision of the astounding possibilities of the
world of the near future as the singularity unfolds sometime within
the next few decades. In “Fantastic Voyage” we provide
readers with the information they need to live long enough and remain
healthy enough to fully experience the wonders of life in the post
singularity world. In writing these two books has Ray painted a
clear picture of the future and provided a blueprint for how to
get there.
© 2006 Terry Grossman. Reprinted with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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Re: Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death
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I fully support the plan, I have some doubts, though, as to the means. It seems that anti-oxidant reach supplements are not that efficient
in neutralizing free radicals in our bodies.
I'd like to point out that melatonin is a really good anti-oxidant. Quoth wikipedia:
Although the primary site of melatonin's action is via the melatonin receptors, melatonin is a powerful antioxidant that can easily cross cell membranes and the blood-brain barrier. Unlike other antioxidants, melatonin does not undergo redox cycling, the ability of a molecule to undergo reduction and oxidation repeatedly. Redox cycling may allow other antioxidants (such as vitamin C) to act as pro-oxidants, counterintuitively promoting free radical formation. Melatonin, once oxidized, cannot be reduced to its former state because it forms several stable end-products upon reacting with free radicals. Therefore, it has been referred to as a terminal (or suicidal) antioxidant. In animal models, melatonin has been demonstrated to prevent the damage to DNA by some carcinogens, stopping the mechanism by which they cause cancer. |
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Re: Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death
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The article quoted form Nerw Scientist is NOT a rigorous research of anti-oxidants.
The whole point is that we are working at the edge with mainly uncheckable data, but based on best guesses:
eg it would take mopre than 100 years to check if anti-opxidants are slwing aging testing on humans.
Why we think that supplements actually work, is becxause they work on lower animals, including nanot5ide worms, mice, rats and even cat5s.
All these life forms have the SAME metabolic pathways as man.
There is GREAT liklihood that increasing up weight for weight, the antioxidant and other formulars with have similar impacts.
But it is not tested.
While there may be some damage from some supplements, the trade-off for survival until immortality is an option when SAI is here, is regarded as worth it by many of us.
Ray Kurzweil may be regarded as a freak by people who haven't paradigm-shifted as new evidence and new theories are presented, but many of us are also supplementing on loads of pills.
Vegitarians of 20 years standing from age 20 are often easily idenitifiable as looking young for theior age.
The few people I know who have been regularly supplementing for 20 years also look younger, even younger than the vegies, and i know at leat one set of non-identical twins, one who has supplemented, the other who hasn't, and the former now looks like the son of his sibbling in age.
What you CANT do is take an instinctive shot at it: you need to do rersearch on it.
the main bidy of research is on animal studies. Trials do pan up tpo humans in many fields, that's why animal testing of new drugs is compulsory, although it is not infallible.
Animals fed antioxidants live longer healthier lives.
Anyone not doing anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals is probably ill-informed.
Mike Price (British Transhumanists) published this in Longivity Report 91:
http://www.quantium.plus.com/lr/lr91.htm
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Re: Ray Kurzweil's Plan for Cheating Death
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well, there's a slight problem with supplementing.
There are several studies showing an increase of lung cancer incidence in individuals supplementing vitA and who used to smoke. therefore if someone used to smoke, supplementing with vitA might be a serious health risk.
Also HGH terapies have mixed results, some of which show greater cancer risks.
All this info I get from the net.
It seems to me very very hard to decide what supplememts to take in what quantities. Plus they cost a lot. I have researched extensivley supplemeting on the net and it is very hard to discern between reliable and unreliable sources of information and supplements.
I have calculated that a supplementation program with a broad range of vitamins and minerals, polyphenols, carnosine, cysteine, lycopene, Q10, and some other stuff, all from LEF costs about 2,500$/year if you get 1-year membership. That's a lot of money, for me at least.
I trust calorie restriction however, and I take a normal broad range vitamin-mineral supplement to compensate low food intake. It's much cheaper :) |
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