Science, A Matter of Belief.

Tom Junod, in the latest issue of Esquire writes:

We are not going to live forever. We are not going to have our life spans scientifically amplified to biblical lengths. We will not be able to take pills that will give us the musculature of superheroes or allow us to gorge ourselves while enjoying the health benefits of starvation. We will reach our limits, and, with some hard-won variation, those limits will be — they will feel like — the same limits we humans have always had. We will remain human where it counts, in our helpless and inspiring relation to our own mortality.

Does this sound obvious? It shouldn't. Indeed, what I should have said from the start is that I believe that we are all going to die, in that science increasingly believes otherwise — and science increasingly has become a matter of belief. Its logic, once pointed at the eradication of disease and infection, is now inexorably pointed at aging and death, which is to say the ultimate questions that were once left to religion. Over the past six years, I've written several science stories for Esquire's annual Best and Brightest issue, and most of them were about scientists who began contending with a particular disease but wound up contending with aging and death as disease — as something that can be cured.

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/brightest-2010/year-science-1210#ixzz16cmSCONw

(h/t Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic)