Reference · 215 terms

Glossary

Every article on this wiki opens with a one-sentence definition. Collected here, those sentences are the field's working vocabulary — what a term means, in the sense this site uses it.

Each headword links to the full article, where the definition is argued for rather than asserted. The chips record which portal the term belongs to and how much of it is demonstrated. Terms the corpus uses but has not yet given a page are listed at the end.

215 terms

A17 terms

AAV vectors GeneticsEstablished: Engineered adeno-associated viruses used to carry therapeutic genes into human cells, the workhorse of in vivo gene therapy and the source of most of its limits.
Accelerating change FoundationsContested: The claim that technological capability grows exponentially or faster, so that the rate of change itself increases over historical time.
Access and inequality SocietyEstablished: The problem of who can obtain expensive biomedical interventions, and whether biotechnology will convert economic inequality into biological inequality.
Aging biomarkers LongevityEmerging: Measurable indicators intended to track the rate or extent of biological aging, sought as surrogate endpoints so that anti-aging trials can read out in years rather than decades.
AI drug discovery FoundationsEmerging: The use of machine learning to select drug targets, generate candidate molecules and predict failure, so far demonstrably faster at making compounds than at making medicines.
AI protein design GeneticsEmerging: Machine-learning systems that predict what shape a protein sequence folds into and that generate new proteins with no natural counterpart.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation OrganizationsEstablished: A United States cryonics organization, founded in 1972, that preserves legally dead members at cryogenic temperatures under a trust structure meant to fund storage indefinitely.
Altos Labs OrganizationsEmerging: A biotechnology company launched in 2022 with about three billion dollars in committed funding to develop cellular rejuvenation programming as a medicine.
Alzheimer's disease LongevityEstablished: The neurodegenerative disease responsible for most dementia, driven above all by age, and the disease that decides whether added years of life come with a working mind.
Anders Sandberg PeopleEstablished: Swedish computational neuroscientist and futures researcher who co-wrote the whole brain emulation roadmap and works on the physical limits of long-term civilization.
Artificial blood BodiesExperimental: Engineered substitutes for the oxygen-carrying function of blood, including haemoglobin carriers, perfluorocarbon emulsions and cultured red cells, none in general clinical use.
Artificial general intelligence FoundationsContested: A hypothetical artificial system matching or exceeding competent human performance across essentially all cognitive tasks rather than in narrow domains.
Artificial heart BodiesEstablished: Mechanical devices that take over some or all of the heart's pumping function, from routine ventricular assist pumps to total replacements used mainly as a bridge to transplant.
Artificial womb ReproductionExperimental: A device that sustains fetal development outside a body by perfusing the umbilical circulation while the fetus remains immersed in fluid, tested so far only in animals.
Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA GeneticsHistorical: The 1975 meeting at which molecular biologists lifted their own moratorium on recombinant DNA work by agreeing a system of physical and biological containment.
Aubrey de Grey PeopleContested: British biogerontologist who proposed the SENS damage-repair framework for rejuvenation and popularized the idea of longevity escape velocity.
Autophagy LongevityEstablished: The lysosomal pathway by which cells digest their own damaged components, and the process through which most known lifespan-extending interventions appear to act.

B10 terms

Base editing GeneticsEmerging: A genome editing method that chemically converts one DNA base into another at a targeted site without cutting both strands of the double helix.
Bioconservatism SocietyEstablished: The position that biotechnological modification of human beings should face a strong presumption against it, grounded in dignity, precaution, or the value of the given.
Bioethics of enhancement SocietyEstablished: The philosophical and policy debate over whether biomedical means may legitimately be used to push human capacities beyond species-typical function.
Biohacking and grinders EnhancementContested: The practice of modifying one's own biology outside institutional medicine, ranging from subdermal implants to do-it-yourself gene transfer and open-source medical devices.
Biological age LongevityContested: An estimate of how far an individual has progressed along the trajectory of age-related decline, expressed in years and compared against their chronological age.
Blue Zones LongevityContested: Five regions claimed to have unusually high concentrations of centenarians, and the lifestyle explanations built on that claim.
Brain preservation MindsExperimental: Preserving the structural information in a brain well enough that a future technology could reconstruct its memories, rather than revive the tissue itself.
Brain-to-brain interfaces CyberneticsExperimental: Systems that link one nervous system to another by decoding activity from a sender and delivering stimulation to a receiver, so far at rates of a few bits per minute.
Brain–computer interface CyberneticsEmerging: A system that measures nervous-system activity, decodes an intention or state from it, and converts that decoded signal into a command for an external device.
Buck Institute for Research on Aging OrganizationsEstablished: An independent research institute in Novato, California, opened in 1999 as the first in the world dedicated solely to the biology of aging.

C15 terms

Calico Life Sciences OrganizationsEstablished: Alphabet's independent biotechnology company, founded in 2013 to study the biology of aging and develop interventions against age-related disease.
Caloric restriction LongevityExperimental: Sustained reduction of energy intake without malnutrition, the oldest and most reproducible lifespan-extending intervention in animals and the least proven in humans.
Cancer LongevityEstablished: The class of diseases in which a somatic cell lineage escapes the controls on its own division, and the age-related cause of death that constrains most life-extension arguments.
Casgevy GeneticsEmerging: The first approved CRISPR-based medicine, which disrupts a fetal-haemoglobin repressor in a patient's own blood stem cells to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia.
Cellular senescence LongevityEstablished: A stable arrest of cell division, triggered by telomere attrition or stress, in which the arrested cell stays metabolically active and secretes inflammatory factors.
Closed-loop life support SpaceEmerging: Engineering that regenerates a crew's air, water, and food from their own waste, reducing the resupply mass that otherwise makes long-duration spaceflight impossible.
Cochlear implant CyberneticsEstablished: An implanted device that restores a functional sense of hearing by stimulating the auditory nerve with electrical pulses, bypassing the ear's damaged hair cells.
Colossal Biosciences OrganizationsContested: A Texas biotechnology company founded in 2021 to recreate extinct species by editing the genomes of living relatives, and to spin out conservation technology from that work.
Compression of morbidity LongevityContested: The hypothesis that chronic illness can be postponed into a shorter interval before death, so that added years of life are healthy ones.
Connectomics MindsEmerging: The mapping of complete wiring diagrams of nervous systems, from macroscale fibre tracts down to every synapse in a volume of tissue.
Consumer blood testing LongevityContested: The sale of clinical laboratory panels directly to asymptomatic consumers as preventive medicine, where accurate assays meet a screening logic that guidelines reject.
Continuous glucose monitoring LongevityEstablished: A wearable sensor that reports glucose in the fluid between cells every few minutes, well established in diabetes and of unproven value to people without it.
CRISPR–Cas9 GeneticsEstablished: A bacterial defence system repurposed as a programmable DNA-cutting tool, in which a short guide RNA directs the Cas9 enzyme to a chosen sequence in almost any genome.
Cryonics LongevityContested: The practice of preserving legally dead people at cryogenic temperatures in the hope that future medicine can repair and revive them.
Cynthia Kenyon PeopleEstablished: American molecular geneticist whose 1993 finding that a single daf-2 mutation doubles the lifespan of C. elegans made aging a tractable genetic problem.

D12 terms

David Sinclair PeopleContested: Australian-American biologist at Harvard known for sirtuin and NAD+ research, the information theory of aging, and disputes over the strength of his public claims.
De-extinction GeneticsContested: The attempt to recreate extinct organisms, in practice by editing a close living relative to carry some of the extinct animal's traits rather than restoring the species itself.
Decellularized scaffolds BodiesEmerging: Donor tissues stripped of their cells to leave an extracellular matrix scaffold, used as surgical implants and as a route to rebuilding whole organs from a preserved vascular tree.
Deep brain stimulation CyberneticsEstablished: A surgical therapy in which implanted electrodes deliver continuous electrical pulses to specific deep brain structures to suppress the symptoms of movement and psychiatric disorders.
Designer babies ReproductionContested: A popular term for children whose traits are chosen before birth, covering a real but narrow practice of embryo selection and a largely hypothetical practice of embryo editing.
Dietary supplements LongevityContested: Vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and other compounds sold without pre-market approval, whose large randomized trials have repeatedly failed to show benefit in well-nourished adults.
Differential technological development SocietyContested: Nick Bostrom's proposal to influence the order in which technologies arrive, hastening protective ones and delaying dangerous ones, rather than trying to halt progress.
Digital immortality MindsEmerging: The persistence of a person in digital form after death, ranging from chatbot reconstructions built from their data to the hypothetical emulation of their brain.
Disability rights and enhancement SocietyEstablished: The disability-rights critique of selection and enhancement, centred on the expressivist objection, the social model, and the difference between curing and accommodating.
DNA nanotechnology NanomedicineExperimental: The use of DNA as a construction material rather than a carrier of genes, folding programmed sequences into nanoscale shapes, devices, and logic-gated containers.
Dog Aging Project OrganizationsEstablished: A longitudinal study of aging in tens of thousands of companion dogs, paired with TRIAD, a randomized placebo-controlled trial testing whether rapamycin extends canine lifespan.
Dual-use research of concern SocietyEstablished: Life-science research that produces knowledge or tools with legitimate purposes but foreseeable potential for catastrophic misuse, and the oversight regimes built around it.

E16 terms

Ectogenesis ReproductionSpeculative: The development of a mammalian embryo or fetus outside a body, either for part of gestation or for all of it, and the ethical arguments the prospect generates.
Effective accelerationism PeopleContested: An online techno-optimist movement holding that technological acceleration is a moral imperative and that precautionary restraint on AI causes more harm than it prevents.
Electrocorticography interfaces CyberneticsEmerging: Brain–computer interfaces that record from electrode arrays resting on the cortical surface rather than penetrating it, trading single-neuron resolution for stability and coverage.
Embryo selection ReproductionEstablished: Testing embryos created by IVF and choosing which to transfer, a routine clinical practice for single-gene disease whose extension to complex traits remains disputed.
Emmanuelle Charpentier PeopleEstablished: French microbiologist who identified the second RNA that CRISPR-Cas9 requires, co-authored the 2012 paper that made the system programmable, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Engineered pandemics SocietySpeculative: Outbreaks caused by a pathogen deliberately modified, synthesised, or released rather than one that emerged from nature, and the biosecurity programme built around preventing them.
Engineered sleep reduction EnhancementSpeculative: The proposal to shorten the amount of sleep a person needs without incurring the costs of sleep deprivation, based on rare short-sleep gene variants and wake-promoting drugs.
Enhancement arms race SocietyContested: The argument that competitive pressure makes enhancement effectively compulsory, so that individually rational adoption leaves everyone worse off.
Enhancement in sport EnhancementEstablished: The regulation of performance enhancement in competition, the only domain that draws an operational line between therapy and enhancement and litigates it case by case.
Epigenetic clocks LongevityEstablished: Statistical predictors that estimate age or mortality risk from DNA methylation patterns at selected sites in the genome.
Epigenetic reprogramming LongevityExperimental: The use of pluripotency factors to reset age-associated marks on DNA and chromatin, restoring youthful gene expression in cells without converting them into stem cells.
Epigenome editing GeneticsExperimental: Targeted modification of the chemical marks that control gene expression, switching a gene off or on without altering the underlying DNA sequence.
Eric Drexler PeopleContested: American engineer who proposed molecular nanotechnology, wrote Engines of Creation and Nanosystems, and later worked on AI strategy at Oxford.
Exercise as a geroprotector LongevityEstablished: Structured physical activity, the intervention with the strongest evidence for extending healthy life in humans and the benchmark any geroprotective drug must beat.
Existential risk SocietyContested: The category of risks that would end humanity or permanently destroy its potential, and the research programme built around identifying and reducing them.
Extropianism PeopleHistorical: The first organized transhumanist movement, built around a set of optimistic principles for self-directed human transformation and dissolved as an institution in 2006.

F2 terms

FM-2030 PeopleHistorical: Iranian-American futurist, born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, who defined the transhuman as a transitional being and was cryopreserved on his death in 2000.
Future of humanity FoundationsSpeculative: The study of humanity's possible long-run trajectories, conventionally grouped into extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthuman transformation.

G13 terms

Gene doping EnhancementExperimental: The non-therapeutic use of gene transfer or gene regulation to improve athletic performance, prohibited in sport since the early 2000s with no publicly confirmed case.
Gene drives GeneticsExperimental: Genetic elements engineered to bias their own inheritance above the Mendelian half, allowing an introduced trait to spread through a wild population.
Gene therapy for aging LongevityExperimental: The use of delivered genes to modify aging biology systemically, demonstrated in mice with telomerase and other constructs and untested in any controlled human trial.
Generation ship biology SpaceSpeculative: The biological requirements of a crewed voyage lasting generations: population genetics, reproduction and development off Earth, and consent for people born in transit.
Genetic code expansion and recoding GeneticsExperimental: Altering how a cell reads DNA so that reassigned codons encode amino acids not found in nature, producing organisms with chemistry and immunity no natural cell has.
Genetic discrimination SocietyEstablished: Differential treatment of people on the basis of genetic information, and the uneven legal regime that restricts it in employment and health cover but rarely elsewhere.
Genetic enhancement of cognition EnhancementSpeculative: The proposal to raise human cognitive ability by selecting or editing genetic variants, constrained by the extreme polygenicity of the trait and by pleiotropy.
George Church PeopleEstablished: American geneticist who helped invent direct genomic sequencing, founded the Personal Genome Project, and co-founded dozens of biotechnology companies.
Geroscience hypothesis LongevityEmerging: The proposition that aging is the shared upstream driver of most chronic disease, so that slowing it would delay many conditions at once rather than one at a time.
GLP-1 receptor agonists LongevityEstablished: Drugs that mimic the gut hormone GLP-1 to lower blood glucose and food intake, producing large weight loss that persists only while treatment continues.
Governance of human genome editing SocietyEmerging: The patchwork of national law, professional norms, funding rules, and international soft law that determines what may be done to a human genome and by whom.
Grey goo NanomedicineSpeculative: The scenario in which self-replicating nanomachines consume the biosphere, an idea introduced by Eric Drexler in 1986 and later disowned by him.
Gut microbiome LongevityEmerging: The community of bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses living in the human intestine, and a much-claimed but weakly demonstrated lever on aging.

H12 terms

Hallmarks of aging LongevityEstablished: The consensus taxonomy of cellular and molecular processes held to drive mammalian aging, set out as nine mechanisms in 2013 and expanded to twelve in 2023.
He Jiankui affair GeneticsHistorical: The 2018 announcement that twin girls had been born from CRISPR-edited embryos in Shenzhen, and the scientific condemnation and criminal prosecution that followed.
Head transplantation BodiesContested: The proposed transfer of a living human head onto a donor body, blocked chiefly by the inability to reconnect a severed spinal cord and rejected by mainstream neurosurgery.
Healthspan LongevityEstablished: The portion of life spent in good health and function, as distinct from total lifespan; widely used as a goal but not standardized as a measure.
Heat and cold exposure LongevityContested: Deliberate exposure to heat or cold, from sauna bathing to cold-water immersion, as a health practice built on a hormetic mechanism whose effect on human lifespan is unmeasured.
Human cloning ReproductionContested: Producing a human genetically identical to an existing person by somatic cell nuclear transfer, demonstrated to the blastocyst stage and never taken to a pregnancy.
Human digital twins BodiesExperimental: Computational models of an individual person's physiology, built from that person's own data and run to predict what an intervention would do before it is attempted.
Human enhancement EnhancementContested: The deliberate use of biomedical or technical means to extend human capacities beyond what is needed to restore or maintain ordinary health.
Human germline editing GeneticsContested: Modification of human embryos, eggs, or sperm so that the genetic change is inherited by the resulting child and by all of their descendants.
Human hibernation and torpor SpaceExperimental: The proposal to induce a hibernation-like state of suppressed metabolism in people, and the distance between rodent torpor circuits and any clinical human application.
Human–AI merger FoundationsSpeculative: The proposal that humans and artificial intelligence will form a single cognitive system rather than remaining separate agents that merely use one another.
Humanity+OrganizationsEstablished: The main international transhumanist membership organization, founded in 1998 as the World Transhumanist Association and now a small education and advocacy body.

I7 terms

Immunosenescence LongevityEstablished: The age-related remodelling of the immune system, in which responses to unfamiliar antigens weaken while chronic activation against familiar ones persists.
In vitro fertilisation ReproductionEstablished: The routine clinical procedure in which eggs are fertilised outside the body and an embryo is transferred to a uterus, and the platform every other embryo technology is built on.
In vitro gametogenesis ReproductionExperimental: Making functional eggs or sperm from pluripotent stem cells in culture, achieved end to end in mice and still short of the meiotic stages in humans.
Induced pluripotent stem cells BodiesEmerging: Adult cells reprogrammed back to an embryonic-like state, capable of becoming any cell type in the body and of being derived from a specific patient.
Inflammaging LongevityEstablished: The chronic, low-grade, sterile inflammation that develops with age in the absence of infection, and its disputed role in frailty and age-related disease.
Intelligence amplification EnhancementEstablished: The project of raising human problem-solving capacity by improving the tools, notations and organisations that thinking runs on rather than by altering the brain.
Interventions Testing Program OrganizationsEstablished: A National Institute on Aging programme that tests whether candidate anti-aging compounds extend lifespan in genetically heterogeneous mice, run in parallel at three sites.

J2 terms

Jennifer Doudna PeopleEstablished: American biochemist who co-authored the 2012 paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut chosen DNA sequences, and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Julian Savulescu PeopleEstablished: Australian bioethicist who formulated procreative beneficence and, with Ingmar Persson, the argument for moral bioenhancement; the leading academic advocate of human enhancement.

K1 term

Klotho LongevityExperimental: A gene and hormone whose loss shortens mouse lifespan and whose best-demonstrated job is phosphate control, proposed as a longevity factor on largely non-human evidence.

L7 terms

Lab-grown organs BodiesExperimental: The attempt to produce whole transplantable organs from cells rather than donors, currently limited to simple tissues, islet clusters and organs grown inside host animals.
Leon Kass PeopleEstablished: American physician and bioethicist who chaired the President's Council on Bioethics and made the strongest philosophical case that mortality gives human life its meaning.
Leonard Hayflick PeopleHistorical: American microbiologist who showed in 1961 that normal human cells divide a finite number of times in culture, and who argued for fifty years afterwards that aging is not a disease.
Limb regeneration BodiesExperimental: The regrowth of an amputated limb from the stump, routine in salamanders and absent in mammals, and the biology that separates the two.
Lipid nanoparticles GeneticsEstablished: Four-component lipid vesicles that carry mRNA and other nucleic acids into cells, the delivery system behind mRNA vaccines and the first systemic in vivo CRISPR therapies.
Longevity escape velocity LongevitySpeculative: The hypothetical threshold at which medicine adds remaining life expectancy faster than time subtracts it, making death by aging recede indefinitely.
Loyal OrganizationsEmerging: A biotechnology company developing drugs to extend healthy lifespan in dogs, working through the veterinary regulator that will consider lifespan itself as an indication.

M19 terms

Machine consciousness MindsSpeculative: The question of whether an artificial system can have subjective experience, how anyone could tell, and what would follow morally if one did.
Max More PeopleEstablished: British-American philosopher who founded extropianism, wrote the principles that gave transhumanism its first organized programme, and led Alcor from 2011 to 2020.
Maximum human lifespan LongevityContested: The longest duration a human being has lived or could live, distinct from average life expectancy and disputed as to whether any fixed ceiling exists.
Medical microrobots NanomedicineExperimental: Micrometre- to millimetre-scale devices steered through the body by external magnetic, acoustic, or biological means, demonstrated in animals and used clinically only as capsule endoscopes.
Medical nanorobots NanomedicineSpeculative: Proposed micron-scale machines that would circulate in the body and perform mechanical repair, a design tradition with no working device and several unsolved physical constraints.
Memory prosthesis CyberneticsExperimental: An implanted device intended to restore or improve memory formation by supplying the pattern of neural activity a damaged or underperforming hippocampus fails to generate.
Mental privacy SocietyEmerging: The question of what can be inferred about a person's mental states from neural and physiological recordings, and what protection that information should receive.
Metformin and the TAME trial LongevityContested: A generic diabetes drug proposed as a geroprotector, and the large randomized trial designed to make aging itself an acceptable regulatory indication.
Methuselah Foundation OrganizationsEstablished: A Virginia nonprofit founded in the early 2000s that used prize competitions to seed research on life extension, regenerative medicine and organ engineering.
Microgravity adaptation SpaceEstablished: The set of physiological and neural changes by which the human body reorganises itself for weightlessness, and the countermeasures that limit the cost of returning.
Mind uploading MindsSpeculative: The hypothetical transfer of a person's mind to a computational substrate, such that the resulting process is that person rather than a description of them.
Mirror life GeneticsSpeculative: Hypothetical organisms built from mirror-image biological molecules, which a large group of scientists argued in 2024 could evade immunity and predation and should not be created.
Mitochondrial dysfunction in aging LongevityEstablished: Age-related decline in mitochondrial energy production, quality control and signalling, once explained by free-radical damage and now understood as a more tangled process.
Mitochondrial replacement therapy ReproductionEmerging: A set of IVF techniques that place a mother's nuclear DNA in a donor egg to prevent transmission of mitochondrial DNA disease, licensed in a few countries and used rarely.
Molecular assembler NanomedicineContested: A proposed machine that would build objects by positioning individual atoms, central to Drexler's nanotechnology programme and disputed by chemists since the 1990s.
Moral enhancement EnhancementSpeculative: The proposal to improve human moral motivation by biomedical means, argued for as a response to technologies that outpace evolved moral psychology.
Morphological freedom SocietyContested: The claimed right to modify one's own body and mind as one chooses, and the correlative right to refuse modification imposed by others.
Myoelectric prosthetics BodiesEstablished: Externally powered artificial limbs controlled by electrical activity recorded from the wearer's residual muscles, the dominant design for powered upper-limb prostheses.
Myostatin inhibition EnhancementExperimental: Blockade of the growth factor myostatin to increase skeletal muscle mass, an effect reproduced across species that has repeatedly failed to translate into functional benefit in humans.

N16 terms

NAD+ precursors LongevityContested: Supplements such as nicotinamide riboside and NMN that raise cellular NAD+ levels, with strong pharmacokinetic evidence and weak evidence of any functional benefit.
Naked mole-rat LongevityEstablished: A small eusocial African rodent whose flat mortality curve, tumour resistance and anoxia tolerance make it comparative biogerontology's central model organism.
Nanoscale diagnostics NanomedicineEmerging: Detection methods that read single molecules or use nanoscale labels, including liquid biopsy, multi-cancer blood tests, and nanopore sensing, together with their overdiagnosis costs.
Natasha Vita-More PeopleEstablished: American designer and theorist who wrote the Transhumanist Arts Statement, designed the Primo Posthuman body concept, and led Humanity+ for much of the 2010s.
Negligible senescence LongevityEstablished: The condition of organisms whose mortality rate and physiological function show no measurable decline with age after reaching maturity.
Neural correlates of consciousness MindsEmerging: The minimal neural activity jointly sufficient for a specific conscious experience, and the experimental programme that tries to identify it.
Neural decoding CyberneticsEstablished: The inference of a stimulus, intention, or mental state from measured neural activity, and the statistical machinery that makes brain–computer interfaces work.
Neural dust and ultrasonic implants CyberneticsExperimental: A proposed class of millimetre-scale wireless implants powered and read out by ultrasound, intended to replace tethered electrode arrays with distributed untethered sensors.
Neuralink OrganizationsEmerging: American neurotechnology company founded in 2016 developing a wireless implanted brain–computer interface with flexible electrode threads inserted by a surgical robot.
Neuroprosthetics CyberneticsEmerging: The engineering field that builds devices interfacing directly with the nervous system to restore lost sensory, motor, cognitive, or autonomic function.
Neurorights SocietyEmerging: A proposed set of human rights covering mental privacy, cognitive liberty, and mental integrity, drafted in response to brain-recording and brain-stimulation technology.
NewLimit OrganizationsEmerging: A biotechnology company founded in 2021 to screen transcription-factor combinations that restore youthful function to aged cells without changing their identity.
Nick Bostrom PeopleEstablished: Swedish philosopher who defined existential risk as a field, wrote Superintelligence, and formulated the simulation argument and the vulnerable world hypothesis.
Nir Barzilai PeopleEstablished: Israeli-American physician-scientist whose centenarian genetics work and proposed TAME trial aim to make aging itself an acceptable regulatory indication.
Non-invasive neuromodulation CyberneticsEmerging: Techniques that alter neural excitability through the intact skull or peripheral nerves — magnetic, electrical, and ultrasonic — without surgery or implanted hardware.
Nootropics EnhancementContested: Substances taken to improve cognition in healthy people, a category whose best-evidenced members produce small effects and whose best-selling members produce none.

O7 terms

Off-target effects in genome editing GeneticsEstablished: Unintended DNA changes caused by genome editors, either at sites resembling the target or at the target itself, and the assays used to find them.
Optogenetics CyberneticsExperimental: A technique that makes selected neurons light-sensitive by expressing microbial opsin genes in them, allowing their activity to be switched on or off on a millisecond timescale.
Organ bioprinting BodiesExperimental: The additive manufacture of living tissue by depositing cells and biomaterials in a programmed pattern, pursued as a route to transplantable organs but limited so far to simple structures.
Organ shortage BodiesEstablished: The persistent gap between the number of people who need a transplant and the number of usable donated organs, which drives most work on engineered and animal-derived replacements.
Organoids BodiesEmerging: Self-organizing tissue cultures grown from stem cells that reproduce some of the architecture and function of an organ, used mainly for disease modelling rather than transplantation.
Osseointegration BodiesEstablished: The direct structural fusion of living bone to a titanium implant, the biological principle underlying dental implants and skeletally anchored limb prostheses.
Overpopulation and life extension SocietyContested: The objection that extending human lifespan would cause unsustainable population growth, and the demographic modelling that finds the effect smaller than assumed.

P14 terms

Pantropy SpaceSpeculative: The proposal to engineer humans to suit other worlds rather than engineering those worlds to suit humans, and the ethical problems of designing offspring for an environment.
Parabiosis and young blood LongevityExperimental: Experiments joining the circulation of young and old animals, and the attempts to translate their rejuvenating effects into plasma-based treatments for humans.
Partial reprogramming LongevityExperimental: Transient expression of pluripotency factors that resets age-associated epigenetic marks in a cell while stopping short of erasing its differentiated identity.
Personal identity and continuity MindsContested: The question of what makes a person at one time the same person as at another, and what — if anything — must be preserved for that person to survive.
Personalized mRNA cancer vaccines GeneticsExperimental: A therapy in which one patient's tumour is sequenced, its mutation-derived antigens are ranked by algorithm, and a synthetic mRNA encoding them is manufactured for that person alone.
Polygenic embryo screening ReproductionContested: The ranking of IVF embryos by polygenic risk scores computed from their inferred genotypes, sold commercially since 2019 and rejected as unvalidated by professional genetics bodies.
Posthuman FoundationsSpeculative: A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself.
Powered exoskeletons BodiesEmerging: Wearable powered frames that apply force in parallel with the wearer's own limbs, used for gait rehabilitation, industrial load support, and proposed strength augmentation.
Precautionary principle SocietyContested: The regulatory doctrine that scientific uncertainty about a serious or irreversible harm is not by itself a reason to permit the activity that might cause it.
Prime editing GeneticsExperimental: A genome editing method in which a nicking Cas9 fused to a reverse transcriptase writes a new DNA sequence specified by an extended guide RNA.
Procreative beneficence SocietyContested: Julian Savulescu's principle that prospective parents have moral reason to select, among the children they could have, the one expected to live the best life.
Progeria LongevityEstablished: A rare fatal childhood disorder caused by one recurrent LMNA mutation, and the standing test case for whether a genetic disease can accelerate aging itself.
Proteostasis collapse LongevityEstablished: The age-related failure of the chaperone, proteasome and lysosomal systems that keep proteins correctly folded and turned over, and its link to aggregation diseases.
Psychedelic therapy MindsContested: The administration of serotonergic psychedelics or MDMA alongside psychological support for psychiatric conditions, in trials that cannot be reliably blinded.

Q1 term

Quantified self EnhancementEstablished: A movement and a method for learning about oneself through personal measurement, built on n-of-1 self-experiment and named by two Wired editors in 2007.

R9 terms

Radiation tolerance in humans SpaceSpeculative: The problem of keeping humans healthy under deep-space radiation, and the shielding, pharmacological, and genetic strategies proposed to raise their tolerance.
Rapamycin LongevityExperimental: A macrolide immunosuppressant that inhibits the mTOR growth pathway and extends lifespan across several laboratory species, with no confirmed effect on human aging.
Ray Kurzweil PeopleContested: American inventor and futurist who formulated the law of accelerating returns and forecasts human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological singularity by 2045.
Reproductive longevity ReproductionEmerging: The functional lifespan of the reproductive system, and efforts to extend it in the ovary, which loses function decades before most other organs.
Respirocytes NanomedicineSpeculative: Robert Freitas's 1998 design study for an artificial red blood cell built as a pressurised micron-scale gas tank, widely cited and never built.
Retinal implants and visual prostheses CyberneticsExperimental: Implanted devices that restore rudimentary vision to blind people by electrically stimulating surviving retinal neurons or, more invasively, the visual cortex.
Retro Biosciences OrganizationsEmerging: A longevity biotechnology company funded by Sam Altman with the stated goal of adding ten years of healthy life, working on autophagy, reprogramming and plasma-inspired therapies.
Right to die and the duty to live SocietyContested: How the law and ethics of assisted dying interact with radical life extension, and whether an indefinitely extendable life could still be voluntarily ended.
Robert Freitas PeopleContested: American researcher whose Nanomedicine volumes set out detailed numerical designs for medical nanorobots, among them the respirocyte, none of which has been fabricated.

S17 terms

Sarcopenia LongevityEstablished: The age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass, strength and function, the strongest physical predictor of late-life disability and the target of a drug pipeline that has yet to deliver.
Senolytics LongevityExperimental: Drugs that selectively kill senescent cells, an approach that reduces age-related pathology in mice but has so far produced modest or null results in humans.
SENS Research Foundation OrganizationsEstablished: A California nonprofit founded in 2009 to fund rejuvenation research organized around seven categories of accumulated cellular damage, merged into the Lifespan Research Institute in 2024.
Sensory augmentation EnhancementExperimental: Devices and biological modifications that route information the body cannot normally detect into a channel the brain can learn to read.
Shinya Yamanaka PeopleEstablished: Japanese physician-scientist who showed that four transcription factors can reprogram adult cells to a pluripotent state, sharing the 2012 Nobel Prize for the discovery.
Singularitarianism PeopleContested: The belief that a technological singularity is likely and that it should be actively prepared for, together with the movements organized around that belief.
Sleep and longevity LongevityEstablished: Habitual sleep duration and timing, an exposure tied to mortality in large observational cohorts and almost untested as a deliberate intervention to extend life.
Somatic gene therapy GeneticsEstablished: Genetic modification of a living person's body cells to treat disease, producing a change that is not passed on to their children.
Space medicine SpaceEstablished: The medical discipline concerned with how spaceflight alters human physiology and with keeping crews functional in an environment the body did not evolve for.
Speech neuroprosthesis CyberneticsExperimental: A brain–computer interface that reconstructs intended speech from motor cortex activity, producing text or synthesized voice for people who cannot speak.
Stem cell exhaustion LongevityEstablished: The age-related decline in the number and regenerative function of adult stem cells across blood, muscle, gut and skin, and the loss of repair capacity that follows.
Stem-cell-based embryo models ReproductionExperimental: Structures grown by aggregating stem cells that reproduce stages of early embryonic development without fertilisation, and the regulatory categories they fall outside.
Stentrode CyberneticsExperimental: An endovascular brain–computer interface in which a stent carrying electrodes is delivered through the jugular vein into a vein overlying the motor cortex.
Steve Horvath PeopleEstablished: German-American biostatistician who built the first multi-tissue epigenetic clock, giving aging research a quantitative readout it could test and argue about.
Substrate independence MindsContested: The claim that mental states depend on a system's functional organization rather than on the material implementing it, so that a mind could run on non-biological hardware.
Synchron OrganizationsEmerging: A neurotechnology company developing an endovascular brain–computer interface implanted through a blood vessel rather than by opening the skull.
Synthetic genomes GeneticsExperimental: Genomes designed on a computer and assembled from chemically synthesized DNA, then installed in a cell to see whether the design lives.

T9 terms

Tardigrade genes and human cells SpaceExperimental: The attempt to transfer stress-tolerance proteins from tardigrades into human cells, and the gap between what those experiments showed and how they were reported.
Targeted drug delivery NanomedicineEstablished: The engineering of carriers and conjugates that concentrate a drug where it is needed, a field whose clinical successes have come from chemistry rather than from nanoparticle targeting.
Technological singularity FoundationsSpeculative: The hypothesized point at which machine intelligence begins improving itself fast enough that technological change outruns human ability to predict or steer it.
Technology readiness level FoundationsEstablished: A nine-point scale, originating at NASA, that rates how far a technology has moved from observed basic principles to proven operational use.
Telomeres and telomerase LongevityEstablished: Repetitive DNA caps that shorten with each cell division, and the enzyme that rebuilds them, linking division limits, cancer risk, and a contested marker of aging.
The longevity dividend SocietyContested: The argument that slowing biological aging would produce economic gains larger than curing any individual disease, and the disputes over how that value is calculated.
The teleportation problem MindsSpeculative: A thought experiment in which a person is scanned, destroyed, and rebuilt elsewhere, used to test whether survival requires physical continuity or only psychological continuity.
Tissue engineering BodiesEstablished: The construction of living tissue from cells, scaffolds and signalling molecules, a field with approved products for skin and cartilage but no solid organ after three decades.
Transhumanism PeopleEstablished: The intellectual and cultural movement holding that human beings can and should use technology to overcome the biological limits of the human condition.

U2 terms

Utah array CyberneticsEstablished: A silicon microelectrode array of 100 needles on a 10-by-10 grid, the standard sensor for chronic single-neuron recording in human brain–computer interface research.
Uterus transplantation ReproductionEmerging: A temporary transplant of a donated uterus that lets a woman without a working one carry a pregnancy, then is removed so that immunosuppression can stop.

V1 term

Virtual cell models FoundationsExperimental: Computational models that simulate a cell's molecular behaviour, from complete cell cycles of minimal bacteria to learned predictions of how human cells respond to perturbation.

W2 terms

Wearable health sensors LongevityEstablished: Consumer devices worn on the wrist or finger that continuously record pulse waveforms, movement, and skin temperature, and infer heart rhythm, sleep, and activity from them.
Whole brain emulation MindsSpeculative: A proposed procedure for reproducing a particular mind by scanning one brain's structure in detail, building a computational model from the scan, and running it.

X3 terms

Xenobots BodiesExperimental: Sub-millimetre motile constructs assembled from frog embryonic cells and shaped by an evolutionary algorithm, classed as neither robots nor organisms in any settled sense.
Xenotransplantation BodiesExperimental: The transplantation of organs between species, now pursued with genetically engineered pigs whose antigens and clotting proteins have been altered to survive in a human recipient.
XPRIZE Healthspan OrganizationsEmerging: A $101 million incentive competition launched in 2023 that rewards a therapy restoring at least a decade of muscle, cognitive and immune function in older adults.

Y1 term

Yamanaka factors GeneticsEstablished: The four transcription factors Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc, which together convert a differentiated cell into an induced pluripotent stem cell.

Vocabulary in use

Terms without an article yet

All tags

These 28 terms are tagged across the corpus but have no page of their own. Several are broad enough that they may never get one — aging is a subject, not an entry. Others are simply unwritten. Each links to the articles that use it.