Adelaide Fringe

Fringe Review: Immortality in Adelaide

By Jan Kershaw

Posted on February 17, 2017

This is the fifth and final event in the Academy of Science’s Life + Death series which has explored the topics of death, sex, murder, life and immortality.

Presented by The Australian Academy of Science with The Royal Institution of Australia
Reviewed 16 February 2017

This is the fifth and final event in the Academy of Science’s Life + Death series which has explored the topics of death, sex, murder, life and immortality. The panel, introduced by ABC Radio National’s Bernie Hobbs, consisted of orthopaedic surgeon Professor Peter Choong, evolutionary geneticist Professor Jenny Graves and Matt Fisher, a software engineer and secretary of the non-profit organisation Southern Cryonics which aims to set up a cryonics facility in Australia.

Professor Choong’s perspective on immortality was in terms of replacing damaged parts of the body. He spoke about the medical technologies now available which can produce ‘tailor made’ replacement parts. I was amazed to discover that hand-held 3D printers can produce material to replace damaged cartilage while surgery is actually underway.

For Professor Graves, immortality through genetic engineering is not even on the horizon. She emphasised the ‘Jurassic Park’ scenario of bringing back extinct creatures was just fiction, even for something as recently extinct as the Tasmanian Tiger. She also noted that cloning people is not a route to immortality either. Epigenetics, the way particular genes are expressed and environmental factors, such as a different mother, will impact on the clone.

Matt Fisher sees cryonics as the path to immortality, freezing the body and storing it in liquid nitrogen until such time as medical science is able to cure or repair whatever the person died from. He debunked the myth that Walt Disney’s head had been frozen. It seems that Disney’s health deteriorated faster than expected and he died before it could be arranged and he was cremated. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the first person to be so preserved and the most sophisticated animal successfully revived to date is a nematode worm.

A lively Q&A followed the presentations, raising questions around the issue of immortality such as population pressure; how would people cope with being awoken hundreds of years in the future; what would we do with all the extra time we might have; and the crucial issue of whether we actually wanted to be immortal.

The event was stimulating, thought provoking and, at times, amusing – a wonderful combination making for a great evening’s entertainment. It has certainly inspired me to search out the other presentations in the series as podcasts and/or videos and I highly recommend the Academy of Science’s Life + Death series.

Reviewed by Jan Kershaw

Rating out of 5: 5

One Night Only – Season Ended