Fight Aging!

It is fair to say that the mainstream of environmentalism prioritizes conservation of the environment over human comfort and health. Environmental concerns are high on the list of objections raised against treating aging as a medical condition, because most people believe that this will lead to a larger population, and also believe that population increases cannot occur without degrading the environment. Both of those beliefs are false, the latter evidently so given the improvements in the environment created since the 1950s, over a period of considerable population growth. Models strongly suggest that the future is one in which population growth diminishes with increasing wealth, as is already happening in countries like Japan, and we certainly live in a world in which the wealth of individuals and populations is increasing, quite rapidly in the poorest regions.

In this context, it is interesting to see commentary from someone who values both (a) the high profile goals of environmentalism, and (b) the high profile goals of efforts to treat aging and thereby extend the healthy human life span. There is no reason as to why we can't have the cake and eat it in this case. Given the will, we can have both great longevity and the world recreated as an unspoiled garden. The conflicts between these goals are illusionary, an outcome of mistaken ideas as to what greater longevity will mean, and how technological progress and economic incentives work to create new resources and greater abundance, not simply exhaust the resources we have.

Geroscience and climate science: Oppositional or complementary?

Two of this century's most significant public health challenges are climate change and healthy aging. The future of humanity will be both warmer and older than it is today. Taken in isolation from each other, tackling either one of the novel public health challenges of climate change or healthy aging requires foresight, scientific innovation, and collaborative governmental action. However, the public health challenges of the 21st century are even more Herculean because climate change and population aging are occurring simultaneously. And this means that science communication concerning what constitutes empirically valid and morally defensible ways of navigating these dual public health challenges must be sensitive to both the interdependence of the environment and the mechanisms of aging, as well as the common (mis)perceptions about the potential conflict between the goals of climate science and geroscience.

It is a common and accepted role for scientists to get involved in public policy debates, especially if their research pertains to public health. "Responsible biology" entails that scientists conceive of themselves as artisans working for the public good, and thus, they have a moral obligation to reflect on the ends (and not just the means) of scientific research. Is it socially responsible, in a warming planet of a population exceeding 8 billion people, for science to aspire to develop gerotherapeutic drugs? That is, drugs that target pathways involved in aging with the aim of reducing the burden of aging-related diseases and increasing lifespan and healthspan. This question is, for the field of geroscience, the "elephant in the room." It is a question the field must tackle head on vs avoid, lest it risk marginalizing the science of healthy aging.

Unlike scientific innovation for pharmaceuticals treating specific diseases, like cancer, heart disease, or Alzheimer's, biomedical gerontology often faces concerns that arise from what has been called "gerontologiphobia" - "the irrational fear that aging research is a public menace bound to produce a world filled with non-productive, chronically disabled, unhappy senior citizens consuming more resources than they produce." Climate anxiety among younger persons, coupled with "egalitarian advocacy" (a motivation to take action and enact equality-based change), may lead to "succession"-based ageism - the belief that older adults should step aside to free up coveted opportunities. The case for shifting public health priorities from the goal of making further increases in lifespan for older populations via disease control toward the goal of increasing the human healthspan via rate (of aging) control can help abate the assumptions of intergenerational conflict underpinning such problematic sentiments.

Rather than conceptualizing the distributional effects of an applied gerontological intervention as something that would only benefit persons in late life (e.g., increasing lifespan), and climate change as something that only imposes health and economic risks primarily on younger generations, attention must be given to the reality that aging and climate change are intricately connected. Not only are older persons at higher risk for climate change mortality, but the health of the environments we inhabit (including planetary health) influence aging and the healthspan. Rate (of aging) control would improve the quality of life of adults at all ages and for future generations versus simply increasing the number of years of survival for the older persons of today. In addition, the economic benefits of slowing aging will better enable populations (especially those in lower income countries) to invest in the adaptations (e.g., changing land and cropping practices; installing better-draining pavements to deal with floods; improving water storage and use) necessary to minimize some of the harms of climate change.