They're getting rid of death. Haven't you heard?
Immortality around the corner,
twenty years tops. Already researchers
can regrow nerves, starve cancers. The new word
is we could end aging soon. Eternal
youth. Cambridge dons, nanotechnologists,
extropians, exercise fetishists,
vitamin supplement and health-food nuts all
agree. The flying saucers soon arrive,
so quit smoking, drink green tea. The new fear:
Dying before they can keep you alive
forever. The Youthpocalypse is here!
I for one am skeptical, even scared.
Less bold designs than this have poorly fared.

Before "Should they do this?" first ask, "Can they?"
Is death easily eradicated?
It might work. Theories indicate it
now - as they did phlogiston in its day.
Everything that is and has been, from stars
to stegosaurus to striptococcus,
decays and dies. Is death really useless,
an engineering flaw? From nature are
come all our models, farming to flying,
sonar to drugs, and not one immortal
yet, save perhaps the tumor. Maintaining
the life of any individual
is not Life's way. The universe eschews
preservation. It likes things to renew.

But perhaps they'll do it. Oh happy age!
Will it be bestowed for one princely fee?
Or better still, by installments. (Promptly
pay - bill collectors have new leverage!)
Imagine such invention a hundred
years ago. Would Stalin now be on talk
shows? Pol Pot now farming? They might balk
at being immortal but retired.
And if we can repair genes, we can also improve
them; but some things come only in the womb.
To our descendants, it might ill behoove
us old "obsoletes" to take up such room.
Our conehead offspring will feel entitled
to send us to camps to be recycled.