I Remember Like It Was Yesterday

As someone who has a family history of Alzheimer's Disease and expects to develop it should I live long enough, I still think treating it with gene therapy is creepy. What does that entail? Injections? Surgeries? You think at 80 years old I'll want to be spending my last few years of clarity getting medical treatment that might or might not work? When the main machine stops working, I think it's time to unplug. The problem is knowing when it's the right time, not letting it get too far along, because then you can't stop it. Hubris is an amazing thing. Stem cell research, human genome project, artificial hearts; we think that we have some sort of right to stay alive as long as possible. We can't bear the thought of not thinking or doing anymore. Sure, I'm guilty of it as well, but if so many people believe in an afterlife, as they claim, why are they so het up to keep patching up the leaky hoses and crashed hard-drives of the human body?