The Edmonton Aging Symposium was held at the University of Alberta last weekend, and a number of important anti-aging scientists attended , such as Aubrey de Grey and Gregory Stock. The Symposium discussed the prospect of developing and implementing many anti-aging technologies, with the Methuselah Foundation and the Supercentenarian Research Foundation providing positive positions on the technology.
The Symposium featured a debate between Gregory Stock and Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for Bioethics, on the virtues and vices of anti-aging technology. Callahan’s bioethics appears to be a code for denying individuals choice on the grounds that society has more urgent goals:
Dr Daniel Callahan, a renowned bioethicist from the Hastings Centre for bioethics, argues that focusing economic resources on aging science would be negligent for a society that’s faced with so many other pressing problems.
“Are there any present problems in society that would be helped by longer life? Global warming? Terrorism?” he urges, adding that “individual desire [for a longer life] is not legitimate.”
Callahan further speculates that although we may be able to extend life, we are unable to predict what the quality of that longer life would be. He suggests that there are other means to pursuing health in old age, and that pouring money into radical life-extending science might not be the answer.
“Most of the improvement in the health of the elderly is coming from the background socio-economic conditions …. something like 60 per cent of the improvements have come from that directive, rather than from medical care or medical research. It seems to me that there would be a fundamentally greater value of putting money into improving our understanding of prevention, lifestyle and behaviour issues,” he asserts.
Gregory Stock provided a reported response that did not reject the bioethicist’s assertion that research funds, usually paid for by us, be redirected to societal goals:
His opponent, Dr Greg Stock, director of the program Medicine Technology and Society at UCLA, predicts exactly the opposite economic situation. He contends that the economic gains achieved by eliminating the diseases and detriments of aging would outweigh the costs of research.
“The savings in [medicare and social security] of extending the human health-span would be … so immense that that they would justify the rather modest amount of money that would be spent on research,” Stock states.
These incidental benefits would be byproducts of the research. Yet, we should be grateful that anti-aging research is tarred as immoral by bioethicists. Research into lifestyles and prevention is a code for science that justifies directed diet and behaviour. This will ensure that controls are placed on those behaviours, foods and enjoyable activities which conflict with the list of societal goals, as decided by the state.
Supporting anti-aging research is a private and public good.
“important anti-aging scientists attended , such as Aubrey de Grey”: how sweet that he should have a medieval name.
Aging kills about 100,000 people per day worldwide. Do we have any other problems as “pressing” as something that kills people at that rate?
If our funding decisions today bring the eradication of aging just one year closer, that would save the lives of a larger number of people than the population of Canada.
And who on Earth is he to say that the individual desire to avoid death “is not legitimate”?
I actually agree with Dr Callahan. He is absolutely 100% right and that is why healthcare should be privately funded. After all, if I spend my cash on being able to celebrate turning eleventy-one and am fit enough to break-dance on the occasion then what business is it of the esteemed Dr?
I have never met or heard from a “bioethicist” who wasn’t a twat. I am thinking particularly of Tom Shakespeare. Now, don’t get me wrong. Why is it I always get the impression that they’re folk who would have liked to have been biolgists but just couldn’t hack that pesky science?
Actually, no there is one: that uber-controvesial bloke at Harvard. I find him rather compelling. I think he’s a philosopher though.
Nick M, to whom you are referring?
The worst of these “bioethicist” types is McKibben, who seems to actively dislike life per se. A lot of these people, if they followed their arguments logically, would have opposed basic medicine hundreds of years ago.
Ronald Bailey, by the way, is a writer I strongly recommend on this issue.
I have med Aubrey de Grey and he is a very smart and well informed guy. He also has the sort of long beard that makes him look like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, but he is no hippie dreamer.
There is a fundamental problem with what M.r. Callahan is saying, all my other qualms with his words stem from it: He implicitly assumes, through the way he makes his case, that funding and research are somehow things that must be centrally directed by tax funded research. By saying “we” he’s really talking about the state funded institutions and laboratories, and in case he’s not, then he’s certainly assuming that what research is done will surely be conducted with centralized direction. This is a commonly occuring blindness in social debate of any kind. First of all, as far as numerous sources of private research and funding go, its none of his business. Whether trying to reverse aging is legitimate or not is entirely a subjective choice of whomever decides to or not to fund it. Secondly, Aging affects every living human, and costs us all dearly in the end. Very much unlike global warming, which may actually be a boon for humanity, or terrorism, which could hardly be said to affect a large portion of the worlds population.
What gets me is the unconscionable arrogance of the man:
Thank you for your opinion and all, Doctor, but I’ll make that judgment call for myself if you don’t mind…
This is one of the reasons why it is a no-no to members of the academic American Cryonics Society to talk about cryo-suspension of the terminally ill at the moment current standards call ‘death’. These sick, anti-human, pro-death bioethics types have a great deal of influence in academic circles and it is not a new thing.
There are perhaps a few hundred persons under suspension in the US today, awaiting a far-future technology that will be able to not only cure their disease or repair the thing that ‘killed’ them, but to undo the terrible damage of our stone age cryonics techniques.
But time moves on and the ‘official’ academic spokesmen are aging and the new blood is doing things like freezing and recovering entire human organs for transplant.
So not only will these low grade human hating morons have to deal with life-extension technology… they are also going to get smacked in their smirking infantile faces by advances that will allow successful short term suspension of large bipedal mammals.
That is really going to darken their diapers.
The pro-death bio-“ethicists” are painting themselves into a rather interesting corner. As the technology to slow down aging and extend youthful life is developed, philosophical consistency will demand that they refrain from taking advantage of it. Thus they will die off in their 70s or 80s as they deem “natural” (as if humans in a true state of nature would typically live even half that long!), while the rest of us live on. A perfect example of natural selection in action.
Dr Daniel Callahan, a renowned bioethicist….
What is a “bioethicist” ?
Callahan sounds like a confirmed Nazi.
Presumably we can expect You Tube videos showing Scorpions in a tank attacking one another while his innocent, blonde, buxom lab assistant looks on in wonder.
I have two concerns in the areas of aging and death issues. I was not able to attend the symposium, but wonder if either of my concerns were at all addressed.
First, the attempts of “health promotion” zealots to force longer lifespan for all by controlling social factors such as exposure to trans fats and what this will mean for people who may not wish to live 90, 100, 110 or more years. Second, the high value “health promotion” places on persons whose genetics predisposes them to longer healthier lives and the very low value it places on the lives of persons whose genetics predisposes them to chronic illness and early death.
Shouldn’t every life have equal value?
Perhaps Daniel Callahan should team up with some of our more genocidal “green” activists, who think the cure to the planet’s woes is the removal of a large, presumably non Hampstead-dwelling sector of the world’s population.
I have two concerns in the areas of aging and death issues…..
I don’t think the issues you mention would have come up. The kind of research de Grey and the Methuselah Foundation focus on is aimed at curing the aging process itself, enabling individuals to stay alive and biologically youthful for as long as they want, even for centuries or millennia. It has nothing to do with government efforts to discourage unhealthy food.
I don’t know who are greater idiots: the “scientists” who say they’ll “kill death” and enable people to live forever, or the “bioethicists” who say this is undesirable and try to stop it.
I don’t know who are greater idiots: the “scientists” who say they’ll “kill death” and enable people to live forever…..
Do you have any solid reason for thinking that this is unfeasible, given enough investment and research?
Remember, it is not necessary to solve every problem at once. If the first set of breakthroughs allows people to remain young and vigorous for twenty years longer than they do today, then during that twenty years, further and more fundamental progress will be made which will enable their lives to be extended still further, et cetera. De Grey says that many individuals who are alive right now will live to be 1,000 years old. This understandably provokes reactions of incredulity from many people, but I have never heard anyone make a convincing argument that he is wrong.
‘…“individual desire [for a longer life] is not legitimate.”’
What pure, unmitigated evil!!! This person is a bioethicist???!!!!
What is a “bioethicist” ?
It’s an only-slightly less offensive, but quite accurate way of calling someone a hypocritical Prickartist.
Infidel 753 –
I’ve been a fan of RA Wilson and his writings about Life Extension (among other topics) for 30 years, but I’m still troubled by the question of choice. It seems likely, to me, that if it becomes possible to extend a person’s life to 1000 years that the current “health promotion” zealots would want to make that MANDATORY. Until they have been restrained better than they currently are I wouldn’t trust life extension technology to not be abused in that manner.
I don’t know, but I think what’s got them worried is that life extension treatment might be expensive. What is the current market rate for eternal youth? Which would mean, of course, only the super-rich living forever, which of course cannot be allowed.
And however cheap you make it, it seems very unlikely that it will become universally available before the last of the current generation die, which means some people will get it and others won’t. That’s sure to get up the noses of socialists.
There are all sorts of implications for society that need to be thought about, though. You would never be able to permanently retire, life imprisonment would take on a different meaning, career progression would falter, there would be a lot less inheritance, the population boom might speed up again, the education system would have to be rethought, and so on. Nothing that can’t be solved I’m sure, but its a far bigger change than simply going on as you do now but for longer.
“it seems very unlikely that it will become universally available before the last of the current generation die…”
I hope they don’t close down Paradise for lack of new clients. What a tough choice we will face (really soon): to live forever in this valley of tears, or to live forever in the bliss of Paradise !
Roy Harrold: It seems likely, to me, that if it becomes possible to extend a person’s life to 1000 years that the current “health promotion” zealots would want to make that MANDATORY.
By this argument, all technological changes (printing presses, radio, the internet, etc.) should have been forbidden because the government might abuse them. For that matter, some governments have abused all of those innovations, but we are still better off with them than without them.
Adults are virtually always deemed competent to refuse life-saving medical treatment if they so choose. I see no reason to think this will change. If you are actually afraid of being forced to undergo life-extension treatment, in practice there is no way to prevent people from committing suicide.
Pa Annoyed: I think what’s got them worried is that life extension treatment might be expensive. What is the current market rate for eternal youth? Which would mean, of course, only the super-rich living forever, which of course cannot be allowed.
Virtually all new technologies start off crude and expensive, then rapidly become much cheaper and more sophisticated. This trend will accelerate in the near future as data processing (which is getting cheaper and more powerful faster than anything else) becomes more and more the critical part of the innovation process. This will be especially true of life extension, for which I think the market demand will be enormous. I’m 46 and I think the odds are very good that this will be widely available in the developed world in time for me (the Third World is another matter).
In fact, bioethicists and governments cannot suppress the development of life-extension technology even if they choose to try. All they can accomplish is to shift the research into countries other than the ones where they have influence.
Jacob: What a tough choice we will face (really soon): to live forever in this valley of tears, or to live forever in the bliss of Paradise !
Once we can stop aging, and radical life extension becomes a practical option, it will be very interesting to observe the behavior of people who claim to believe in an afterlife. Very interesting indeed.
Since there is not the tiniest particle of evidence for the existence of an afterlife, only those who truly possess faith (that is, the ability to believe things when there is no reason to believe them) will continue to gamble their continued existence on this fantasy, once death truly becomes a matter of personal choice as it never was before.
It is perhaps slightly mean of me to observe that this will constitute a perfect example of natural selection in action.
Here are a couple of good websites on life extension, which include sections on responding to common objections:
SENS (Aubrey de Grey’s site)
Fight Aging
As de Grey once said, would a cure for aging create problems? Of course it would. Would it create any problems even close to being as serious as the death of 100,000 people per day (the status quo)? No.
I believe that the problem of funding retirement pensions is likely to create political pressure against death prevention. Euthanasia anyone?
Again, the point of anti-aging reasearch is to keep people young indefinitely — preventing death will be a side effect of this. Success would result in the disapprearance of the very concepts of retirement and old-age pensions, since there would no longer be a distinct late stage of life during which people would be too enfeebled to work.
(that is, the ability to believe things when there is no reason to believe them)
The belief that people will live for ever seems to me identical to belief in afterlife – “there is no reason to believe them”.
People won’t live forever. Nothing does. But some may live for a very long time.
In a sense, the human cell line is one continuous chain of cell dividing into cell extending all the way from 3.5 billion years ago – rejuvenated in each egg and sperm.
What if, instead of a billion bodies, that cell line had all gone to maintain a single body? Cellular machinery that started a billion years ago and has operated without a break functions perfectly to this day – like the axe whose handle and head have both been replaced from time to time, but which is still, in a sense, the same axe.
I think the main issue with this reasearch is not whether it is technically possible – I’m sure it is – but that the advocates have perhaps not given enough thought to the question “why do we die?”
Evolutionary biology suggests that it is to keep ahead of the parasites. They learn to pick the locks on our cells, and because we cannot change a billion locks at once without hopelessly mixing up the keys, we instead move house, change the locks on only a single cell and build a new body from it. And then the old bodies must die, lest they become a reservoir of infection for the new, young population.
If you could cure all infectious disease, I suspect extended lifetimes would evolve naturally. But we’re quite a way off doing that yet, and some of the improved artificial locks we’ve developed are close to being picked. The same situation applies where the green revolution gave us bountiful wheat, but now we have an unchanging genetic monoculture and today the wheat rust Ug99 is threatening disaster. If you want to survive you must never stand still on the genetic battlefield, and unchanging youth would do exactly that.
Literally “living forever” is too problematical a concept to defend in concrete terms here. Millions, billions, trillions of years — we today can’t possibly anticipate all the problems that might arise over such spans, nor how we might overcome them. I speak of defeating the aging process as we know it today, allowing the lifespan to be extended pretty much indefinitely. Individuals living for 500 years will likely encounter issues we can’t imagine today; the technology of 500 years in the future will also allow us to address those issues by means we can’t imagine today. But there’s no point in trying to predict matters that far ahead in detail.
There is no evidence for an afterlife. There is nothing in the world around us, or in our knowledge of nature, that even suggests or hints that there might be an afterlife. By contrast, people like de Grey can present substantial evidence to support their claim that the conquest of aging, and thus indefinite life extension, can be achieved in as little as 20 years. The two cases are not comparable at all.
I actually expect to see the eradication of infectious disease within that same 20-year time span. In any case, even if the finite lifespan of most large animals originally evolved as a strategy against infectious disease, it no longer contributes anything significant to that purpose for humans. Our strongest weapons in the fight against infectious disease now come from our technology, and future success in that fight will also depend on technology. Renouncing anti-aging research so that people continue to die of old age would contribute nothing to our ability to defeat such diseases.
Who cares about forever? If I can get 500 years or so, that’s probably good enough for me.
Perry,
You’re very modest in your demands.
Ok, so no 1000 years life span as some “scientist” proposes.
How wrong. That’s just a mystic belief. Technology helps a little, but just a little, no more. Our strongest weapon in the fight against infectious disease is our natural immune system.
Perry, give me my 120 years as God promised and I’m content. (That is, we’ll debate further at that time, maybe).
No, it just means the changes will happen through changes introduced by technology rather than natural genetic selection.
During the Black Death, people also had immune systems and it did not do them much good. It is unarguable that our greatly extended life spans are because of improvements in technology, not improvements in our natural immune systems.
It is unarguable that our greatly extended life spans are because of improvements in technology, not improvements in our natural immune systems.
It is arguable.
Our longer life spans probably have a lot to do with affluence, abundance, lack of hunger and deficiencies caused by malnutrition. Also with tools and machines that spare us hard toil. (That’s technology, but not in the sense of medical technology).
The greatest and most significant advance in medicine has been the discovery of penicilin and antibiotics, beside the better understanding and practice of hygiene.
So, yes, medicine helps a little, but mostly, when you’re sick, you either die or recover thanks to your own immune system.
The greatest and most significant invention, I’d say, was clean water. Antibiotics are good, but clean water, closed sewers, disinfectants, and hygiene education are the big lifesavers.
Yes Perry, if we were able to re-engineer the immune system, swapping the histocompatibility complexes on all our cells simultaneously and keep the immune system running throughout, that would indeed fix the problem I raise. I have no doubt that such is theoretically possible, but we are a long way from even fully understanding the immune system, let alone acomplishing such a feat. Indeed, if we could do that, I doubt the anti-aging thing would pose us any difficulty implementing.
We will eventually be able to design a better immune system, using our technology to catch and disect any invaders before re-engineering our biology to resist it. Maybe even with nano-technology. And maybe in the year 2000 we will all wear aluminium foil clothes and go to work in flying cars.
I can’t say its impossible and its a fine goal to aim at, but its too early to be making predictions yet. I expect it will be possible to figure out how the aging clock works, and maybe even stop it, in the next few decades. But completely re-engineering the immune system? I’d be guessing more like 50-80 years, and that’s far enough into the future that something else is likely to have turned up to make the question moot. Something maybe even better than we can imagine now.
I guess I don’t see histocompatability problems as deal breakers. All we have to do is synthesize anti-bodies faster than new cloaking mutations can become epidemics. By using synthetic anti-bodies, the immunology problems move from human biology into lab technology, which can evolve. And pretty fast. And synthetic anti-bodies could be used for a lot more than infections. Cancers and some kinds of poisonings for example.
Quite possibly people with fast mutating diseases like AIDS will simply drop by a walk in clinic, have a sample of blood drawn, and leave with a course of anti-bodies tailored to their infection’s lastest mutation.
And that is a worst case. Quite possibly, an intensive treat modify and treat protocol could could include a vaccine. Knock down and wipe out diseases in a single course of treatment.
And I imagine the day will come before too long when we can insert plasmids into eukaryots and do amazing things to our cells with just an engineered virus capable of doing the inserting.
This technology, combined with enhanced monitoring and treatment of diseases while still in the potential vector (which our epidemiologists are already doing), makes the problem solvable.
“…makes the problem solvable…”
Maybe the problem is solvable…. you are entitled to your beliefs.
What medicine does, mostly, right now is this: they might identify your illness – whether it’s a cancer or a virus, (and many times they fail even in that), then they give you some palliatives, and when the time comes, some pain killers, and that’s it.
If you live under the illusion that physicians are like mechanics that are able to fix any part of your body that malfunctions – you are hopelessly wrong about the hard facts.
That’s what we have now, these are the facts.
You’re of course entitled to dream about future miracles, scientific or otherwise..
Nevertheless I enthusiastically support any research in medicine, longevity or in anything else.
Mid,
There’s more to immunology than antibodies, or histocompatibility for that matter. The bugs have ten thousand tricks and we have ten thousand responses, and antibodies are just one part of one of them.
Histocompatibility markers are proteins found on the outside of cells that mark them as our own. Identity cards, if you like ;->. The immune system consists partially of a lot of “policeman” cells that go round killing any cell that cannot present a valid identity card on demand. There are ocasional problems like auto-immune diseases where this goes wrong and innocent citizens get lysed, but generally it is quite effective. (There may be a lesson to be learned here, but it isn’t central to my point. Feel free to have a go, though. 🙂 ) And as is unfortunately often the case, a lot of the nasties have learnt to forge IDs, by evolving similar surface proteins, or even stripping them off the cells they invade as a sort of camouflage suit.
Once they’re able to forge your ID, they can pass through the checkpoints at will. But there is another trick the immune system has, let’s call it racial profiling. Most bugs have surface proteins that don’t naturally appear in the body, like a sort of skin colour. Antibodies float around looking for such proteins, latching on to them, and then screaming at any passing policemen “Kill me! I’m green!” The bug might have the right ID, but the antibodies mark it out for death anyway.
But again, the bugs respond to this by hiding their surfaces, or switching to proteins that look local, or switching their surfaces chameleon-like so often that the hunters can’t keep up. And you have to bear in mind that the immune system is a pretty efficient lab and can cook these things up fast.
For example, suppose the bug makes a change every ten generations. So from one bug you’ve soon got a thousand with the same colour. But then they all switch, but to different colours so you’ve now got about a thousand different colours. Ten generations later, there are a million bugs in a thousand different colours, and they all switch. Now you’ve got a million different skin colours. Ten more generations and you’ve got a billion. Thirty generations in total, at 20 minutes a generation, is about 10 hours. And how many victims? That’s a fast lab you’ve got there…
(Of course, any bug mutating at that rate would make a higher proportion of lethal mistakes, which would disadvantage it with respect to its more careful sisters. The bugs match their costume changes to the response, just as we expend only just enough effort on the response to just about make it. But if you sped up the response, the fast mutators would do better too.)
The bugs can over longer periods try out billions of combinations, most of which get swiftly killed, until they hit on one that is so like your own proteins that you can’t kill it without killing your own cells. Your immune system can’t see it clearly. In practice, even if you do eventually nail every last one, the toxins and dead cells the battle leaves ends up poisoning you, and the whole time you’re scattering them around your environment.
Essentially, the whole thing is a bit like Nineteen Eighty Four versus Invasion of the Bodysnatchers versus The Thing. As I’m sure you’ll agree, ID-based authoritarian schemes like the immune system cannot work forever. You need to take a few carefully screened cells and have them set out (in the Mayflower? 🙂 ) to set up a new colony, free from the parasites and vulnerabilities of the old. When you’re dealing with exponential replicators, it’s an entirely new paradigm, and the usual engineering solution approach doesn’t work. You have to build systems that build systems that build solutions. And that means AI, which we haven’t quite cracked yet.
Nature hasn’t figured out a better answer to this question yet than sex and death. Don’t underestimate the problem.
Don’t underestimate the problem.
Wise words.
Or they might balloon out the coronary obstruction, which is definitive care for a heart attack. Or they might bust a clot to treat an ischemic stroke. Or they might pass 200J through the heart, jerking it back into its proper rythmn.
Cancers, and diseases caused by pathogens are a bitch, no doubt. However, the world isn’t over just because we can’t treat everything yet. (Now, if they would only stop giving kids antibiotics for the common cold…)
It was great to see the video records of this Symposium.
I have posted my reflections on these records at:
http://longevity-science.blogspot.com/2007/04/edmonton-aging-symposium.html