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It seems a little strange that advocates for aging research must still make the argument that it is a good thing to prevent people from becoming sick and dying. This seems self-evident! It is true that prevention and cure of disease is a goal with widespread support when discussing specific diseases or age-related conditions. Yet, somehow, as soon as one starts to talk about treating aging as a medical condition, the root cause of the majority of disease and suffering, we are right back to objections that amount to defending a world in which people become sick and die. It is a strange situation that is hard to understand.
As long as there have been humans, there has been death. There’s evidence that funeral rituals may date back hundreds of thousands of years, so it’s likely our species has grappled with its finitude for at least tens of millennia. Is knowing it will end what motivates us to succeed, or provides meaning at all? The first thing to say is that this is one of many objections that demonstrate how we put ageing research into its own ethical category – no-one would ask a cancer researcher whether they’re concerned that a reduction in death arising from their research might negatively affect the human condition, and yet, for ageing biologists, this is a common query.
Much of the meaning in our lives comes from the people that fill it, our families and friends. And much of the pain, both emotional and physical, results from ill health, either theirs or our own. If we were all living longer lives in good health, as medicines against ageing promise, why wouldn’t we want to continue living? And as art, music, science, technology and more continue to advance (perhaps to new places only possible thanks to creators or researchers with extended careers, able to make discoveries only possible with extra decades of experience), it seems incredibly unlikely that we’d get bored.
And, even if we do tire of life itself aged 250, wouldn’t you rather go in a short, painless manner at a time of your own choosing, rather than having life slowly and painfully taken from you over decades by the ageing process? The key point is that medicines for ageing are just that – medicine. They’re no stranger than a heart disease researcher trying to prolong healthy life by creating a drug to lower cholesterol. There’s no real evidence that the extra years bought by preventing heart attacks have stripped modern life of its meaning – so why would adding a few more years free from heart attacks and cancer and frailty do so?