Now I start to answer my blogterview questions concerning life extension. Here is the first:
1. What is the story of your life extension commitment? since the age of 15. I started my first offline diary at that age with a sentence something like this: I have eventually find the aim and meaning of my life which is the extension of human life, understanding the aging process and eliminating aging-related problems. The key for that is in mitochondrial DNA mutations, which must be reversed, here is an idea how..followed by some childish argumentoid how to repair them. And I have a sharp memory about the formulation of the argument that led me to this “aim” conclusion: I, A.Cs. would like to become a good scientist, but I need 50 years for biology, 50 years for physics, 50 years for mathematics and so on…and the only way to achieve this is not concurrently but consecutively, so I need more time, a lot much more than my evolutionarily fixed biology allows me to expect. (Of course today, if I had the chance to live as long as I can, I would prefer to become a little more than a pure scientist, say 50 years for web technology, 15 years for journalism, 15 years for travelling, 20 years for playing go …any way I can fully develop my own capacities, abilities let it be mental, physical, or moral. The list is mildly determined by Zeitgeist.) Next thought was to extend the range of this possibility to family members, friends…and people all over the world, because everybody has the right to live as long as they can. Oh yeah, this business is about eliminating ageing, get enough time to explore individuality and has nothing to do with eliminating death once and for all. I don’t want to become a wholly immortal person, and my motivation was not exactly the childhood fear of death and dying.
In the early 90s, when I was a school boy, the most exciting buzzword in life sciences was molecular biology, not stem cell resesarch nor whole genomes or omics or system biology. My definite professional motivation traces its roots back to a Scientific American article with the name (for me it was in Hungarian) Sense and nonsense DNA. The basics of molecular biology (replication-transcription-translation) were crystal clear and well established and conceivable at the first sight for a teen, and the aesthetic simplicity behind it was amazingly attractive. So I decided to become not a medical doctor but a molecular biologist. Read the rest of this entry »
