Forever young. Nanotechnology and medicine

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With nano-enabled drugs that destroy diseased cells and enable tissue repair, doctors may one day extend life expectancy far beyond our current capabilities - at least in countries wealthy enough to afford the technology. But the medicine that so radically redefines our standards of health and mortality will also profoundly challenge our social support systems and cultural values. In this Fred Friendly Seminar, moderator and Peabody award-winning journalist John Hockenberry leads a panel of experts through provocative scenarios that shed light on the issue. What kinds of cures and therapies will nanomedicine make possible? Should access to them be universal, even if they are prohibitively expensive? Does everyone have a right to live forever? Or does immortality present a danger, ironically, to human survival? Seminar panelists include Dr. Michael Goldblatt, President and CEO of Functional Genetics, Inc.; Dr. Michael L. Roukes, Professor of Physics, Nanoscience Institute at CalTech; Dr. James R. Baker, Jr., Director of the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences; and Dr. Rosalyn Berne, Associate Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia.