A well-designed and -implemented study has shown that our descendants will live longer if we take the right steps to live longer ourselves. Healthier behavior can change gene expression in an individual, and the life-prolonging results of that change are passed on the individual’s descendants—even though, perplexingly, the epigenetic change itself is not passed on.

But why bother to work at getting healthy when we can re-engineer ourselves to live longer? There is no longer any doubt about our ability to genetically engineer whole new species and ourselves, and some of the implications of that are discussed in this interview (not to mention, ahem, yet again, in my book.)

It gets even better: We can do more than genetically re-engineer ourselves. We can re-engineer ourselves bionically, as we have reported oft times in the Digest, and soon we will be able to extend the functioning of bionic implants, from pacemakers to power-hungry artificial organs, by using biofuel cells to energize them.

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