⚫ Show notes. ⚫ Why Natasha Vita-More doesn’t want to be called a transhumanist. ⚫ The brilliant cryonics experiment. ⚫ The nanobot future. ⚫ Living in Scottsdale. ⚫ Primo Post-Human ⚫ “They're fucking lying.”

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Just the other day I read that Natasha Vita-More has survived cancer several times in the past twenty years. In our conversation it doesn’t come up once. In a show about aging and longevity, that would normally be an omission. But with Vita-More there’s simply too much - work, art, experiments, manifestos, daily practice, life - to fit in a two-hour conversation.

And although she’s been here for 75 years it often feels like talking to a human from the future.

So, who is she? A philosopher, artist, and researcher with a PhD in media and design, president emeritus of Humanity+, and co-editor of The Transhumanist Reader (among many other things). In 1982 she wrote the Transhumanist Manifesto that helped launch the movement. In 1997 she designed Primo Post-Human, a first pass at a whole-body prosthetic: a speculative “next body” with technological upgrades.

But now she tells Patrick and me to not call her a transhumanist. It’s not a disavowal, but a refusal to be boxed in by a label she thinks has been diluted. What she wants is philosophy and systems thinking: spot the gaps, run the experiment, do the work. “I’m a doer”, Vita-More tells us. Indeed she is.

A perfect example of this is her cryonics research. If cryonics is to mean anything, what matters is not only whether a body can be preserved, but whether the mind inside it can return intact.
To fill that particular gap - to see if memory is retained - she set out to test it. Using the tiny roundworm C. elegans, she trained them to recognize a particular smell, cryopreserved them, and then brought them back. The result was striking: the worms still remembered.

It was a brilliant experiment and a great proof of concept: learned information can survive the process.

Cryonics is both figuratively and literally close to Vita-More. She lives in Scottsdale, home to biostasis provider Alcor, together with Max More, whose own name is braided into the movement’s history. For Vita-More, cryonics is “the best alternative we have to the ultimate finality of death.”

That line of thinking also explains Primo Post-Human. If revival becomes possible, what will we come back to? For her, it’s not enough to imagine survival - she wants to imagine the form in which survival could continue.

And she is blunt about what comes next. Artificial intelligence won’t cure aging on its own, though it can help us map the biology. The real leap, in her view, will be nanorobots able to repair us continuously from within.

In the conversation she extends that thought further, likening our future with nanorobots to our ancient partnership with mitochondria. Just as human cells long ago merged with these tiny powerplants to fuel life, she imagines us merging with nanoscale repair machines to maintain it.

As futuristic as that might sound, there’s something else she says that stays with me even more. It’s when she talks about her peers. Many of them content to “just be 70, 80, 90” and let their bodies decline - “it’s just aging” - while she insists on training, experimenting, and pushing forward.

Natasha Vita-More is just getting started. At 75, she talks less like someone closing a chapter and more like someone drafting the future in real time.

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