Fight Aging!

Biomedical gerontologist and healthy life extension advocate Aubrey de Grey made an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week yesterday. A Real Media format download for the show is also available.

DEMOS are launching a collection of essays exploring the politics of human enhancement and life extension featuring an interview with the Cambridge scientist, DR AUBREY DE GREY, who describes why he believes that the first person to reach 1000 years old may already be alive and why this is something we should strive for. The collection is called Better Humans? and is published by Demos and the Wellcome Trust.

A couple of commentaries from the all-seeing, all-hearing blogosphere are up already:

Would you want to live to be a thousand years old?

But what of living to be 1,000? Clare demonstrated the sort of politician she is by seemingly failing to listen to what Dr Aubrey de Grey was saying and angrily coming up with all sorts of instant objections.

let's live forever

However the most interesting response to de Grey is opposition. Other panellists responded "why should we want to live to 200", "what is wrong with frailty?" and talked about overpopulation. I think these responses - which I shared the first time I considered this issue - are not only missing the point but are frightening. All medical technologies could be similarly doubted, and it would be hideous to do so. What de Grey anticipates are medical technologies so effective they make our present technology seem like leeches and a hole in the head. We are largely resigned to dying in our first century, this is better than spending a life in fear of death. But it doesn't mean that death in the our first century is desirable.

If you don't want to live to 200, you can take the way out any time you choose. We find suicide terrible, but perhaps we should find natural death terrible, and respect the chosen death after a long life, celebrating the fact that nature did not intervene sooner.

But what about overpopulation? What about healthcare, including the costs of and access to longevity technology? What about pensions? These will be significant challenges, but not so significant I think that we should seek to kill everybody off at the age of 80 by suppressing the technology.

It's interesting - and promising in its own way - to see those who would once have been in the naysayer camp now rationalizing their way to common sense (in the form of a pro-longevity, pro-research stance) as the prospects for radical life extension in our lifetime become more rosy. It demonstrates that we're on the right track - we just need to pick up the pace.

Technorati tags: advocacy, life extension