X-Message-Number: 21835 From: Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 03:40:52 EDT Subject: Something important This morning's Washington Post, front page below the fold headline: "Stem Cell 'Master Gene' Found." This is the gene "largely responsible for giving those cells their unique regenerative and therapeutic potential. The discovery ...brings scientists closer to the holy grail of biology: the ability to turn ordinary cells into those that possess all the biomedical potency of human embryonic stem cells, eliminating the need to destroy embryos to get them." Work was published in the journal Cell, and conducted by U of Edinburgh researcher Austin Smith. His team worked independently but in parallel with a team led by Shinya Yamanaka of Japan's Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Note that cutting edge work in this area is being done outside US. Is this a GWBush effect? This is but one step in a long process, of course, but each step brings bioscientists and biotech closer to something akin to physical immortality. Of course, they don't dare say so in so many words, but the more obvious the direction becomes, the more people will start thinking the unthinkable. This is very important for cryonics. Hardly anybody outside the tiny cryonics circle today thinks of the future in these terms. Take, for example, the silly twaddle of Paul Farrell about the singularity doomsday. When they start to think of the future as having this potential, even, let us say, 50 or 100 years out, then they begin to feel the pain of not being alive at that future time, of being cheated, as it were, by accident of when they were born (too soon.) Only then does cryonics come into the picture as a chance, however remote, of sharing the future with those future immortals. Those who live into that time when the bio-technolgy has cracked the aging problem will, of course, have no need and no desire for cryo-preservation, but for most of us, especially those like myself who have seen six or more decades roll by, the situation is very different. We need to be joined by millions more who come to realize that human immortality is just beyond the horizon of their lifetime. Ron Havelock, CI member. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21835