Gary Marchant

Professors Gary Marchant and Joel Garreau were quoted in a Nov. 23 article in the ASU State Press about radical life extension and the growing reality that, as science progresses, people may live well past 100.

Radical life extension was the focus of a Nov. 16 Future Tense seminar in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the College of Law, ASU, the New America Foundation and Slate magazine. Experts, including Marchant and Garreau, discussed the biology and policy significance of life extension.

“The implications of life extension are profound,” said Marchant, the ASU Lincoln Professor of Emerging Technologies, Law and Ethics, and Executive Director of the law school’s Center for Law, Science & Innovation.

“Are we set up for people to live 50 years after they retire?” he asked, pointing out the impact on Social Security and Medicare. “Do you change the retirement age? If you live to 120, do you retire when you are 90?”

Joel Garreau

Garreau, the ASU Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values, said there is puzzling evidence of both increasing and decreasing life spans among humans around the world.

Read the full article here.

Marchant’s research interests include the use of genetic information in environmental regulation, risk and the precautionary principle, legal aspects of personalized medicine, and regulation of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, neuroscience and biotechnology. He teaches courses in Environmental Law, Law, Science & Technology, Genetics and the Law, Biotechnology: Science, Law and Policy, and Nanotechnology Law & Policy. He also is a professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences.

Garreau, who joined the College in 2010, is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies, and What It Means to Be Human, a look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. As director of The Prevail Project, he is building upon a Radical Evolution concept that the Prevail Scenario – the humanistic possibility that we can control and direct this future – might be encouraged. Garreau is a former longtime reporter and editor at The Washington Post.