Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2014 number 6

There are considered the most important milestones in the search of personal immortality from Antiquity to immortology of our time, the emergence and evolution of the main historical forms of humanism, including immorto-humanism as a consistently optimistic form of modern humanism, which relies on the success of progress in science, technology and social development. Immortology, the science of immortality, starts from new philosophical ideas (life as a contradiction, the historicity of the laws of nature, expanding the scope of freedom to death and immortality of man, etc.), accept the modern challenges (significant aging of population, shortening of the productive period of life, modern demographic trends that threaten the under-population of the planet, and so on), takes into account the possibility of juvenology — a science about the ways of preserving and returning youth, moral-humanistic values of real personal immortality and many other factors. Literally on a daily basis, the scientific achievements supplement the arsenal of combating death in order to win over it. Along with such relentlessly developing fundamental scientific discoveries as a real possibility of human cloning (which is being artificially and unjustifiably impeded, not to mention completely unacceptable moratorium on these studies), further decoding of the human genome, manifold usage of the stem cell regeneration, the successes proteomics, cryonics, nanotechnology, computer immortality when the psychic information is encoded, transmitted to another material carrier and then returns to the cloned individual; and many others, there are revealed a fundamentally new ways and means of implementing the cherished dream of the humans of the real personal immortality. The most recent among them include the discoveries by John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, whose studies were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.