Extended Life, Eternal Life.

On March 5 and 6, the John Templeton Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania hosted a conference called "Extended Life, Eternal Life," with participants discussing the ethical and theological implications of our increasing ability to extend and enrich our lives through biotechnology. As might be expected, tempers flared, with anti-biotech speakers such as The Hastings Center's Daniel Callahan declaring, "The worst possible way to resolve [the question of life extension] is to leave it up to individual choice.[ldots]There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death." Gregory Stock, director of UCLA's Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society, begged to differ, suggesting, "We are not moving toward a cataclysmic reckoning. Instead, I offer you the image of birth. Like birth, this period [of nascent biotech] is messy, bloody, and traumatic, but it is the beginning of a new era. Future humans will look back on this period as the time when the very bases of their lives were laid down and thank us."

Some of the conference materials (including an archived debate on "Should biomedicine seek to treat dying like a disease--and seek to cure it?") are available on the Web at www.extended-eternallife.org REASON Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey attended the conference and filed daily dispatches, available at www.reason.com/opeds/rb030600.html.