The July 20, 2007 Future Salon meeting was titled, The Science and Ethics of Longevity Research. This is Part 1 of a summary of that presentation as well as commentary and supplemental information regarding the topics and concepts discussed. Commentary, of course, represents my own views and responses to the presenters’ points, not the views of the presenters.

When I entered the tidily furnished, modern cafeteria of Palo Alto’s SAP Labs facility, I still did not know what to expect beyond a talk between biologist Aubrey de Grey and bioethicist William Hurlburt. I did not know if the audience would consist primarily of life-extensionists, death apologists, or people who were simply curious, and I did not know what kind of dynamic would play out as the evening moved forward.

Attending “future-themed” events (for lack of a better term) is something I am fairly new to, and in general I tend to approach new places and experiences like a cat: inching about the perimeter of the area, trying to get a sense of the space at hand and the shapes within it, and eventually finding a quiet corner to settle into where I might observe the goings-on around me. I recognized a few of the other early arrivals and offered greetings to some of them, but mostly just looked around, took random photographs, and nibbled on raw vegetables from the refreshment table.

Eventually, I found myself a nice table by the window where I could set up my laptop and stayed there for practically the rest of the evening. On a whim I decided to see if there was any wi-fi in the area, and lo and behold, SAP had a “guest” network connection. This thrilled me more than it probably should have — for some reason, I get schoolgirl-excited at the mere prospect of being able to walk around with a portable computer and (where possible) simply turn it on and without so much as a wire, be connected to the most extensive information-transfer medium in known existence. There was a kind of crisp, flowing beauty in being able to log on, upload a photograph showing the very room I was actually in, and post it to the Web within the space of a mere few minutes.

Soon, the room filled up with more people than I’d expected to see at such an event. I was very impressed by the turnout, and the attendees were very civil and respectful of both the facility and the event itself (which is always nice to see, considering one of the reasons I generally avoid crowds is the fact that large groups of humans tend to generate unpleasant, loud, screamy, emergent properties).

An informal audience survey at the beginning of the event revealed what looked to be a slight preference for hearing more about the science side of things, but ethics ended up being the main focus of the evening anyway. This is by no means a complaint, though — while the dissemination of more good, solid, technical information about longevity science would indeed be welcome, the evening’s focus was quite appropriate given that the primary discussion was to occur between a biologist (with an understandable interest in bioethics), and a bioethicist. The meeting was framed as a “debate” of sorts, and (generally speaking) when it comes to science, you don’t debate it to prove that it works, you do it and see if it works.

Aubrey de Grey began by noting two mutually exclusive positions (associated with science and ethics) that tend to come into play when people state opposition to longevity research:

Position 1: “I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is feasible, because it is clearly not desirable.”

Position 2: “I refuse to think seriously about whether defeating aging is desirable, because it is clearly not feasible.”

Two argumentative frameworks tend to be associated with the above two positions, according to de Grey: the “Argument from Superficial Authority”, and the “Argument from Personal Incredulity”.

My impression is that people taking Position 1 most often tend to argue from superficial authority. I would imagine that this includes people who invoke “Nature”, the words of conservative bioethicists, or possibly their deity of choice when attempting to explain why seeking to extend the healthy lifespan is a bad idea.

People taking Position 2, on the other hand, tend to argue from personal incredulity — that is, they consider it a foregone conclusion that human lifespan is basically fixed at a particular point, and that our chance of moving this point outward is so small as to be functionally negligible.

In order to at least begin to address the above positions and their supporting attitudes, de Grey suggests demystifying the task of actually achieving longevity medicine. This is where the majority of the “science talk” took place during de Grey’s presentation — the “simple logic” of Life Extension Escape Velocity (which is probably quite familiar by now to most who have been following longevity science for any length of time) implies that as time goes by, it will become possible to fix more and more of the damage that accumulates as a person ages. Simply put, fixing half the damage will allow a person to live to the point where it is possible to fix 3/4 of the damage, then 7/8 of the damage, and so on, and so forth.

It is worth noting here as a reminder that the notion of “escape velocity” is not new. A 1978 article in Future Magazine described the concept as follows:

…if you are in your 40s, you will probably not be hauled off­stage by the Grim Reaper in 2008, as the insurance companies are betting. You will probably still be here in 2078. And if you are in your twenties or younger, you have a good chance of being around until 2098.

But if you will be around that long, what will happen in the meanwhile?

Even if the current predictions of such learned scientists as Dr. Segall, Dr. Prehoda and Dr. Komarov — projecting life spans of 400-1000 years — are a generation premature, two generations premature or even three or four generations premature, still, you have a good chance of being here when these dreams are achieved.

In short, even if we can only double lifespan in this generation, we will still be around when further breakthroughs will probably triple it, quadruple it or raise it into millenniums.

It is somewhat sobering (as it should be) to read articles like that quoted above now, nearly 30 years later, and realize that little progress of the sort imagined by 1970s futurists has come to pass. In some respects this is certainly a good thing — I mean, I don’t really see myself being happy in a silver unitard. But I don’t doubt that there are probably a fair number of “old school” cryonicists and other longevity-oriented folks out there who have been around to see a lot of change in the world, yet little in the directions that indicate the probable emergence of life extension medicine sooner rather than later.

However, the good news is that the Escape Velocity concept is now in a far better position to be realized than it was 30 years ago — for the simple reason that now, people are actually making tangible efforts toward achieving the first significant longevity milestones. People unfamiliar with the subject of life extension are likely to assume that what is being sought is a “magic bullet” approach, when this is not actually true at all — age-related health decline is an extremely complex phenomenon that will require complex, incrementally applied solutions. (On this subject, I was pleased to see a lovely color version of a particular graph that, if I recall correctly, was brainstormed into existence at the meeting I attended back in January with various members of the Methuselah Foundation and other interested parties.)

de Grey continued the science discussion by noting the fact that metabolism is the primary path by which damage occurs, and that this damage is what eventually leads to recognizable pathology. He also mentioned the possible utility of biological simulations in predicting the efficacy of treatments applied to restore various aspects of health to people of various projected ages.

After that, the more practical discussion gave way to the more philosophical (I am guessing that de Grey wanted to have at least some reasonable longevity justifications out on the table prior to Hurlburt’s speech). The Ethics portion of de Grey’s discussion began (at least according to my notes) with his noting of some of the key psychological challenges to longevity research:

- People tend to fear the unknown (and a world in which age-related death is no longer a certainty definitely qualifies as an “unknown”).

and,

- It used to make sense to engage in apologism for the nastier bits of the aging process (because we honestly didn’t have much hope of actually doing anything about it).

In response to these challenges, it was suggested that we ought to apply reflective equilibrium to the problem of ageism (which is really a large part of the root of opposition to longevity medicine), and that ethics ought to be revealed as a “people skill”. (I really appreciated the second point being made, because all too often it seems that very superficial criteria are used in order to determine “people skills”, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging the ethical aspects of a situation.)

de Grey also made the point that the job of a bioethicist is to “provide arguments that people in general, not just bioethicists, will find persuasive.” This was a good point to make, considering that it is very easy to become so immersed in one’s own professional jargon that one forgets that the result of ethical explorations must be, at some point, applied to and tested against the real world (in a manner that can, and will, affect real people).

The “wisdom of repugnance” argument was also invoked here, in the context of suggesting that visceral reactions sometimes do lead to preferential moral positions. After all, quite a few things that did not used to be considered “repugnant” now certainly are; examples given were slavery, mass murder of indigenous peoples, non-universal suffrage, and homophobia. All these things are now fairly widely condemned, when they used to be accepted as a matter of course. Applying the “wisdom of repugnance” to the subject of longevity, de Grey asks whether age-related death might perhaps become repugnant at some point.

The answer to this query depends on whether people are willing to engage in a general move toward valuing life more than they did in the past. Some trends do seem to point in this direction; de Grey cites the less-frequent incidence of war between developed nations in recent years as suggestive of greater valuation of life.

However, I am personally a bit more torn on whether most people are actually moving more toward valuing life than away from this position — sometimes it seems as if the opposite is actually true, particularly in the cases of elderly and disabled persons. Certainly, it is possible that a majority of persons will come to the position of always giving the lives of existing persons the benefit of the doubt, but I think we’ve got a long road ahead in this regard.

de Grey also brought up the commonly-cited point that “there is no difference between saving lives and extending lives”. I will not summarize this point here again, since I have covered it in the past.

Overall, de Grey’s opening statement, while it seemed slightly hurried (understandable, given the time constraints), did manage to portray longevity research as nothing more than the logical extension of medicine to persons of all ages, not just the young. I did not really learn anything I didn’t already know, or hear any pro-longevity arguments I’d not encountered in the past — but I certainly enjoyed seeing a room full of people (there must have been close to, if not slightly more than, 100 in attendance) who appeared to mostly support the pro-longevity position. As such, I figured that the next presenter, William Hurlburt, would have a very tough time defending his more conservative position to such a crowd.

(Continued in Part 2)

Date posted : July 23rd, 2007 by AnneC Last Modified : July 23rd, 2007 / Filed under : Feeds / Report a Concern Navigate : Previous post / Next post / Top of Page
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