The Death of Death

Book about ageing and death written by José Luis Cordeiro and David Wood

Is death inevitable? Until now, the history of mankind has been marked by this fatal fact. Religions, borders and progress are born from an ancient fear of death, comfort from this fear man often found only in religious paradigms. But according to José Luis Cordeiro and David Wood, the incontrovertible fact of death is no longer an absolute certainty - science and technology are preparing to tear down the final frontier: that of immortality.

This accessible book provides insight into recent exponential advances in artificial intelligence, tissue regeneration, stem cell treatment, organ printing, cryopreservation, and genetic therapies that, for the first time in human history, offer a realistic chance to solve the problem of the aging of the human body. In this book, Cordeiro and Wood not only present all the major developments, initiatives, and ideas for eternal life, they also show why there are a number of good arguments for seeing death for what it is: the last undefeated disease.

Originally published in Spanish under the title: La muerte de la muerte

Book Highlights

100 key points from The Death of Death.

This book is dedicated to the first generation of immortal humans.
From 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) has started recognizing age-related diseases.
Other countries are getting old before getting rich.
Medical costs around the world are already around 10% of global GDP.
The first human right is the right to life.
Human beings, unlike most other living beings, are conscious of life and therefore conscious of death.
The elixir of immortality, a legendary potion that guaranteed eternal life, is a recurring theme in many cultures.
In today’s so-called Western religions immortality is achieved mainly through resurrection.
Neither resurrection nor reincarnation are scientifically proven.
Biology and medicine are being digitized rapidly, and this will allow exponential advances in the coming years.
The Methuselah Mouse Award has already been given to scientists who have managed to extend the life of mice to the equivalent of 180 human years.
The question today is not whether it will be possible, but rather when it will be possible.
There is no scientific principle that prohibits rejuvenation and imposes the need for death.
Extending human life is not only ethical but also our moral responsibility.
The main cause of death on the planet is neither malaria nor tuberculosis: it is aging.
Aubrey de Grey explains that you’ll save more lives by helping to cure aging than in any other way.
Bacteria that reproduce via symmetrical cell division can be considered biologically immortal.
The first eukaryotic organisms were also unicellular, among them fungi and yeasts, which are also considered biologically “immortal”.
Life appeared in order to live.
Hydra may have escaped senescence and may be potentially immortal.
Planarias can be cut into pieces and each piece will have the ability to regenerate a complete worm.
HeLa cells were the first human cells that could be developed in a laboratory and that were biologically “immortal.”
Neurons in some parts of the brain can regenerate, unlike what was thought until recently.
The naked mole rat is considered a cancer-proof species, despite the abundant expression of telomerase in its somatic stem cells.
Despite the great advances of the twentieth century, there is still no universally accepted theory of aging.
Aubrey de Grey's approach to life extension is called SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence).
Aging research has been growing exponentially, with hundreds of researchers joining the field and writing thousands of articles every year.
Aging occurs gradually, so that damage can also be attacked sequentially.
Aging is not considered today something biologically “inevitable” or even “irreversible.”
Classifying aging as a disease will greatly contribute to curing the disease itself.
Many of the most important industries of our world today were once ridiculed.
The human rejuvenation industry has the potential to become the largest industry in history.
Aging-related diseases cause the greatest suffering to the greatest number of people.
Today we know that curing aging is possible; we also know that it will not be easy.
Knowledge is doubling, in quantity if not quality, every second year.
Anti-aging and rejuvenation were taboo subjects that used to destroy the careers or scientific credibility of some researchers.
Scientific advances in recent decades have begun to attract investors to fund more research.
The longevity industry has grown from millions of dollars at the start of this century to billions of dollars today.
Thanks to the acceleration of technological change, we believe that in the next two decades we will see more transformations than in the last two millennia.
With just hunting, fishing and food gathering, the African continent could not support more than a million people.
The population in China declined by nearly one million people between 2021 and 2022
The coming demographic crisis is no longer an excess of humans, but rather a possible stagnation and reduction of the planet’s population.
It is time to begin a fantastic journey into indefinite youth.
Longevity escape velocity (LEV) was originally raised by American businessman and philanthropist David Gobel.
When we reach longevity escape velocity, technological advances will annually increase life expectancy by more than a year.
Today it is estimated that, for every year lived, in the most advanced countries we can increase our life expectancy by 3 months.
According to Kurzweil, by 2029 we will reach the longevity escape speed.
The Methuselarity is a future moment in which all medical conditions that cause human death will be eliminated and death will occur only by accident or homicide.
Most annual predictions overestimate what can happen in a year and underestimate the power of the trend over time.
Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which are now supposedly modern medicine, will soon become primitive medicine.
To know how proteins fold will be fundamental to understand how biology works, and AI is thus accelerating our understanding of biology.
In China, the population began to age before it became rich.
The time has come to move from curative medicine to preventive medicine.
In this book we defend the extension of life so that we can be indefinitely young, not indefinitely old.
We are going to add more years to life and also more life to years.
The concept of the “Longevity Dividend” was introduced in a 2006 article in the scientific journal The Scientist.
Even if the extension does not become indefinite— if, for example, it only leads to seven more years of healthy life— it would still be extraordinarily positive from both an economic and a humanitarian perspective.
Longer-lived people have the potential of to contribute more to the economy (and not represent a drain on resources).
As they live longer, people work longer, produce more, and provide more experience to the workforce and the community as a whole.
There are several possible sources of resources to make a significant additional effort that can be applied to the rejuvenation project.
Impressive advances in nanotechnology will enable us to compose, decompose, and recompose matter at a very low cost.
A 70 kg person could be fixed for 70 dollars.
The human body is cheap, and fixing something cheap is going to be cheap when we know how to do it well.
It is very likely that in a few years the genome can be sequenced for as little as ten dollars in a minute.
Thanks to exponential advances it is even possible that we can cure aging before it becomes a chronic disease.
We must rethink the entire health system and invest at the beginning, rather than spend at the end.
It makes strong financial sense for society to accelerate its investment in rejuveneering.
The human ability to vividly anticipate death ahead of time– that is, when not in any imminent danger– poses a problem for the management of the body’s terror subsystem.
Groups of humans who successfully survived tended to be ones that developed social and psychological tools to manage the terror of the prospect of death.
The awareness that we humans will die has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in almost every domain of human life— whether we are conscious of it or not.
Nobody wants to die, but many people object to long-term extension of the human lifespan by reversing the aging process.
Religious or not, faith does, in all cases, involve the view that good members of society should accept death when their time comes.
Paradoxically, it’s their fear of death that makes them upset about the contrary ideas.
Aubrey de Grey refers to “the pro-aging trance”, on account of what he describes as “the depth of irrationality that is exhibited by so many people”.
Advocates and slogans that were successful in attracting an initial community of supporters to a new cause often need to be changed before potential mainstream supporters will be prepared to listen.
To advance towards the death of death, we must first leave behind the terror of death itself.
In 1967– 68, the evidence of drifting continents and the spreading seafloor was unified into a global framework.
The accepting-aging paradigm fits the same pattern. It persists in part due to lack of knowledge, but also due to the overhang of prior habits and prior thinking styles.
Without being aware of the history, it would be difficult to imagine how much hostility the concept of evidence-based medicine engendered before it became more widely accepted.
Bloodletting was widely advocated as a medical treatment for more than two thousand years.
There might be hopes for the regeneration of people from the Before-Rejuvenation (BR) era.
The early stages of clinical death may be reversible in the future.
To date, Cryonics Institute has over 200 cryopreserved patients and over a thousand members, while Alcor has a similar number of patients.
Several patients decide just to preserve their head.
The reanimation of cryopreserved patients will start with the last to have undergone this technique, who will have been cryopreserved with better technologies.
One of the great recent successes of cryonics was the birth in 2017 of an embryo cryopreserved for almost 25 years.
The arguments against the idea of cryonics mirror the arguments against rejuveneering.
In Norway, there has been an old saying for the past three decades that you’re never dead until you’re warm and dead.
During hypothermic arrest, a patient is physically and biochemically indistinguishable from someone who is dead.
Available evidence lends support to the possibility that brain features that encode memories and determine behaviour can be preserved during and after cryopreservation.
One of the biggest threats to the rejuveneering project is that muddled thinking will prevail, in the public mind, about what kind of actions are admirable.
But it’s still going to take a lot of effort— and a lot of smart marketing— to overcome the public’s deep-rooted “accepting aging” apathy.
We see plenty of reason why the present time is ripe for the idea that we can, and should, abolish aging.
We are between the last mortal human generation and the first immortal human generation.
Aging has been and remains the greatest enemy of all humanity.
Ask not what “immortality” can do for you, ask what you can do for “immortality”.
But we need your help, for it is everyone’s fight against death.
Most consumer-level longevity interventions explored by leading longevity clinics today focus on early disease diagnosis and lifestyle optimization.
We are now seeing high school students choosing longevity biotechnology as their primary career path.
To achieve longevity, you need to truly want it, demand it, and fight for it.
AAA