Get Ready for Life Unlimited

For the Foresight Institute’s 40th anniversary, we’re partnering with them to showcase what the future holds

At e184, we are deeply committed to human potential. We work to expand human capabilities beyond the bounds set by our biology, achieving long-standing dreams.

Over its forty-year history, the Foresight Institute has had a central role in articulating those dreams. Founded in 1986 by Christine Peterson and Eric Drexler, Foresight has inspired researchers and innovators to aim for the stars, advocating for work towards technologies from nanotech to artificial general intelligence. Over that time, they have become the core of a substantial community dedicated to the question of what comes next.

Now, many of the technologies Foresight’s community has dreamed about are closer than they have ever been. Brain-computer interfaces are increasingly capable, augmenting the capabilities of a small group of pioneers, while technologies like artificial wombs have gone from science fiction to viable research goals. Scientific progress has yielded increasingly fine-grained control over the building-blocks of life itself. As a result, we may well be the last generation that has to accept biology as it is.

Last year, we worked with Foresight to highlight just one aspect of that story, that of neurotechnology. We’ve been in contact with them since then, discussing ways we can support the community of dreamers they foster, and showcase how close some of those dreams are to being achieved. Inspired by those discussions, this year, we wanted to tell a broader story: one that doesn’t concern just one of our focus areas, but the whole picture.

That’s why this year, we’re partnering with Foresight to offer a preview of what’s in store. For their Vision Weekend UK event on June 5-7, we worked with them to select speakers for a special track. Called Life Unlimited, this track brings together experts in areas of the life sciences where we see the greatest potential to overcome long-standing human limitations, giving humanity unprecedented control of both how life begins and how it ends. We plumbed both Foresight’s network of experts and our own contacts, finding speakers who could give an exciting peek at the world of tomorrow.

The session begins with a keynote address by our founder, Kirill Eves. In his talk, he will talk about our core mission at e184, focused on extending the limits of human potential in reproduction, the genome, and cognition. He’ll talk about the technologies, like in vitro gametogenesis, artificial wombs, and non-implantable brain-computer interfaces, that we are pursuing to achieve that mission. And he’ll talk about how we plan to grow in future, with directions like genome editing letting us tackle biological limits at their roots.

The next talk, titled “Hacking Aging Biology”, is by João Pedro de Magalhães, the Chair of Molecular Biogerontology at the University of Birmingham. A world leader in using big data to study aging, de Magalhães’s works to decipher how the human genome impacts how we age, with the potential to radically increase longevity, extend health, or even reverse aging. As a futurist and thinker, he exemplifies the community that Foresight fosters.

From our own expert contacts, we invited Google DeepMind’s Žiga Avsec to give the third talk, titled “Advancing Regulatory Variant Effect Prediction with AlphaGenome”. In a world of increasingly impressive AI achievements, AlphaGenome stands out for its potential. Able to predict the effects of individual mutations on a wide range of biological processes, Avsec’s work with AlphaGenome paves the way towards an era where we can treat DNA like computer code.

Finally, University of Oxford professor Lynne Cox is an expert on cell senescence, one of the most important processes behind aging on the cellular level. She has identified the chemical rapamycin as a “genoprotector” that can protect aging cells from accumulating DNA damage. Her work connects to the Foresight Institute’s longstanding interest in longevity, and the scientific question of whether we can one day live longer without diseases like cancer holding us back.

We’re proud to support Foresight in choosing and showing this set of speakers, and celebrating forty years of dreaming big. If these talks excite you like they excite us, then we look forward to seeing you on June 6 at 11am for the Life Unlimited track at Foresight Vision Weekend UK!