Fight Aging!

Here are a few thoughts on the need for advocacy in longevity science from Rejuvenaction:

People don't think that ageing is a disease because they're used to thinking that it's just a stage of life. They will start to finally accept that this is not the case only when a sufficiently large number of other people in positions of authority, scientists and organizations, will come out and say it out loud. That's one sad truth: people accept things far more quickly than they understand them, and if, at some point, news from the anti-ageing world will frequently populate their TV screens, social media feeds, newspaper articles, and even casual discussions, they will stop ignoring the problem of ageing and cease to oppose its resolution. Nobody likes to advocate for an unpopular cause: it doesn't feel good to be the only person in a group to support a certain claim while being fiercely opposed by all the others, but it does feel nice to be on the winning side of an argument.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the SENS Research Foundation and a few others, researchers of the field are quite hesitant about their goals. I don't see anything wrong with looking for a "fountain of youth". Actually, I don't see how can you want to just "increase health span" without looking for a fountain of youth or eternal life. If they want to increase the current health span it's clearly because they think that the current one isn't enough. So they're not okay with getting sick of the diseases of old age at 80. Now just how much do they want to increase this health span? Till you're 100? 120? When is it okay to get age-related diseases? Unless you increase health-span indefinitely, at some point you are going to get age-related diseases, and they will kill you.

And say that one day they manage to extend health span so that you don't start experiencing age-related decay until you're 120. Then some other researchers come along and say that "they just want to extend health span" so that age-related diseases are delayed until you're 140. Are we saying no to that? Extending your health span up to when you're 120 is fine but up to when you're 140 is not? Why? This game is rather silly, particularly when you think about the obvious fact that unless you have a health problem of some sort, you do not die: yes, being shot, poisoned, electrocuted, eaten by a shark and whatever violent death you can think of counts too, because they all cause you health issues that eventually (rather fast, in fact) kill you. So, if you're not looking for eternal life, it means you're explicitly and intentionally leaving around some health problem of which people can die. In the case of age-related diseases, which ones should we leave around? Which age-related diseases are okay to die of? Alzheimer's? Cancer? Cardiovascular disease? Make your pick - I'm okay without any of those, thank you.

I'm willing to concede that, perhaps, the researchers are playing it safe: they know that if you dare saying that you want to get rid of biological ageing altogether then people will jump down your throat, and thus it's better to slowly get them used to anti-ageing research before making bolder claims. However, I disagree: curing ageing is an urgent humanitarian problem, and there's no time to fool around to please the masses. We need to educate people, get them understand that curing ageing and immortality aren't the same thing at all, that age-related diseases are an extremely serious and compelling problem that needs to be addressed right now, before it goes from bad to worse, and that all the objections to the defeat of ageing make no sense whatsoever.

Link: https://rejuvenaction.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/which-age-related-disease-would-you-like-to-die-of/