Aging Is Not an Immutable Law of Nature – In the Near Future It Will Eventually Be Treated

Interview with José Cordeiro, Co‑Author of The Death of Death

Do you remember the moment you first became aware of your own mortality, and what did you feel at that time?

I don't remember a single defining moment, but I have always found it extraordinary that humanity accepts aging and death as inevitable. As an engineer, I tend to see problems as challenges waiting to be solved. We eradicated smallpox, conquered many infectious diseases, landed on the Moon, and built artificial intelligence. Why should aging be different?

Instead of fearing death, I became curious about it. That curiosity eventually became a scientific pursuit. The more I learned about biology and technological progress, the more convinced I became that aging is not an immutable law of nature but a medical condition that can eventually be treated. That conviction ultimately inspired me to write The Death of Death.

Has there been any scientific breakthrough in recent years that has changed your perspective? Which technology today do you believe holds the greatest promise for achieving radical life extension in the foreseeable future – stem cell therapies, gene editing, or something entirely different?

What has changed my perspective is not one single discovery but the extraordinary convergence of several technologies. Artificial intelligence is dramatically accelerating biomedical research. Gene editing, particularly CRISPR and its successors, is giving us unprecedented control over our own biology. Cellular reprogramming has demonstrated that aged cells can recover youthful characteristics. Regenerative medicine, stem cells, senolytics, precision diagnostics, and organ replacement are all advancing simultaneously.

If I had to choose one transformative technology, I would actually choose artificial intelligence. AI is becoming the engine that accelerates every other field. It helps discover drugs, analyze enormous biological datasets, predict protein structures, personalize treatments, and dramatically reduce the time needed for medical breakthroughs. AI is not replacing biotechnology—it is amplifying it.

I believe radical life extension will come from the convergence of technologies rather than from a single miracle cure.

Do you suspect that technologies capable of extending human life by several decades already exist and might be being used secretly by a small group of privileged individuals, hidden from the general public?

No, I do not. Extraordinary scientific breakthroughs are extremely difficult to hide. Modern science is global, competitive, and increasingly transparent. Thousands of laboratories, universities, companies, and researchers are working on longevity.

What wealthy individuals can already buy is access to better healthcare, earlier diagnosis, superior nutrition, continuous monitoring, and experimental therapies. These advantages may improve both lifespan and healthspan, but they are far from biological immortality.

If someone had already discovered a genuine therapy capable of adding several healthy decades, I think the scientific evidence would quickly emerge. The race to defeat aging is taking place in the open, not in secret underground laboratories.

Is the human mind truly prepared to live for centuries, or would such extreme longevity create new psychological disorders that we cannot yet foresee?

People often assume that our psychology has evolved specifically for short lives. I disagree. Human beings have continuously adapted to longer lifespans. Two centuries ago, average life expectancy was below forty years. Today, many people remain intellectually active well into their eighties or nineties.

I suspect our psychology is far more flexible than many imagine. Living longer would allow us to pursue multiple careers, learn entirely new disciplines, build deeper relationships, and accumulate wisdom across generations.

Of course, new challenges will emerge, but humanity has always adapted to profound technological change. I believe the opportunity to continue learning and creating will outweigh the psychological risks of living much longer.

How many human experiments would society be willing to tolerate in the pursuit of defeating aging?

Every medical breakthrough has required carefully regulated human clinical trials. There is no ethical alternative if we want safe therapies.

The important question is not how many volunteers participate but whether the research is conducted ethically, transparently, and with informed consent. We already accept clinical trials for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, and countless other conditions.

If aging is increasingly recognized as the greatest risk factor for most diseases, then studying interventions against aging should become just as legitimate. Scientific progress must always respect human dignity, but excessive regulation that unnecessarily delays life-saving therapies also has ethical consequences because every year of delay costs millions of lives.

If a revolutionary life‑extension technology became universally accessible – not just to the wealthiest societies – how could humanity prevent catastrophic overpopulation and resource depletion? And in such a scenario, might governments ultimately resort to coercive – perhaps even brutally inhumane or dystopian – methods of population control?

I think this concern is understandable but largely based on outdated assumptions. Population growth is already slowing dramatically around the world. Many countries now have fertility rates well below replacement level and are facing demographic decline rather than explosion.

Moreover, human ingenuity has repeatedly expanded Earth's carrying capacity. Agriculture, energy, computing, and transportation have become exponentially more efficient. Artificial intelligence, clean energy, synthetic biology, and eventually space resources will continue expanding what civilization can sustainably support.

I strongly reject coercive population control. History has shown that such policies violate fundamental human rights and often create long-term demographic problems. The best solutions come through education, prosperity, technological innovation, and individual freedom—not authoritarian control.

If human lifespan were to approach practical immortality, how should society treat individuals who do not wish to live indefinitely? Could the right to voluntary euthanasia – even without terminal illness – become a fundamental civil liberty? And on the other hand – would it be logical for capital punishment to be reinstated everywhere as the heaviest form of penalty?

Radical life extension should expand human freedom, not reduce it. Every competent adult should retain autonomy over deeply personal medical decisions, provided appropriate safeguards exist.

Personally, however, I expect that most healthy people will continue choosing life. We already observe this today. People generally do not wish to die—they wish to avoid suffering.

As for capital punishment, I oppose it. If we succeed in dramatically extending healthy life, then human life becomes even more valuable, not less. The objective of civilization should be to preserve life whenever possible, while maintaining justice and protecting society through humane means.

In a world where humanity could live practically forever, what would our first steps be? Would we turn toward the stars, or toward a complete restructuring of our own planet? Are we even capable of learning to plan more than a few decades ahead?

I believe we will do both simultaneously. Longer lives naturally encourage longer-term thinking. When people expect to live for centuries, they become far more interested in preserving the planet, investing in future generations, and undertaking projects that require decades or centuries to complete.

At the same time, radical longevity makes interplanetary and eventually interstellar civilization much more realistic. Long-lived humans could personally participate in missions that today seem impossible because of time constraints.

Ultimately, I envision humanity becoming both a sustainable planetary civilization and a multiplanetary species. Those goals reinforce each other rather than compete.

Which book do you wish you had written – both on a personal level and in terms of your professional aspirations?

On a personal level, I sometimes wish I had written Carl Sagan's Cosmos — a book that managed to make hundreds of millions of people fall in love with science itself, not just with a single discovery. That combination of rigor and wonder is what I try, in my own smaller way, to bring to longevity science. Professionally, I have enormous admiration for Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and Aubrey de Grey's Ending Aging — both were, in their own moment, the book that gave a scattered field a shared vocabulary and a shared sense of possibility.

I am deeply proud of The Death of Death (co-authored with David Wood), including the Bulgarian edition published by Iztok-Zapad. It is the book I needed to write: a clear, accessible, scientifically grounded, and morally urgent defense of the idea that death is not inevitable. I felt the world still needed an accessible, rigorously sourced case for why defeating aging is not science fiction but a realistic, near-term engineering and moral project.

However, the book I most wish I could write is the one none of us can write yet: the definitive account, from the vantage point of the second half of the 21st century, of how humanity actually accomplished The Death of Death.

Interview by Vladimir Tsankov