Fight Aging!

President of the Gerontological Society of America, that is. You can find his campaign statement in their latest (PDF-format) newsletter:

In recent years, the biology of aging has become sexy. By that I mean that scientific efforts to understand, and purposely alter, the rate of aging - in animals now, but ultimately in humans - receives an inordinate amount of public attention. Those of us in the field note that it has now become easier to publish our papers in prestigious scientific journals. Our phones ring regularly with inquiries from journalists in both the print and electronic media asking for our interpretations and opinions about new scientific research to be sure, but also about the social, political, and ethical implications of our work.

The dirty truth of it is, of course, that as much as our opinions might be useful in interpreting new biological breakthroughs, most of us have given scant thought to the social, political, or ethical implications of our work. For all of the time we spend at our laboratory bench, we spend little time thinking about the day-to-day life, the personal pleasures, or social roles of the elderly ... which illustrates why the GSA is so vitally important. It is the only organization that routinely brings together people that should be talking to one another across discipline boundaries - caregivers, political scientists, biologists, educators, historians, and philosophers - and forces them to talk to one another. In doing so, it gives form and breadth and context to the work of all of us and makes us consider issues that we might easily avoid by locking ourselves solely in the company of our fellow specialists. I remember the first GSA meeting I attended featured a symposium, organized as I recall by Roy Walford, on the topic of whether it was ethically justifiable to medically retard aging. I was surprised to discover that not everyone considered (as the biologists did) that retarding aging was an unalloyed good thing. Moreover, the reservations expressed were meticulously thought out, clearly and forcefully expressed, and as I later discovered, quite representative of wider public opinion. My horizons were broadened in a way that no number of meetings with other biologists was likely to do.

Steven Austad is a good deal less conservative than many in the GSA when it comes to applying the lessons of aging research to extend the healthy human life span - having a more forward-looking and well known society president would be a positive step forward for the field.