42 The War on Aging IN CONCLUSION The first-generation SENS therapies that will give middle- aged  humans  an  extra  20–50  years  of  healthy  life  may  be developed  well  before  mid-century,  or  they  may  not.  But however long it takes, most of the first cohort who benefit from those therapies will probably live as long as they choose to, whereas those only five or ten years older will only have the opportunity of cryonics to live beyond 150. Every day that we can expedite the development of SENS will, therefore, prob- ably confer on roughly 100,000 people the opportunity to extend their life span indefinitely – and this figure is largely independent of when SENS arrives. We can no longer pretend that we know so little about how to cure aging that the timing of this advance will be determined overwhelmingly by future serendipitous discoveries: we are in the home straight already. We are therefore perpetrating, right now, an offence that puts the medical establishment’s suppression of Semmelweis in the shade. References 1) Schwartz, Maxime; “The life and works of Louis Pasteur” in: Journal of Applied Microbiology (2001, Vol.  91); pg. 597– 2) Carter, Codell K & Carter, Barbara R; Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (1994); Greenwood Publishing Group 3) Armstrong, Gregory L & Conn, Laura A & Pinner, Robert W; “Trends in infectious disease mortality in the United States during the 20th century” in: Journal of the American Medical Association (1999, Vol.  281); pg. 61–