Immortality could be sneaking up faster than we can believe. Barely a month goes by without some new advance in organ replacement, and arecent operation to replace a boy’s windpipe with one generated from his own stem cells was called “embarrassingly simple” by the specialist in charge. Further breakthroughs could be made by the Sens Foundation, led by the radical immortalist Aubrey De Grey, with a brutally simple plan to give humans an unbeatable protection against cancer. This involves limiting human cells’ ability to divide at cancerous levels, with regular top-ups from externally grown cells replacing worn-out tissue.

If these technologies can hold to their promise, biological immortality, perhaps the most cherished goal of the transhumanists, may be with us in a few decades. A loose grouping of scientists, philosophers and sympathisers, with organisations such as the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute and Humanity+, transhumanists urge human progress through radical technological enhancement. With regards to immortality, I’m certainly a sympathiser: if a dictator was murdering tens of millions of people right across the world, we’d gladly do anything to overthrow him. And yet ageing, as eloquently put by the transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, is a tyrant that kills us by the cartload – and what do we do to stop it? And yet most people remain unconvinced by the possibilities laid out by transhumanism, saying that even if it’s possible, it’s unethical.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/15/transhumanism-biological-immortality