The Speculist

The current issue of The Scientist, sporting the catchy phrase "Fight Aging" on the cover,* features an article on the reality of life extension in the near future:

Imagine an intervention, such as a pill, that could significantly reduce your risk of cancer. Imagine an intervention that could reduce your risk of stroke, or dementia, or arthritis. Now, imagine an intervention that does all these things, and at the same time reduces your risk of everything else undesirable about growing older: including heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer and Parkinson disease, hip fractures, osteoporosis, sensory impairments, and sexual dysfunction. Such a pill may sound like fantasy, but aging interventions already do this in animal models. And many scientists believe that such an intervention is a realistically achievable goal for people.

The experience of aging is about to change. Humans are approaching old age in unprecedented numbers, and this generation and all that follow have the potential to live longer, healthier lives than any in history. These changing demographics also carry the prospect of overwhelming increases in age-related disease, frailty, disability, and all the associated costs and social burdens. The choices we make now will have a profound influence on the health and the wealth of current and future generations.

Reason, of that blog with the catchy name, observes that the authors of the piece, S. Jay Olshansky, Daniel Perry, Richard A. Miller, and Robert N. Butler, are not exactly radicals or firebrands; no, they "collectively stand as core and representative of mainstream gerontology and aging research." These are the folks who are usually on the other side of the debate with people like Aubrey de Grey.

Now, lest we get carried away, it's important to note that the life extension they're talking about isn't the variety that we normally talk about around here. They suggest that it would be realisitic to slow the aging process by about seven years, making tomorrow's 75-year-old the equivalent of today's 68-year-old.

Seven years doesn't sound like all that much, but we'll take it. Much more exciting, as Reason points out, is not the amount of life extension being discussed, but the very fact that the mainstream has shifted and is now seriously talking about it all. Progress!

* A cover featuring the words Death Sucks seems almost inevitable, doesn't it?