Fight Aging!

The advance of medical science would proceed far faster if not for certain attitudes pervasive in the research community, and the heavy shroud of regulation that drapes every human endeavor in our modern societies. I've written on these topics in the past, on the cost of central control of medical research in particular: under a regime in which all that is not permitted is forbidden, we should not be surprised to see that barely a fraction of the potential of each new discovery's is utilized.

This is a critical time in the evolution of biotechnology and medical science. Enormous advances are possible in the years ahead, including significant extension of the healthy human life span, yet this marketplace is not open and competitive. Everywhere is the hand of government, suppressing competition, forbidding all that is not expressly permitted, and dragging the potential for progress down into the gutter.

I am far from the only person to see the present state of affairs as it is. A recent interview with James Watson, for example, is on the topic of cancer research, but his comments could equally well be applied to all of medicine and biotechnology:

the Nobel Laureate bemoaned some pessimistic cancer researchers who he said were more interested in merely researching cancer and didn't realise that they had an obligation to cure people and save lives.

"I got real annoyed with someone … at the end of his talk he said, 'we're going to get somewhere over the next ten to twenty years'. He could have said twenty to forty or why didn't he say five to ten?"

"We should try and cure cancer now, not ten to twenty years from now," Watson warned. "It would be sort of irresponsible to all those people who would die of cancer if we don't try and do it now."

...

Watson told journalists that he was in favour of less regulation for clinical trials as this could speed up the process of finding a cure for cancer: "We're terribly held back on clinical tests by regulations which say that no one should die unnecessarily during trials; but they are going to die anyway unless we do something radical. I think the ethics committees are out of control and that it should be put back in the hands of the doctors. There is an extraordinary amount of red tape which is slowing us down. We could go five times faster without these committees."

Nothing is more important to progress than freedom. The simple freedom for patients to collaborate with researchers as they see fit, and take the risks they want to take - not to have the terms of their lives and deaths dictated by uncaring, unaccountable government employees. At the present time, we live in a sick society, one in which it is considered normal and appropriate for people to be blocked from their own considered medical choices by threat of fines and jail, and for vast swathes of research and development to be forbidden outright.

Why, despite the great range of potential applicable biotechnology, do we not see hundreds of millions of dollars invested in startups attempting to address the aging process? The answer is buried in this New York Times article on Sirtris: "Dr. Westphal and Mr. Sinclair stress that they are not working to 'cure' aging, a condition that, so far at least, is common to all humanity and that most physicians do not consider a disease. 'Curing aging is not an endpoint the federal drug agency would recognize,' Dr. Westphal says dryly.