Should we try to live forever?

1. Background
2. Speaker Profiles
3. Recommended Resources
4. Audio Links

Background

This seminar, led by the Institute of Gerontology, King’s College London, is co-hosted with the Division of Research Strategy UCL, University of Surrey and BioCentre.

A modest proposal of geriatric storage
Bryan S Turner, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

Medical sciences rarely consider the social and economic consequences of a radical life extension project. What are the implications of gerontological and demographic changes for housing, employment, pensions, retirement and the environment? Without radical social reform, the life extension project will intensify social inequality and increase intergenerational conflict. Gerontological sciences cannot help us distinguish between mere existence and life, and hence cannot provide a convincing account of the severe boredom that might accompany indefinite longevity. The populations of the affluent North will continue to age steeply with no real policies to cope with this outcome. The Japanese re-locate their elderly populations to geriatric holiday camps in Thailand & Malaysia, and the British translate their surplus elderly to Spain & Portugal. However, following Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729), I propose more radically that governments address the geriatric surplus by creating large storage facilities to house the cryonically frozen in anticipation of further medical discoveries to postpone disability and death indefinitely and to restore them to active participation in society.

Longevity as a side-benefit of truly good health: what's the problem?
Aubrey de Grey, Chief Scientific Officer, SENS Foundation

Trillions of pounds are spent worldwide in the attempt to fight the various diseases of old age - to depressingly little effect. All these diseases are age-related for a simple and almost truistic reason: they are aspects of the later stages of a degenerative process that goes on throughout life, namely, aging. Thus, aging is a plausible and massively cost-effective potential target for medicine: such medicine would be simply preventative geriatrics. Yet, virtually nothing is spent in the quest for such medicines, largely because of widespread fear of one likely side-effect of making them really work, namely a sharp increase in longevity. This increase would indeed probably have dramatic societal consequences - but so what? We have a problem today, namely the misery of being old and frail, which far outweighs any problem that the defeat of aging might herald. It is thus our clear and present moral obligation to strive our utmost to achieve the postponement, and ideally the defeat, of aging as soon as possible.

Speaker Profiles

Bryan S Turner
Presidential Professor, Ph.D. Program in Sociology

Bryan S. Turner is one of the world’s leading sociologists of religion; he has also devoted significant attention to sociological theory, the study of human rights, and the sociology of the body. In Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), he presents an interdisciplinary dialogue with the literature of economics, law, medicine, philosophy, political science, and religion. His current research involves the role of religion in contemporary Asia and the changing nature of citizenship in a globalizing world. Turner has written, coauthored, or edited more than seventy books and more than two hundred articles and chapters. The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Sage, 2008), first published in 1984, is in its third edition. He is also an author or editor of The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, and The Sage Handbook of Sociology. He is a founding editor of the journals Body & Society, Citizenship Studies, and Journal of Classical Sociology. Turner comes to the GC from Wellesley College, where he was Alona Evans Distinguished Visiting Professor; he is also professor of social and political thought at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Leeds and has been awarded the Doctor of Letters from both Flinders University in South Australia and the University of Cambridge.

 

Aubrey de Grey
Chief Scientific Officer, SENS Foundation

Aubrey is the Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world's only peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging. His research interests focus on the accumulating, and eventually pathogenic, molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism ("damage"). This "damage" constitutes mammalian aging and Aubrey's work seeks to design the interventions necessary for its repair and/or obviation. He has developed a potentially comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks the aging problem down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one.

A key aspect of SENS is its potential to extend healthy lifespan without limit, even with repair processes which remain imperfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Aubrey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies, "longevity escape velocity".

In 2007 Aubrey published his book, Ending Aging, bringing his ideas to a wider audience.

 

Resources

 

Audio

Audio recordings of this Symposium can be downloaded here