I tried searching for information on this subject, but came up with nothing. So, I figured I just post it here and get people's opinions of this article, even though it is a few years old...
Friday, November 18, 2005
What, you might ask, is the connection between nanotechnology and immortality? Well, most recently, there is <A href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/">Ray Kurzweil’s book, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which he wrote with an MD, Terry Grossman, an “expert in longevity medicine” according to the publisher’s publicity. The book is named after the Isaac Aasimov sci-fi story and the resulting Raquel Welch movie featuring miniature submarines that may eventually cruise through our veins. Say the authors, nanotechnology is the third bridge that will connect present day medicine to a future in which we are all, barring fatal accidents, immortal. The second bridge is biotechnology and the first bridge, naturally, is Kurzweil’s and Grossman’s diet and exercise program, which will not be discussed here.
But before Kurzweil ever happened upon nanotech there was Ralph Merkle, an Eric Drexler associate, and by all accounts, a very bright guy. As a graduate student at Stanford he was credited with being the co-inventor of public key encryption, a method of computer security that has become widely used to protect the contents of e-mail and other computer documents. After receiving his doctorate in 1979, Merkle worked at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), a legendary lab that was responsible for many of the innovations now used in computing. Merkle was also paid to dabble in nanotech with Drexler, which although the work was largely useless to Xerox “was just part of the ambience of work in a major research center” and apparently yielded intellectual rewards.
Ralph Merkle is also a director of the cryonic firm Alcor, which freezes people…no, excuse me…vitrifies corpses in the hope that they can eventually be rejuvenated with advanced technology. Vitrification is different than simple freezing, because corpses are perfused with a cryonic solution (M22 from 21st Century Medicine) composed of such poisons as polyethylene glycol (automotive antifreeze), formic acid, dimethyl sulfoxide and glycerol [this is in error, corrected in a later post. M22 contains ethylene glycol (not polyethylene glycol), formamide (not formic acid) and does not contain glycerol]. These largely prevent cell membrane-damaging ice crystals from forming. As Merkle points out, your probability of dying (permanently) if you don’t undergo this procedure is 100%, whereas there is a finite probability that the technical problems that led to your terminal disease may be correctable at some point in the future, and that your body can be reanimated using a procedure that hasn’t been invented yet.
When Jim Von Ehr founded Zyvex in the hope of commercializing atomically precise manufacturing, he hired Merkle as a consultant. Jim and Zyvex quickly found that creating a nanotech assembler from scratch was a daunting task. Research at the company descended into a sort of academic model, or perhaps a Xerox PARC model, with projects and people proliferating. When Tom Celluci was made President and COO in 2003, he says, there were “82 employees and 85 projects.” He cut the number of projects to three. Among those who left Zyvex as a result was Merkle, eventually finding an academic position in the Computer Science department of Georgia Tech. Celluci complained that Merkle’s interviews with the press about Zyvex would always descend into discussions of life-extension and freezing heads and corpses, which in Celluci’s view undercut the serious image that the company was trying to project.
It was to Merkle’s current home, Georgia Tech that I traveled recently to take in the Immortality Institute’s first conference. As a Tennessee-dwelling refugee from California, it was weird to see so many stereotypical representatives of my former home transported to the heart of Dixie. There were a lot of interesting people there, including: Martine Rothblatt, a communications satellite pioneer; Max More, founder of the Extropians techno-cult; Michael Rose, author of The Evolutionary Biology of Aging; and Aubrey de Grey, from Cambridge University, the pony-tailed promoter of Strategies for Negligible Senescence (SENS), who has made himself the willing target of outraged gerontologists everywhere for his basic assertion that aging is a disease that can be cured.
There was a lot of talk on legal problems associated with cryonics. Basically, it is illegal to freeze anybody before they are declared legally dead. On the other hand, it is legally impossible for dead people to own property or to institute lawsuits. What leverage do you have, therefore, to make sure that someone will keep up your payments to Alcor or revive you when the time comes? How to keep your nest egg accumulating for the next century or two or three?
I was particularly interested in Merkle’s talk, as I had interviewed him for The Nanotech Pioneers: Where are they taking us? His presentation, titled “Cryonics and Nanotechnology” was a disappointment. The problem he addressed was how to reanimate the frozen dead person. The answer, of course, is the aforementioned tiny submarines. Nanotechnology, for Merkle, is the “sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic” made famous by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Lots of cartoons of little nanomachines that don’t exist yet. Imaginary artificial cells from Robert A. Freitas, Jr., author of Nanomedicine. Kind of short on details. Merkle is an expert on being vague. His speaking style should be studied by aspiring politicians.
There were, however, some real advances in the science of longevity mentioned by other speakers. I will save them for another post.
posted by Steve Edwards at 12:03 PM
Edited by Mike79, 12 January 2009 - 01:22 AM.
