The "Disease" of Aging

I found this post on Digg today. It describes the enormous technological and medical progress being made in the field of aging. The article quotes a Cambridge geneticist, Aubrey de Grey, who says people who are alive today will be able to live to up to 1,000 years of age. Let’s just let that sink in a minute. One thousand…years of age. This man believes that, in the future, there will be 1,000 year old people. A millennium is the length of time this man says people will be able to live for.

While the article notes that Grey’s vision may be a little over the top, there is “a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts” who believe that aging can be significantly slowed or even all-together halted.

Robert Freitas, a nanotech expert at a Palo Alto non-profit, was also quoted as saying, “…in the near future, say the next two to four decades, the disease of ageing [sic] will be cured [emphasis mine].”

A couple of points on this: first, while advancements in genetics and other technology and medicine will undoubtedly lead to longer life-expectancies, I can’t help but think that scientists have a tendency to get ahead of themselves. Human beings are immensely complex, and the likelihood of anti-aging advancements related to each and every aspect of our being progressing such that people are able to live limitlessly – without other, perhaps more substantial, health problems occurring as a result of that immortality – seems slim.

Second, and more importantly, why in the name of all that is holy would we want this? There is a frustrating, even unnerving, belief in our culture that aging is bad. Botox abounds, elders are disrespected, and young people like myself are constantly told that these are the best years of our lives. Freitas’ reference to aging as a “disease” perfectly encapsulates this notion.

But aging is, of course, part of life. Death is part of life. We must be careful that we do not become consumed by our obsession with youth.

This is also not to mention the many other problems with the idea of such drastically extended living. Having people live that long would be an impossible-to-sustain drain on our resources, including space (The Earth is only so big.).

And I for one don’t want to live to be 1,000. Life should be exciting, it should be engaging. If we live long enough, we will very quickly become bored. How many fewer risks would we take if we knew we had centuries to make up for lost time? This all amounts to a sad and, quite frankly, pathetic future.

To the article’s credit, it does recognize some of these latter points (The author quotes one bioethicist as saying, “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”). And the science behind these advancements – and I hesitate to call them “advancements” – is impressive, even thrilling.

But a world desperate for panaceas and ever-lasting youth should be careful what it wishes for.