Writer Damien Broderick talks about the futuristic possibility of the end of death as we know it. That line once meant some kind of spiritual or even redemptive victory over the inevitable extinction that flesh is heir to. But death may also have no dominion, according to Damien Broderick, if science fulfils its promise. Damien Broderick writes science fiction. But his latest book, called 'The Last Mortal Generation' is a collection of essays about, as its subtitle has it, 'How Science Will Alter Our Lives in The 21st Century'.
Death is intensely personal.
We're more moved by death than by any other passage, except perhaps, birth. I myself have never seen a baby born, except on television, never fathered a child of my own. Indeed I've taken steps to ensure that I never do. But I watched with great emotion as my father's elder sister quietly died in hospital, her face and body reduced to bones and rags by her final illness. A few years earlier my mother had died of cancer at just 66.