Aubrey de Grey Keynote at April 2013 Conference

IMAGE: PHOTO OF AUBREY DE GREY

The Mormon Transhumanist Association is pleased to announce that Dr Aubrey de Grey will be a keynote speaker at our 5 April 2013 conference in Salt Lake City. He will speak on "Why it is a sin NOT to strive to develop medicine that eliminates aging". Aubrey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for the repair of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism (“damage”) that constitute mammalian aging, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one.

As announced previously, Dr Richard Bushman will also be a keynote speaker at the conference. He will speak on "From Humanity to Fulness the Mormon Way". Richard retired as Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University in 2001, and then came out of retirement in 2008 to accept a position as visiting Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling and Co-General Editor of the Joseph Smith Papers. He chairs the Board of Directors of the Mormon Scholars Foundation which fosters the development of young LDS scholars. With his wife Claudia Bushman, he is the father of six children and twenty grandchildren. He has been a bishop, stake president, and patriarch and is currently a sealer in the Manhattan Temple.

Aubrey and Richard will be joined by guest speakers Carl Teichrib, speaking on "A Christian Critique of Christian Transhumanism", and Peter Wicks, speaking on "An Atheist Transhumanist Critique of Religious Transhumanism", as well as speakers from among the membership of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Register for the conference today!

The association thanks Ben Goertzel for his gracious assistance, consequent to a schedule conflict, in making arrangements with Aubrey de Grey.