Fight Aging!

Via in Search of Enlightenment I notice that the sole open access treat buried in the latest edition of Rejuvenation Research is a paper on the future of aging research. Along the way it also examines presently widely held beliefs that are at odds with the reality of scientific progress - to the point of holding things back, in fact.

[This paper] makes the case for reviving the Aristotelian conception of political science (namely, that it is the architectonic science). It also makes the case for prioritizing the imperative to tackle the inborn aging process and, most importantly, the obstacles that impede our ability to accurately perceive the importance of tackling aging.

Long time readers will know that I disagree with this author on a number of fundamental axioms regarding political organization and economics, but that doesn't stop it from being a well-constructed paper that is unambiguously in favor of engineering an end to aging. The future for a given field of scientific study tends to look rosier when people holding many different philosophies of life start supporting it, and especially when they have to fight against the mainstream of their community of thought in order to do that.

In any case, take a look and see what you think:

The greatest single threat to the health prospects of today's aging populations is the inborn aging process itself. However, many cognitive limitations and biases impair our ability to accurately perceive this reality.

...

if asked to simulate what a future with no cancer would be like, a person is likely to have a positive emotive response. The same would no doubt be true for eliminating any specific disease of aging, like Alzheimer disease, stroke, or diabetes. However, if asked to simulate what a future of slowed human aging would entail, our deliberations are likely to fall prey to some common prospection errors because of the complexities and indeterminacies of such a simulation exercise. Thus, biogerontologists often face what Richard Miller calls "gerontologiphobia" - "the irrational fear that ageing research is a public menace bound to produce a world filled with nonproductive, chronically disabled, unhappy senior citizens consuming more resources than they produce."

There's much more in that vein. Longevity science will not, of course, produce a world of eternally frail, age-damaged people. Firstly it doesn't actually seem possible to achieve that end, given what reliability theory tells us about the way in which complex systems respond to damage and repair, and secondly researchers and the people who fund their efforts are aiming to build technologies that can extend or restore youth. We want to be able live as though young for longer, or regain the youthful biology we lost - we'll choose to pay a premium for that over any other option, and scientists and their funding sources are just as much a part of the market economy as everyone else. They follow the money, as the flow of money is no more than choices, preferences, and wishes writ large and made evident.