Lifeboat Foundation

Featured Stories

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  Philippe Van Nedervelde joins the Lifeboat 500, becoming one of a few special individuals and organizations to make a meaningful, but affordable commitment of the price of a cup of coffee a day, in order to help us grow!

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  Diana J. Muir, founder of the Hawking Institute and of the Personal Learning Center, International, joins our Education Board. With more than 14 years in online learning, Diana is considered one of the pioneers in the field of online education.

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  Lifeboat Foundation launches 3 books! The Lifeboat Foundation has launched three books. They are: The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen — and What to Do, Fourth Edition by Daniel Berleant, Visions of the Future, Second Edition edited by J. Daniel Batt (with 42+ authors!), and Prospects for Human Survival by Willard H. Wells.

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  Read Minding the Planet: The Meaning and Future of the Semantic Web by Nova Spivack.

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  Our David Pearce has authored the special report Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry, and Childbirth.
   
  Before the advent of anesthesia, medical surgery was a terrifying prospect. Its victims could suffer indescribable agony. The utopian prospect of surgery without pain was a nameless fantasy — a notion as fanciful as the abolitionist project of life without suffering still seems today. The introduction of diethyl ether CH₃CH₂OCH₂CH₃ (1846) and chloroform CHCl₃ (1847) as general anesthetics in surgery and delivery rooms from the mid-19th century offered patients hope of merciful relief. Surgeons were grateful as well: within a few decades, controllable anesthesia would at last give them the chance to perform long, delicate operations.
   
  So it might be supposed that the adoption of painless surgery would have been uniformly welcomed too by theologians, moral philosophers and medical scientists alike. Yet this was not always the case. Advocates of the “healing power of pain” put up fierce if disorganized resistance.

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  Maria Entraigues joins our Media & Arts Board. Maria’s written songs and performed as a soloist singer for several feature films including Rush Hour 2 (with Jackie Chan), After the Sunset (with Pierce Brosnan), The Magnificent Ambersons (with Madeleine Stowe), Picking up the Pieces (with Woody Allen), Diamond Hunters (with Alyssa Milano), and A Walk in the Clouds (with Keanu Reeves).

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  Julia Margo, author of Make Me a Criminal: Preventing Youth Crime and coeditor of Politics for a New Generation, joins our Ethics Board.

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  The Lifeboat Foundation worked with ten other organizations including the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation to launch a new strategic alliance for space development and commerce named the Alliance for Space Development (ASD).

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  Read The Ultimate Right to Life Debate: Synthetic biologists know the meaning of life, but do they know the meaning of synthetic biology? by Alan H. Goldstein.

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  We now have quotes by Lord Martin Rees on our Quotes page. Martin was our Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award 2004 winner and is a member of our Scientific Advisory Board.