May You Be Forever Young

In Search of Enlightenment, a piece on Why Worry About Aging?, an extensive post which looks at the aging issue from the point of view of risk taking and biogerontology.

When people ask me what I am working on I inevitably mention aging and the aspiration to retard human aging. This provokes many different responses. The most common response is a sense of surprise that we might actually be able to do something about aging. This is of course understandable, for if one had not been following the field of biogerontology for the past few years one might assume that aging is immutable, for that was a common belief. But this belief has been proven wrong- aging is not immutable.

Once I note this people often persist in their scepticism, and express doubt that we could actually develop a technology that could slow aging in humans (rather than just in mice). Again, this scepticism is understandable, indeed some scepticism is warranted. But I often ask them how much scepticism they have about finding a cure for cancer, or reversing climate change. And when it comes to these issues they are pretty optimistic about the likelihood that these goals could be achieved.

So I push them a bit further… and it becomes evident that this optimism is not based on any scientific experiments that demonstrate a particular therapy could cure all 200+ types of cancer, or that climate experiments demonstrated that we could reverse the rise in global temperature. What their optimism is based upon is the desire to achieve these things, that they would create enormous benefits for humanity. Again, I understand the appeal of this line of thinking. We want to believe that we can achieve those things that would really do a lot of good in the world.

And:

And so at some level everyone knows, to some degree, that aging is a big problem for them as individuals. No one enjoys the fact that their risk of cancer, heart disease, stroke, AD, etc. will continue to rise for all of their remaining years. When in certain moods, we can all admit this. But we don’t want to go on and on about it every day. It’s depressing! And so we tend to bury these feelings deep inside and go on with our daily activities wearing “aging-blinders”.

And so we find there is an enormous disconnect between what the public actually demands of their governments- like protection from terrorists, tackling abortion , etc.- and what would actually substantively improve their lives. If you really want government to reduce your chances of death and disease, then get behind aging research. If there was no chance that scientists could actually develop a drug or intervention that could modify the rate at which the molecular and cellular damage of aging occurs then it would be cruel to tell people to “worry about aging”. But given where the science actually is, it is irrational and irresponsible *not* to tell them to worry about aging. Especially when people fear so many things that really do not pose a great threat to their health and well being.

Via Fight Aging.

From Reason’s post The Way People Think About Aging:

When talking about progress over decades, the most important part of that progress is not the year in which scientific progress reaches a tipping point - although that helps - but it is the year in which advocacy and education reaches a tipping point. Significant progress occurs when a large number of people want it to occur: up until that point matters tends to move slowly. This means that we should pay more attention to the way we used to think, back in the day. How did we wake from our pro-aging trances? That event has to be repeated many millions of times over the next decade if a large community and effective community of supporters, researchers, and fundraisers is to arise.

I think that distinction between technical tipping point and advocacy tipping point is an important one. At some point, more and more people are going to think, “Hey, this is possible and worth pursuing.” But we’ll need some sort of critical mass before the general consensus is, “Let’s go for it.” It’s a critical mass that we’d be better off reaching sooner rather than later.

Prevention.com gives us a quicky article outlining 14 Surprising Signs You’ll Live Longer Than You Think. Their list:

1. Your Mom Had You Young
2. You’re a Tea Lover
3. You’d Rather Walk
4. You Skip Soda (Even Diet)
5. You Have Strong Legs
6. You Eat Purple Food
7. You Were a Healthy-Weight Teen
8. You Don’t Like Burgers
9. You’ve Been a College Freshman
10. You Really Like Your Friends…
11. …and They’re Healthy
12. You Embrace New Challenges
13. You Don’t Have a Housekeeper
14. You’re a Flourisher

Some of these aren’t so surprising, but still a decent list.

Aubrey de Grey on “Why Fight Aging”. Amusing and pointed. Worth your time.

Can’t make it to the Edmonton Aging Symposium in person? You can still be there virtually. They’re offering access to their media stream for a nominal $5.00 CAD. Just register and choose the Internet Access option.

Speakers include Judith Campisi, Aubrey de Grey, James Joseph, Michael West and others. Worth checking out.

Reuters featured Aubrey de Grey recently, with a look at financial implications of life extension.

“Longevity risk” — the chance that people live longer than experts expect — is now a regular topic in the pension industry because this risk is considered difficult to plan for.

Corporate pension funds have been turning to cutting-edge tools such as swaps to hedge risks on their portfolios, but to date coping with the risk of a higher-than-expected lifespan has proven a tough challenge for pension funds.

I hesitate to link to this crap, but I think it is relevant as it so baldly lays out the anti-anti-aging fear case. The article is callled “The curse of immortality: Why anti-aging technology would spell disaster for humankind”, and holds gems like this:

If you think about it, one of the best things about some people is the fact that they will eventually be six feet under. Actually, that’s true for us all.

Pardon? Is that the view we shold hold of our fellow man?

How about this:

All the immortal old people would hang around forever, consuming all the resources and passing new laws to restrict births even more. Meanwhile, their outdated ideas, beliefs and power monopolies would never go away, either. That, you see, would be a genuine curse for all humanity.

What about the capacity to change? Perhaps immortality would force people to clean up their act because they’re going to have to live with the consequences for so long.

Fight Aging is often going on about this topic. It’s the fear thing.

I’m on the side that says living longer means you can have the chance to do more good in the world, and that people are capable of taking more responsibility, even if we don’t see that every day.

If living forever is going to be a curse for you, feel free to let nature prune you from the tree. Me? I’m here for the haul.

News.com.au gives us a story called Eternal life ‘not so appealing’. Brad Partridge, a PhD student at the University of Queensland, researched what people thought of anti-aging using focus groups and surveys.

He discovered that when it comes to life, people are more concerned with quality rather than quantity. “Contrary to what many in the scientific community have been saying, people are actually much more concerned about the quality of life rather than the length of it,” Mr Partridge said.

And:

“Of course you’ve got lots of interest in the concept, but people are more measured than you’d expect,” he said.

There were concerns about overpopulation if everyone lived to 150, and many people said they wanted access to euthanasia if they could live longer.

Reason posted on this over at Fight Aging! recently, and made the very important point that how people are asked these questions can make a huge difference to the result.

Given the widespread nature of the Tithonus error - the belief that living longer would mean being ever more frail and diseased - asking someone whether he would want to live to 120, providing no further context, is much the same as asking whether he would like to suffer for decades in increasing pain, frailty and disease. Not many takers there. Healthy life extension medicine will mean a longer healthy life; a postponement of disease and frailty by preventing or repairing the root causes of age-related degeneration.

It reminds me of trying to sell organic food. Show someone two apples side by side and ask them to pick one, and they’ll go for the more perfectly formed specimen. Then tell them that the perfect-looking one is sprayed and what it was sprayed with, and that the other is organic. Their choice will be affected by the greater information.

It’ll be the same with anti-aging. Context and information will affect people’s opinions and choices.

Let’s hope Mr Partridge keeps that in mind as he studies further.

The Wall Street Journal looked at longevity insurance (excerpt here, subscribers here), which is insurance that pays a guaranteed income, normally after someone turns 85. Given that lots of people fear running out of money if they live too long, it is interesting to see insurers appealing to that fear. The WSJ calls these policies “a new spin on deferred fixed annuities”.

Longevity insurance porvides guaranteed income typically starting after a person turns 85, in exchange for an initial investment made some 20 years earlier. Payouts are fixed and cover you and your sponse for as long as you live.

The main advantage over a deferred annuity? Higher income payouts. Possibly much higher (the article compares a $137 monthly payment to a $710 monthly payment).

The downside? Much less flexibility, like no withdrawals before 85, and typcially no death benefit. If you die before then? Tough beans. There are more flexible schemes, but the cost is lower monthly payments. The Journal gives the expected caveat that longevity insurance should only be part of the financial plan.

Appropriate financial management is going to be a key to a sucessfully extended lifespan. No question there. But perhaps the best longevity insurance won’t come from an insurer. It’ll come from living a lifestyle that promotes longevity, and from embracing the life-extension opportunities as they safely emerge.

Update: Zen Personal Finance did a piece on this, which points to a SmartMoney article.

Fight Aging points to a paper by Mark Walker called Boredom, Experimental Ethics, and Superlongevity.

Abstract:

‘Superlongevity’ may be thought of as doubling (or more) the human lifespan through the use of technology. Critics have argued that superlongevity will inevitably lead to boredom, while proponents have denied this claim. Rather than attempting to resolve the debate through theoretical speculation, I argue that allowing persons to become superlongevitists can be construed as an experiment to decide this issue. Further, the moral benefits of conducting the experiment greatly outweigh the moral costs of not running the experiment.

Love the term “superlongevity”.

I can’t imagine being bored. By the time one has learned to play the French horn, mastered Mandarin, seen what there is to see, and figured out how to make as many positive contributions to the world as possible, a doubled lifespan hardly seems enough.