Live Long, and Prosper?
Free Exchange points us to this interesting Washington Post interview that talks with biologist Abrey de Grey (a name that sounds like it should belong to a character in the next installment of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ) about the possibility of radical life extension. The anonymous FE blogger writes:
De Grey has devised a possible therapy for aging that would extend lifespans for centuries. I find the thought cheering and consider longer lives an unalloyed good. But it seems almost no one agrees.
Straight up immortality does seem like it could be something of a bore, but I’ll admit to being vexed by opposition to extending life by a few hundred years. I know that many objections are religiously motived, but these don’t make much sense to me either.
Just two centuries ago, average lifespan in West was less than 40. In other places it was lower. These days, life expectancy worldwide is about 77. This is due in large part to advances in medical science. Is anyone outside of a few small sects honestly bothered by the way medicine and technology have gradually extended of lifespans over the last few hundred years? I don’t see many hands raised. Why, then, should anyone worry about doubling or tripling lifespans again?
One of the biggest political debates in the country right now is over health care and health insurance. Read books like Jonathan Cohn’s Sick and you’ll be inundated with stories purporting to show situations in which people died for lack of care. The underlying reasoning here — reasoning that I suspect is shared by the majority of the population — is that no one should die when the technology exists to keep them alive. So why does technology-driven radical life extension spook so many people? I’m honestly baffled by this, and have yet to read anything that amounts to much more than someone’s account of having a vague moral instinct that living that long would be a perversion of human existence.
On the other hand, I find Slate’s recent piece on great books you haven’t read to be argument enough for my position. Give me a couple hundred extra years and I might actually get through all those classics.
I’m a lot more comfortable with the prospect of RLE than I used to be. That said, I can see why one would want to draw a distinction between RLE and ordinary means of improving longevity. Keep in mind that one of the main reasons life expectancy has gone up over the last few centuries is that infant mortality has come down dramatically. Sanitation and the development of labor-saving technologies had a big hand as well. In other words, in the old days, if you managed to survive to adulthood and happened be a member of the upper classes, you could expect to live about at long as the average person does today. (According to Psalm 90:10, the average lifespan of a human being is 70-80 years; and that was a couple of thousand years ago.)
So it’s one thing to have technologies that allow one to live to a normal old age, but another to live to ages previously seen only in mythical accounts — Methuselah and such. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, of course, but there is a difference.
— Isaac · Nov 1, 09:09 PM · #
I think if you research this you will discover that only a modest fraction of the extension of life expectancy since 1750 is due to improvments in medicine and surgery (as opposed to improvments in nutrition and sanitation).
Ivan Illich’s “Medical Nemesis” is well worth one’s time and attention (though one may suspect its thesis is overstated).
— Art Deco · Nov 1, 09:53 PM · #
To add to AD’s point, weren’t a lot of those gains also due to plummeting infant mortaility rates?
— Lee · Nov 1, 10:01 PM · #
Two centuries ago life expectancy was in the 40s because infant mortality was factored in, dragging the average way down. Life expectancy for those who survived infancy was more respectable.
— scriblerus · Nov 1, 10:27 PM · #
Not to nit pick, but it’s worth noting that medical advancements have very little to do with moving average lifespans into the 70s range. We can thank engineers for most of that.
If you live much beyond 75, then I guess you can send your doctor a thank you card.
— Ricky · Nov 2, 01:14 AM · #
Aside from the general weirdness of de Grey (he had a 60 Minutes interview, I think, a few years ago) and other folks who just can’t accept dying (frozen heads anyone?) it seems to me one very good reason to worry about these sorts of technologies is that they’re quite likely not to work on everything all at once. As folks above have noted, a good portion of our improved life expectancy is due to improved sanitation and lower infant mortality. Part of it is also the much-improved treatment we give to heart attack victims. As recently as, say, 1970, if you were a 50-year old man who had a heart attack, chance are that you’d die right there or soon after. Now we can do a lot more and so people’s hearts don’t kill them nearly as much as they used to. My 85-year old grandfather had quintuple bypass surgery a few years ago and he’s still kicking around. But – and this is a big but – he has (as many people his age do) developed mild dementia, has trouble getting around because his joints don’t work as well as they used to, doesn’t see or hear as well, etc. What we are likely to get from the de Grey’s of the world (unless you believe there’s some magic “silver bullet” to combat aging per se) are treatments that take care of certain problems of aging (heart disease, eyesight, etc.) but leave others untouched – or make others worse. If we all, let’s say, live to 250, it’s a near certainty, I’d bet, that nearly all the men would get prostate cancer and all the women would get breast cancer. And we’d all likely get skin cancers, serious debilitating injuries (if you’re around longer, you’ll surely tear that ACL playing in the over-150 softball league), etc. Progress on this stuff (if pursued vigorously) is likely to be asymmetrical and it’s worth thinking about those effects.
Besides, can anyone imagine how insufferable the baby boomers would be at 200?
— Michael Simpson · Nov 2, 03:22 PM · #