I’m not a Christian, and though I’d like to work myself into a tizzy over the afterlife I should be looking forward to, I can’t physically override my capacity for logic. Thus I’m stuck with the proposition of ceasing to exist in about six decades. Having a rather pronounced instinct for self- preservation, this does not sit well, and I'd like to find ways to delay the inevitable. After all, the trick to immortality is to continually survive until the next increase in life expectancy. Unfortunately, historically such increases have always been more than one lifespan apart. Today though, medical science is picking up speed and there’s a very real possibility that my generation will be the first to live forever--or the last to die.

Naturally I'd prefer the former. Urgently.

Any research path that has the slightest chance of improving the length and quality of human life should be unconditionally supported as a boon to mankind. All of the research avenues currently on the legislative chopping block have that probability in abundance. Politicians are hardly PhDs and Nobel laureates. I cannot stand people who would rather let scientifically illiterate, morally dubious, political leeches decide whether or not they will permit actual researchers to extend my life.

To do so is to essentially let politicians kill me. Time here is at a premium. I’m 20 yrs old, expected to live to approximately the year 2056. With bureaucrats out of the way, I have high hopes that my 75yr expectation will be extended prior to my date with destiny 55yrs down the road. And then will the deadline be postponed again before we hit the new date? Get the idea? If I can survive the next half- century or so, the odds of achieving immortality look better and better. But if the FDA and NAS bungle it for me, there’s no way.

Still the suicidal anti-technology people bemoan such atrocities as the Tuskegee experiment and Nazi concentration camp laboratories. Don’t we need govt to provide oversight against these inherently amoral scientists? Bullshit, the exceedingly rare Dr. Mengele crap is hardly a sufficient excuse to clamp a huge bureaucracy onto the scientific community at large.

Politics is the most deadly disease on the planet. I may never get cancer, but if politicians continue to run rampant I will most assuredly be a casualty. Government control of science is a death sentence for my entire generation. As Kim Robinson poignantly emphasized this fact whenever a character died in his Mars trilogy, “And there went another one who could have lived 1000 years.”

So message to all you fundamentalists, 'bio-ethicists' and neo-luddites: Your agenda involves my preventable death. Stop now before I decide to return the favor.