As the bitter and dirty race for the American presidency draws to a close, it's time to highlight the only candidate who has put bioethics at the front and centre of his campaign. His program is pretty simple: to overcome death and ageing within 15 years. A Tranhshumanist Bill of Rights for "Human beings, sentient artificial intelligences, cyborgs, and other advanced sapient life forms" commits government to working for indefinite life spans, morphological freedom and an end to involuntary suffering and ageing. Some people have questioned the practicality of eliminating death, because of the resulting population explosion. However, Zoltan's response is that "mind-uploading will be here in 50 years, so people might actually remain alive but in machines, making population levels easy to deal with." He has a few other ideas as well, such as surrendering the job of being president to artificial intelligence.

Zoltan Istvan is many things: a journalist, a futurist and entrepreneur. Mostly, though, he's been a cheerleader for the transhumanist movement, a philosophy focused on merging humans together with technology. To live forever as a new post-human species. Istvan kicked off a presidential campaign as head of the Transhumanist Party in 2014, mostly to spread the word about the movement. We sat down to talk with him about his experience running for president, and why voters should care about the transhumanist movement. Was the process of running this campaign what you expected? My campaign has been pretty much to always spread the message around transhumanism. It was never to win, and I said that from the very beginning. What I didn't expect is that I would very quickly enter into the top 10 candidates for almost the entire two years. Just three years ago, I signed with one of the major websites that puts you together with candidates.