I’ve been meaning to post a link to Ronald Bailey’s excellent survey of life extension technologies and controversies, Forever Young for several months now. Okay, there — I finally did it.
Bailey does a nice job of covering the long-running battle between longevity optimists and pessimists, including the $500 million bet between demographer Jay Olshansky and biologist Steven Austad. The two set up a trust fund with $150 that has to pay the loser or his heirs $500 million in 2150 depending on whether or not there is anyone alive then who is at least 150 years old — Olshansky is betting against the possibility.
But as Bailey points out, demographers have a long history of making inaccurate predictions about future longevity. He cites, for example, demographer Louis Dublin’s 1928 prediction that average life expectancy in the United States would never rise above 64.75 years. Today, of course, average life expectancy exceeds that figure by almost 12 years.
The longest living person whose age can be verified, of course, was Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122. So assuming that’s the upper bound for life expectancy without any upcoming radical life extension therapies, Austad looks like he’s got a pretty good chance of winning his bet.
Bailey also surveys the current status of life extension research from the results of calorie restriction to vitamin supplements, hormone replacement therapy, and the possibility of nanomedical technique to repair damage to our bodies and thereby extend our lives.
And Bailey also does his usual nice job of skewering the critics who think that an average human life span of 150 years would be a bad thing. Leon Kass, who unfortunately is one of the folks the Bush administration keeps calling on for bioethical advice, believes that people who lived very long life spans or were even effectively immortal barring accidents, murder, etc. would no longer be truly human (and unlike the Extropians, he considers that a very bad thing).
I, of course, agree completely Bailey who ends his long article by writing,
“A dramatic increase in lifespan is inevitable,” Aubrey de Grey said in the British Sunday Times two years ago. “We understand aging at the molecular level sufficiently to not just imagine interventions to retard aging, but enough that we can describe them. It’s an engineering project now, not a scientific one. We just don’t know how long it will take.”
To which I say: Hurry up! The 22nd century looks too interesting to miss.
Source:
Forever Young. Ronald Bailey, Reason, August 2002.