It's absolutely possible, and in fact could happen within less than a year.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!

So, I will present it.

This is a New York Times article about scaling neural networks to supercomputer scale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?pagewanted=all

This is a video lecture by Jeff Dean of Google on it
http://techtalks.tv/talks/57639/

This a hugely significant piece of technology - it is about unsupervised learning - or more simply put - Fully Automated Machine Learning.

They have not yet incorporated a mainstream technology used in science and engineering - the Finite Element Method - but once they do, they can essentially run a Artificial Neural Network Larger Than The Human Brain.

This would allow for the creation of Human-Level Artificial Intelligence that would approximate the abilities of a human mind. It only has to run once on a supercomputer to find the mathematical model and it would be able to run on much smaller computers thereafter.

(The same technique can be applied to bioinformatics data to learn as much as can be possibly learned. It is essentially the automation of data analysis.)

The economy augmented with many human-level intelligences would greatly accelerate developments in biomedical research. Robots that have the same visual capability as humans would work 24/7 to conduct experiments. The analysis of those results would also be automated.

This is not science fiction - it is simply the application of mathematical modelng techniques on supercomputers to approximate the human brain.

This is all possible within weeks or months. The Elimination Of Most Deaths are within reach - if a Supercomputer Scale Neural Network would be run.