For information on what I'm involved with in Life Extension, Superconductors and other Science Kits, visit the Futurescience home page.

From 1970 to 1978, I worked at the Ampex Corporation, the company that invented the video tape recorder.  During most of that time I was a test engineer, developing test procedures and designing test interface equipment for their professional audio products.  From August, 1978 through January, 2008, I worked as a radio and television transmitter engineer, most of that time as Transmitter Supervisor, for the ABC affiliate in Colorado Springs.  I worked atop Cheyenne Mountain, just outside of Colorado Springs.

I now have a multi-faceted career operating two separate one-person businesses.   I am an electronics consultant through a new company called Transmitter Maintenance, LLC.  I also have a company called Futurescience, LLC., which will be primarily directed toward producing a subscription-based web site for distributing advanced information related to preventive medicine and healthy life extension.  Futurescience, LLC. may also be doing a limited amount of superconductor production, primarily providing continued support for the hundreds of Futurescience superconductor kits now in use in universities around the world.

In May, 2008, I had more than one million points on my DNA decoded by a division of Decode Genetics in Iceland.  In November, 2008, I had another scan of nearly 600,000 points done by a company called 23andMe.

You can see many of the results of that DNA scan linked from the Preface to my Life Extension Manual.  The information that I have online includes a detailed outline of health risks using the new Promethease software.  These DNA scans (technically known as single nucleotide polymorphism scans) may not be very useful to most people, but I have already found the information enormously valuable to me.

Life Extension: I've been an experiment-in-progress in life extension and anti-aging medicine for most of my life.  Many advanced techniques in preventive medicine have a good scientific basis, but are seldom used.  By the time I was 20, I had decided that it was time to make a real effort to prevent the deterioration of the aging process.  I also realized then that I was living in a time when such an effort might really pay off -- and it has.

In 1981, I stepped up my personal life extension to a point that requires regular medical supervision.  An important method of life extension is maintaining one's hormone and enzyme levels at what would be normal levels for a healthy person in his twenties.  I've been taking things like DHEA, melatonin, deprenyl, testosterone, human growth hormone and pregnenolone long before most people had ever heard of them.  (Before I make use of any potentially life-extending substance or technique, I actually read the more important research reports on the subject in legitimate medical journals -- and I get frequent medical testing).  It is important to read the research at the source.  Medical reporting, like all forms of science reporting in the popular media, is frighteningly awful.  Even the practice of medicine, all too often, is not based on scientific evidence.

Anti-aging medicine has finally matured to the point where it is a legitimate medical specialty.  Physicians who take a rigorous exam can become board-certified in anti-aging medicine.

For more information on Life Extension and anti-aging medicine, I have written a free on-line Life Extension Manual.

Superconductors:  In the image on the right, a magnet levitates above a black ceramic superconducting disk partially immersed in liquid nitrogen.  From 1987 until 2006, I made hundreds of these ceramic superconductors in two bench-top lab furnaces in my little ceramics lab.

Most of these superconductors were sold to schools and universities for demonstrations of the basic concepts of superconductivity.  Most of my superconductor business has been phased out.

My favorite book is How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne, a book that almost perfectly reflects my own worldview.  Everything in this book just seems to me to be very simple and logical, but it is very different from how most people think.  This book was originally published in 1973 and was been out-of-print for some time; but it was re-released in 1997 in a new hardcover edition with a new foreword and afterword by the author.  In the afterword, he explains how his thinking has changed on some subjects in the years since the book was originally published.  (Yes, this is the same Harry Browne who ran for U.S. president in an attempt to experience freedom in a free country.)  Harry Browne died of ALS in March, 2006.

My favorite book on science and technology is Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler, which I also believe to be the most important book of the 20th century.  The entire text of the book is on the Web.

My favorite television program is Jacob Bronowski's Knowledge or Certainty episode from his Ascent of Man television series that was shown during the early 1970s on PBS.

My favorite regularly-scheduled entertainment program was Dark Angel, another one of those science fiction shows that became more popular after it was cancelled.  Since it was cancelled in 2002, it has since been often shown in reruns on the cable/satellite channels, and all of the shows are available on DVD.  The setting of the show is the United States in the aftermath of a terrorist EMP (nuclear electromagnetic pulse) attack, which is a very likely form of attack that is being almost completely ignored.  Dark Angel is about what happens to kids who have been genetically engineered to be soldiers who have escaped from the government, and who just want to live free in this post-EMP environment.

Dark Angel deals with all of the issues that are likely to affect us most during the first half of the 21st century, including EMP attacks, genetic engineering, stem cells, nano-medicine, and bigotry against people who have been genetically or technologically modified.  My favorite episode of Dark Angel was Freak Nation, a two-hour episode directed by James Cameron, which turned out to be the final episode of the series.

Nearly everything in Dark Angel, including the cometary viral plague that was supposed to be the focus of the third season, is based on serious scientific possibilities.  See my Dark Angel Science page.

Another of my favorite television shows was Venevision's El Club de los Tigritos, which has been out of production for several years.  This show was supposedly a "children's show." but when I was growing up, this show would not have been called a "children's show."  The idea that shows with mainly teenage actors are only for children is a strange phenomenon that did not occur until about 1980.

My favorite science fiction book is The Great Explosion by Eric Frank Russell.  This is the story of the attempt by the Terran bureaucracy to establish "official relations" with various nonconformist societies across the galaxy.  Most of the book, which is now out-of-print, is a build-up to the last section (which was originally published separately as a novella entitled And Then There Were None) on the hilarious ultimate cultural clash between an authoritarian bureaucracy and a free society.

As a last resort, in case I ever need an ambulance to the future, I'm signed up for cryonic suspension with the Alcor Foundation.  With current freezing techniques, reviving someone in cryonic suspension would probably only be possible with molecular nanotechnology.  Fortunately, unless some catastrophe happens that stops technological progress, the development of molecular nanotechnology seems inevitable in the first half of the 21st century.  (See the reference above to Engines of Creation.)

Cryonics isn't really all that expensive.  It's usually paid for with life insurance.

Here is my sister Brenda's eulogy for my father.

A scientist is a magician who shows you how every trick is done.   -- Sandy Shaw