Michael
D. West, Ph.D.
is the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman
of A.C.T. Group of Worcester, Massachusetts; a company focused on the medical
and agricultural applications of nuclear transfer (cloning) technologies.
He manages the Company's subsidiaries: Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., Cyagra,
LLC, and CIMA Biotechnology, Inc.. He received his Ph.D. From Baylor College
of Medicine and has focused his academic and business career on the application
of developmental biology to the age-related degenerative disease. He was the
Founder of Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, California and from 1990 to 1998
he was the Director, and Vice President, where he initiated and managed programs
in telomerase diagnostics, telomerase inhibition, telomerase-mediated therapy,
and human Embryonic Stem (ES) cells.
Gregory
Benford, Ph.D.
is a working scientist who has written some 23 critically-acclaimed
novels. He has received two Nebula Awards, principally in 1981 for Timescape,
a novel which sold over a million copies. It also won the John W. Campbell
Memorial Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, and the British Science Fiction
Award. In 1992, Dr. Benford received the United Nations Medal in Literature.
He is also a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine
since 1971. He specializes in astrophysics and plasma physics theory and was
presented with the Lord Prize in 1995 for achievements in the sciences. He
is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and Phi Beta Kappa. Over the years, he has been
an advisor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United
Sates Department of Energy, and the White House Council on Space Policy, and
has served as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. Currently he holds
research grants from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is the author
of 140 research papers in his field, and has also published in biology and
climate change. His first book-length work of non-fiction, Deep Time (1999),
examines his work in long duration messages from a broad humanistic and scientific
perspective.
Ray
Kurzweil, Ph.D.
was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical
character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind,
the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the
first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral
instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition.
Ray has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR,
music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology. All of these
technologies continue today as market leaders.
Ray Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize,
the world's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the
1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology,
from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores
of other national and international awards.
Kat
Cotter, D.C.
is Vice President of Maximum Life Foundation. Until
recently, she was the Director of Lifespan Longevity Center in Los Angeles,
California and partner in the Chiropractic and Wellness group. She left private
practice to dedicate herself full-time to work with the foundation and help
further life extension research. She is certified through the American Board
of Anti-Aging Medicine by the New York Chiropractic College as an Anti-Aging
practitioner. She holds a doctorate in Chiropractic through Southern California
University of Health Sciences along with certifications in several other areas.
She has experience in public relations, public speaking, marketing, and in
the planning and development of conferences and seminars. Dr. Cotter is President
and co-founder of the virtualhealthfair.com, a health resource site. She is
also the director of “The Longevity Bootcamp”, the first conference on aging
designed for the general public, which focuses on what can be done right now
to help people take charge of their own aging process. She is Co-Chair for
this year's Extreme Life Extension Conference. She is a member of Alcor Life
Extension Foundation and is on their Board of Directors.
,
tutorial
Aubrey
de Grey, Ph.D.
received his BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University
of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, where he is currently a research associate. His
main research areas are the role and etiology of oxidative damage in mammalian
aging, including both mitochondrial and extracellular free radical production
and damage, and the design of interventions to reverse the age-related accumulation
of oxidative and other damage.
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tutorial
Gregory
Fahy, Ph.D.
received his bachelor of science degree from the University
of California at Irvine in 1972 and his Ph.D. in pharmacology from the Medical
College of Georgia in 1977. He then moved to the American Red Cross, where
he directed an organ cryopreservation program until leaving in 1994 to become
the Head of the Tissue Cryopreservation Section of the Transfusion and Cryopreservation
Research Program of the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
At the time he joined NMRI, he also became the Chief Scientist of two biotechnology
companies, LRT (currently Life Science Holdings) and Organ, Inc. (currently
Organ Recovery Systems). He left Maryland in 1997 and currently is the Chief
Scientific Officer and Vice President of 21st Century Medicine in Rancho Cucamonga,
California.
Robert
A. Freitas, Jr., J.D.
is a Research Scientist at Zyvex Corp. in Texas, a Research
Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in California, and author
of Nanomedicine, Vol. I (Landes Bioscience, 1999), the first technical book
on medical nanorobotics. In 1996, he authored the first detailed technical
design study of a medical nanorobot ever published in a peer-reviewed biomedical
journal, and has twice been a finalist for the annual Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology.
Freitas is presently completing Volumes II and III of Nanomedicine and is
consulting on molecular assembler design at Zyvex.
Steven
B. Harris, MD
was trained as an internist and geriatrician, and is now
Director of Research at Critical Care Research, Inc. He has been interested
in experimental gerontology and has published work in dietary restriction experiments
in mice, and in humans in Biosphere II. His current work is in experimental
induction of very rapid hypothermia in lab animals by means of liquid fluorocarbon
breathing. The goal of this work is to ultimately make possible brain resuscitation
without damage, after half an hour or more of cardiac arrest and "clinical death".
Dr. Harris is a contributing editor of SKEPTIC magazine and a self-confessed
enthusiast of science fiction, usenet, and scuba.
Rudi
Hoffman CFP
is an independent Certified Financial Planner and investment
and insurance broker based in Daytona, FL. Mr. Hoffman is the leading writer
of life insurance in the world for the purpose of funding biostasis, with
over 100 policies written in the last few years alone. He is also an Alcor
member since 1994, and counts cryonicists among his best friends. "Ending
the stranglehold that death has on us all is the most important work we can
do for humanity. My passion to help show people how cryonics is affordable
grows from my personal experience and my hatred of death and aging." Mr. Hoffman
has been in financial services since 1978.
David
A. Kekich
serves as chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Transvio Technology Ventures,
LLC. Mr. Kekich founded the country's largest life insurance master general
agency, co-founded the world's biggest private stock loan company and arranged
venture capital funding for private companies. He is a recognized expert on
private investing and authored the venture capital handbook "How The Rich
Get Richer With Quiet Private Investments". Mr. Kekich founded both public
and private companies, was engaged as a consultant and served as director
to numerous private and public corporations. He has also sold and developed
real estate. In 1999, Mr. Kekich founded the "Maximum Life Foundation", a
501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to controlling aging.
TutorialJerry
Lemler, MD
is a Board Certified psychiatrist who came to Alcor from
Tennessee in March of 2001 to become the organization's first full-time Medical
Director. In September of the same year, Dr. Lemler was elected President
and CEO of Alcor by the Board of Directors. Dr. Lemler is a native of New
Rochelle, NY, who earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee
in Knoxville and a medical degree from the University of Tennessee College
of Medicine in Memphis. Following his formal psychiatric residency training
in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Dr. Lemler was in private psychiatric practice
in Mobile, Alabama, after which he served four years as the Chief of Staff
of Lakeshore Mental Health Institute in Knoxville, TN. In 1994 Dr. Lemler
received The National Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from The National Alliance
for the Mentally Ill.
tutorialRalph
C. Merkle, Ph.D.
received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979 where
he co-invented public key cryptography. He joined Xerox PARC in 1988, where
he pursued research in computational nanotechnology until 1999. He is now
Vice President, Technology Assessment at Foresight and a Nanotechnology Theorist
at Zyvex, where he continues to pursue research in nanotechnology. He chaired
the Fourth and Fifth Foresight Conferences on Nanotechnology, was corecipient
of the 1998 Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology for theory, and was corecipient
of the ACM's Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice, the 2000 RSA Award
in Mathematics, and the IEEE Kobayashi Award. Dr. Merkle has published and
spoken extensively and has ten patents. His home page is at www.merkle.com.
Max More, Ph.D.
studied philosophy, economics, and politics at Oxford
University and the University of Southern California. As President of Extropy
Institute he synthesizes diverse perspectives and disciplines to look for
ways to use advanced technologies to improve the human condition. He is author
of "The Extropian Principles", a document codifying the extropian transhumanist
movement's shared goals of moving beyond human limits. He is also Director
of Content Solutions and Futures specialist at ManyWorlds, Inc. More frequently
lectures, writes, and appears in the media on issues surrounding the impact
of emerging technologies. Dr. More has organized several multi-disciplinary
conferences on advanced and emerging technologies and their effects on culture
and business and has spoken internationally at many conferences on future
trends. He has been a member of the Alcor Foundation since 1986.
Natasha Vita-More
is a media artist, lecturer and writer. She is founder
of Transhumanist Arts & Culture, an organization that encourages a well-rounded
and cross-disciplinary fusion of ideas in discussing and dealing with the
future. She is a long-time activist for new technologies, environmental problem
solving, advanced education, and the preservation of human dignity. She is
known for breaching gaps in public awareness of transhumanity and building
bridges for cultural sustenance of superlongevity. Her future body design
“Primo Posthuman (3M+)" has received worldwide acclaim. Exhibitions:
London Contemporary Museum, Brooks Memorial Museum, Olympic Arts Festival,
Telluride Film Festival, Filmex International, American Film Festival, Kyoto
Convention Center, and Accademia Belle Arti.
Christine
Peterson
writes, lectures, and briefs the media on nanotechnology.
She is co-founder and President of Foresight Institute, a nonprofit which
educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology
and its long-term effects. She directs the Foresight
Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organizes the Foresight
Institute Feynman Prizes, and chairs the Foresight
Gatherings. She lectures on nanotechnology to a wide variety of audiences,
focusing on making this complex field understandable. With Eric Drexler and
Gayle Pergamit, she wrote Unbounding
the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, 1991), which sketches
nanotechnology's potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible
abuses.
Michael
R. Rose, Ph.D.
went to the University of Sussex in 1976 for his doctoral
studies on aging in Drosophila melanogaster. There he began his work on the
evolution of aging and created Drosophila stocks with postponed aging by selection
for later reproduction. In 1991, his Evolutionary Biology of Aging appeared,
offering a view of aging that was a complete departure from the views that
had dominated the aging field since 1960. Evolution described the field of
gerontology as having become "after Rose". In 1997, Rose was awarded the Busse
Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology.
Stephen
Spindler, Ph.D.
is a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of California,
Riverside, and the Chief Scientific Officer at Biomarker Pharmaceuticals,
Inc. He earned his B.S. in Biology at the University of California, San Diego
in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences with a focus in Biochemistry
at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in Houston,
Texas in 1976. He performed Postdoctoral studies in the Department of Biochemistry
at Colorado State University and in the Endocrine Research Division of the
University of California, San Francisco. In 1981 he joined the faculty at
the University of California, Riverside. For the past 17 years, he has studied
the molecular biology of caloric restriction and aging.
,
tutorial Brian
Wowk, Ph.D.
is a physicist and senior scientist at 21st Century Medicine,
Inc. He earned his B.Sc. in physics, M.Sc. in medical physics, and Ph.D. in
physics in 1997 at the University of Manitoba. His graduate studies encompassed
radiotherapy physics and magnetic resonance imaging of human brain function.
He has numerous publications in the fields of medical imaging and cryobiology,
and holds four patents. His work in the field of nanotechnology has been featured
in Popular Mechanics magazine. Dr. Wowk is currently a staff scientist at
21st Century Medicine, Inc., where his work includes development of synthetic
ice blocking molecules, and engineering of organ perfusion systems.
