Depressed Metabolism

It’s difficult to follow up a best-selling book about the cultural history of the penis, but David M. Friedman has a knack for engaging readers in topics that others find difficult to broach. This time he tackles the touchy subject of death by relating the intertwined biographies of Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel in [...]

Perhaps no political philosopher has done as much painstaking work to review the legitimacy and need for political authority as Anthony de Jasay.  What makes de Jasay’s work stand out is his ability to engage with the technical arguments of political economists and philosophers without sacrificing common sense. For example, de Jasay understands the complications [...]

The website TopTenz recently published a list of the Top 10 Most Famous Preserved Body Parts. The list includes Galileo’s finger and Albert Einstein’s brain. As has been discussed on this blog before, the preservation of human brains (no matter how frivolous the intention) raises a number of important questions about the nature of death [...]

The Italian Island Sardinia is known for its beautiful beaches, wild countryside, rugged mountains, valleys and plains that formed the background for some of Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti western‘ films, but also offers a rich history dating back to the nuragic age circa 1500 BC and is famous in the mining world for the richness of [...]

My experiences with death began in 1974, when I was age 10.
On Labor Day Sunday, while watching the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, my father told me to turn the TV off.
When I asked why, he said my grandfather, age 74, died.
I would learn years later that he had emphysema and heart trouble.
I did not know [...]

Nine-Banded Books has done the world a great favor in publishing a new edition of L.A. Rollins’ The Myth of Natural Rights. Although one could argue that in one sense it is a mixed blessing because it indicates that there is still a need for such a book. While the idea of natural rights seems [...]

In 2003 George Hart published an article called “The Immortal’s Dilemma: Decontructing Eternal Life” , making a secular case against immortality.  Hart mainly uses logical arguments and provides a fair amount of room to address a number of possible objections to his position. In a nutshell, Hart considers two variants of immortality, one without [...]

In an insightful post on the blog Overcoming Bias, economist (and Alcor member) Robin Hanson argues that proposals to halt stock trading or short selling  during times of crisis are akin to banning bad news:

“The fact that newspapers report a lot less news on this crisis on weekends shows that most crisis news now comes [...]

The idea that death gives meaning to life is widespread but does not reflect careful reasoning, and is often a  desperate rationalization of human mortality. As a consequence, life extensionists have not been at great pains to defeat “pro-death” arguments. A (secular) philosophical position that is harder to refute is that we should not fear [...]

Ever since first tasting port wine, it has become my favorite drink.  On my last visit to Portugal we therefore decided to visit Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia, the birth place of port and the economic heart for the production and distribution of Port.
Port is produced from grapes grown in the Douro region. The [...]

It has been shown that perfusability of the brain is significantly compromised after long-term (>5 min) ischemic events (the “no reflow” phenomenon). Improving cerebral blood flow after circulatory arrest is one of the fundamental objectives of human cryopreservation stabilization protocol.  To that end, cryonics organizations administer the resuscitation fluid Dextran-40 and the drug Streptokinase to [...]

In a recent opinion piece for Forbes, legal scholar Richard A. Epstein draws attention to the political philosophical aspects of the financial meltdown:
Fannie and Freddie didn’t design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the “patterned principles” of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully [...]

Unless you are a long-time cryonicist or a surgeon, you may not have heard of BioTime before. This company, recently profiled for its innovative stem cell research in Life Extension Magazine, is best known for producing the blood-volume expander Hextend, which was initially developed by Trans Time, an early cryonics company performing ultra-profound hypothermia research. [...]

Life Extension Foundation (LEF) unveiled a new blood test in an article in this month’s Life Extension Magazine (November 2008). Unlike cholesterol testing, which simply gives a measurement of high-density (HDL) and low-density (LDL) lipoprotein levels and provides little information about acute risk of stroke or heart attack, the PLAC® blood test “can accurately identify [...]

“On November 15-16, 2008, the world’s most dangerous ideas will collide in Mountain View, California. Convergence08 examines the world-changing possibilities of nanotech and the life-changing promises of biotech. It is the premier forum for debate and exploration of cogtech ethics, and ground zero of the past and future infotech revolution. Convergence08 is an innovative, lively [...]

In 1991 the Libertarian Alliance published an article called “Immortality: Liberty’s Final frontier” (PDF) by David Nicholas. In this article the author argues that “the continuing fact of death renders all talk of liberty ultimately futile.” The author further argues that our concern for the future will diminish as we approach death. But instead of [...]

All politics is redistributive. Although this is often hidden from view through appeals to the social contract, democracy, and the common good, the recent attempts to reward unsound business practices with taxpayers’ money make even the most sophisticated appeal to the “common good” look suspicious. Although advocates of liberty have offered persuasive accounts about the [...]

At the blog Fight Aging!, Reason draws attention to the possibility that taking large amounts of antioxidant supplements may not necessarily be an improvement:

Our biology is complex - why would we expect that successfully modifying it with chemicals would be as simple as eating those chemicals? Ingesting antioxidants in the hope of benefit because they [...]

Rudi Hoffman, cryonics activist and the world’s leading cryonics insurance provider, is today’s featured guest on “The Future and You:”
“You can too take it with you!  How combining cryonics and insurance can let you leave your million dollar insurance death benefit to yourself. It may allow you to wake up a century or two in [...]

One of the most puzzling aspects in the discussion about the current financial crisis is that the situation is treated as a form of “market failure” that the Federal Reserve is simply faced with. One does not have to be a strict adherent of the Austrian School of Economics to consider the possibility that public [...]