21st century alchemy

A colleague asked me the other day what I thought was the raison d'etre of molecular biology. Though it had never occurred to me before, one possible answer was immediately clear: immortality.

The acknowledged goals of molecular biology are to cure disease, to live healthy into our old age, giving all members of our society an equal chance at a productive life, no matter what their genetic makeup; to engineer our food sources to provide what we naively think we need to improve our health. But what are the unspoken, and perhaps even unconscious driving forces? Is all this technology really an altruistic act on the part of we scientists to help those less fortunate?

Our scientific ancestors were the alchemists, whose ostensible pursuit was the transformation of materials, the quest for gold. But buried between the lines of alchemical texts, one finds the true underlying motivation: the transformation of the soul, the quest for eternal life.

Technology now in the hands of modern scientists is vastly more complex than that of our alchemical forefathers, but have our human desires really evolved in parallel with our means of investigation? Is this hugely complex undertaking we call molecular biology, now racing towards the generation of a human clone, simply the age-old pursuit of eternal life in a 21st century disguise?