Since the late nineteenth century, many scientists have sought to elucidate the mechanistic basis of life and thus render natural processes amenable to human intervention. Synthetic biology explicitly conceptualizes biology as a subfield of engineering, but the basic idea has a long lineage in the Western tradition. Via the systematic reverse engineering of natural processes, the hope is that we can potentially unlock the secrets of aging and thus find a way to forestall a fate that once seemed inexorable. From this vantage point, aging becomes amenable to human ingenuity and biotechnological interventions that reverse time and deterioration. This distinction is not simply semantic rather, aging or death as a curable disease metaphor unmoors these conditions from the realms of theology and philosophy and places them squarely within an engineering framework. Key to the growth of the anti-aging industry is a rhetorical and scientific shift from seeing aging and death as intrinsic to the human condition to the notion that “death is a curable disease” (Istvan 2019) and thus vulnerable to advances in science and technology. The anti-aging sector can be divided into four distinct subsectors: 1) established researchers who want to make the normal lifespan of approximately eighty-five years healthier 2) the moderate life extensionists, who hope to push the average human lifespan to one hundred and twenty-five years 3) the radical age extensionists, led by figures such as Aubrey de Grey, who envision future lifespans of at least three hundred years and 4) the immortalists (Stambler 2014), who see in nanotechnology, biotechnology, and/or digital technology the skeleton keys that will eventually unlock the secret of life itself.

Last to Know by Never Says Die