Life and death, creation and destruction, a thing always inevitably contains its opposite. The negation of life is essentially contained in life, and life means death. Only by facing and accepting death can we better understand life. Hegel said: "The life of the spirit is not manifested as fear of death and keeping an absolute distance from desolation, but as bearing death and preserving itself in death. Only when the spirit finds itself again in a state of absolute fragmentation can it win its truth."
Life and death, creation and destruction, a thing always inevitably contains its opposite. The negation of life is essentially contained in life, and life means death. Only by facing and accepting death can we better understand life. Hegel said: "The life of the spirit is not manifested as fear of death and keeping an absolute distance from desolation, but as bearing death and preserving itself in death. Only when the spirit finds itself again in a state of absolute fragmentation can it win its truth." ("Phenomenology of Spirit") However, on the one hand, because capitalism makes all human relations more thoroughly determined by ownership, reason ritually and stubbornly removes death. Because when death is imminent, the entire concept of "ownership" will eventually appear completely meaningless. Everything that the bourgeoisie has created and owned, even the extremely superficial sense of ontology and self created in nothingness, will vanish with the decline of form. Therefore, capitalists will regard death as a threat and spare no effort to make it a seemingly true truth. This fear of disappearance, of becoming a nobody, together constitutes the fear of death. No matter how confident they may appear, the alienated capitalist is always surrounded by this feeling of uneasiness. The excessive worship of private property has deprived them of what once made death bearable for them, the feeling of the epic unity of death and the richness of life.
On the other hand, the bourgeoisie has alienated its own creativity: as long as it can benefit itself, it will make it a reality by any means. In the endless pursuit of pleasure, they have no time to consider the moral, social and psychological abyss opened up by this creativity. They suppress the wonder and fear of what they have created; they learn only when they are destroyed personally and publicly. With the development of capitalist production, scientific factors are consciously and extensively developed, applied and reflected in life for the first time on a scale that was simply unimaginable in previous eras. Since the goal of capitalism is the constant pursuit of high profits, all these applications of science and natural forces based on social labor appear as means of exploiting labor and increasing the value of capital. They are using science and rationality to expand human power, creating Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in broad daylight, which will inevitably cause demonic power to erupt irrationally. This market impulse that the bourgeoisie cannot control drives society in a terrible direction.
In 2020, Amazon founder Bezos invested $3 billion in Altos Labs, a cell regeneration startup. The company focuses on cell reprogramming technology, and Bezos set a goal for shareholders: "Avoiding death is something that must be done."
Zuckerberg, the helmsman of Meta, who is ridiculed by the outside world as not being human, is also very interested in immortality. In a conversation with Hawking in 2015, he said: "I am most interested in human beings themselves. How can I live forever?" To this end, he also invested $3 billion to establish the BioHub Biological Center Research Institute, hoping to draw a human "cell map" and unlock the code of immortality.
At present, the main methods of pursuing immortality in the technology circle are blood transfusion therapy and cell programming.
The so-called blood transfusion is not to directly exchange the blood of two people, but to extract some molecules from the blood of the young and put them into the blood of the old. Supporters of blood transfusion therapy believe that after the new blood of the young replaces the old blood of the old, it can restore and repair the cells of the old, and ultimately achieve longevity and immortality.
Silicon Valley tycoon Bryan Johnson has done this. He extracted part of the blood of his 17-year-old son, and then separated it into plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. The plasma was transfused into Johnson's body. Similarly, he also transfused the plasma from part of his blood into his old father's body.
However, there is no conclusion and basis for whether blood transfusion can restore youth, so don't imitate it. And Johnson has also terminated plasma therapy, claiming that the effect is not good and it has no benefit to him.
The reason why many people believe that blood transfusion can restore youth comes from an experiment.
In 2014, Stanford University published an article in "Nature", which talked about a research team taking blood from young mice to remove blood cells and injecting the remaining plasma back into the bodies of older mice. As a result, the older mice behaved as energetically as the younger mice.
Therefore, the research team believes that young blood can improve the aging of the body.
However, as time goes by, more and more people question the accuracy of this experiment. In 2020, researchers from California claimed that they replaced the plasma of old mice with saline and albumin, and also achieved an effect similar to that of young blood.
This shows that the real problem of aging lies in the old blood, not the new blood.
Cell reprogramming is favored by more bigwigs due to its more scientific technical characteristics.
Friends with a biological basis know that human cells will undergo a process of proliferation, differentiation, aging and death. The degree of aging of cells determines the degree of aging of people.
The so-called cell reprogramming is to recode the genetic information related to aging in cells, restore cells to a state close to stem cells, and then develop into various types of cells to achieve "rejuvenation" at the cell level.
Figuratively speaking, it is to let the cells return to zero and then develop again.
This technology has theoretical and experimental support. In 2006, Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka discovered that four transcription factors can reverse highly differentiated somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells, allowing them to redifferentiate into different types of cells. In 2016, researchers such as Ocampo found that cell reprogramming can improve the aging symptoms of mice with progeria, and the median life span of mice was extended by 30%-50%.
With theoretical and experimental support, some technology giants have become quite greedy. Bezos has a crazy wish: he wants to replace all 40-60 trillion cells in his body, return to the baby state, and live again.
