Living Longer: Who wants to live forever?

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

Background

This seminar was the third in the ESRC funded Seminar Series The 'New' Ageing Populations: Mapping identities, health, needs and responses across the lifecourse, led by the Institute of Gerontology, King's College London.

BioCentre was pleased to be a co-host to this event with UCL Grand Challenges of Human Wellbeing.

The potential of new ageing populations’ extending lifespans opens new fields for discussion of bioethics and in particular the issue of limits to longevity. Key questions we seek to address here include: What can bio-gerontology tell us about increasing longevity? What are social implications of increasing lifespans? Should we all live forever? Here we aim to consider the emerging cohorts of older adults who engage the most high-tech life extension therapies in later life. This population is growing exponentially in the U.S., and perhaps elsewhere, and will continue to do so as technologies for longevity-making proliferate, and as a new kind of social ethics enables that proliferation.

Making Longevity in an Aging Society- linking technology, policy, ethics
Sharon Kaufman

An explosion in the varieties of life-extending interventions for older persons is changing medical knowledge and societal expectations about longevity, 'normal' old age and the time for death. Cultural assumptions and expectations about growing older are partly shaped by a new form of ethics, constituted by the routines and institutions that comprise ordinary clinical care. To be distinguished from bioethics, with its emphasis on clinical decision-making in individual situations, this new form of ethics can be characterized as an ethical field because it is exceptionally diffuse. It is 'located' in and shaped by health care policies, standard technologies and clinical evidence. It emerges in what physicians understand as standard care and in what patients and families come to need and want.


Renaissance treatises on ageing well
Chris Gilleard

In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous books were written on the subject of ageing, longevity and living well.  This paper briefly outlines the recipes for a good old age that they offer as well as the ‘modern’ sense and ‘medieval’ nonsense they contained.  Looking back I suggest that they derive much of their content from Galen and his Muslim commentators, the idea of the natural and the non-natural aspects of ageing and the particularly contested status that ageing had in his writing and the implications that had for prolongevity doctrines.  Looking forward, I will draw out some points of similarity as well as points of difference between these treatises and contemporary writing on ‘successful ageing’.

 

The future of death & ageing
Guy Brown

Ageing is not natural: it was rare in humans and wild animals prior to the modern age. In last 200 years, human longevity doubled, while the rate of ageing remained largely unchanged. The result is: an ageing population, a degenerative end to life, and a switch from digital to analogue modes of death.  Preventing the end-of-life from becoming a living hell depends on rebalancing our investments in life (preventing age-related disease, disability and dementia) relative to simply preventing death.  Otherwise we are doomed to the Tithonus scenario. 

Speaker Profiles

Prof. Sharon Kaufman,


Professor, Medical Anthropology. Institute for Health & Aging, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Author of:

• The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1987
• The Healer’s Tale: Transforming Medicine and Culture. Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1992
•  A Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life. NY: Scribner 2005/Univ. of Chicago Press 2006

 

Dr. Chris Gilleard

Honorary Research Fellow in the Division of Research Strategy at University College London Medical School

Chris Gilleard has published numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of ageing including a number of papers on the history of ageing. He is the co-author (with Paul Higgs) of Cultures of Ageing: Self, Citizen and the Body (Prentice Hall, 2000) and Contexts of Ageing: Class, Cohort and Community (Polity, 2005). He is also a co-author of Ageing in a Consumer Society (Policy 2008). Chris Gilleard is currently writing a book on the history of ageing and old age in Western society. In 2007 he was, with Paul Higgs, a finalist in the Gerontological Society of America’s Social Gerontology Award.




Dr. Guy Brown

Senior Lecturer at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge

Dr Guy C. Brown received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the Biochemistry Department at Cambridge, then had a College Research Fellowship from St Catharine's College. He then moved to the Department of Physiology, University College London, with a Wellcome Trust Post-doctoral Fellowship, and after 18 months transferred to a Royal Society Research Fellowship at the Department of Biochemistry at UCL. In 1994 he returned to Cambridge with a Royal Society Research Fellowship, and has been a Senior Lecturer since 2002. He has published about 150 scientific papers, and several books, including most recently: The Living End: The future of death, aging and immortality. His research has been funded by: the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council, the European Union, the Wellcome Trust, the British Heart Foundation, and Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

 

Resources

• King's College London, Institute of Gerontology
• Personal website of Dr. Guy Brown

 

Audio

Audio recordings of this Symposium can be downloaded here