If a scientist found a way to halt aging.......
Let's say a good scientist found a way to halt the process of cellular senescence?
Would this person be in danger? Would the therapy be allowed to be given to the masses? Would this be good for the economy?
I work in the Biotech sector and this just hit me. Even if scientists found a cure for aging, would anyone ever know? Or live to tell about it?
I would like to think society would allow such a brilliant discovery to be to the benefit of all.
Hey CiaronSmith, I'm the WSO Monkey Bot and I am sad to say, but this thread is lonely, so thought I'd post in here to try and help out. Some potential topics that might help:
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Fingers crossed that one of those helps you.
Google is one company working on this.
Halting aging is impossible. But, we might figure out how to slow it down significantly.
What makes you say it’s impossible
We’re well on the path already…. Income/wealth already leads to large differences. 15 years of additional life for the top 1% males versus bottom 1% males.
(Peer reviewed source: “The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States”)
Its likely that minor improvements will continue to be made over the coming decades, improvements for treating dementia, cancers, heart disease etc will overall increase longevity. Improvements at the ‘cohortian’/ individual level may be slower in coming, but is an area of active research.
Novel gene based therapeutics are monstrously expensive at this time and insurance rarely covers these types of things. Prices will go down but its likely to be out of reach of the common man for some time. (on the order of ~400k-2m per treatment.)
There are of course serious implications for increasing longevity on the earth, society and economics. The least of which would be increasing concentration of wealth and all its attendant benefits(and drawbacks….)
Absolutely not. Not even close. We are not on the path to stop aging. That would make humans immortal. We are on the path to slow aging, which is the difference between living for infinity and living for maybe a couple hundred years. This is a HUGE difference.
I was taking a charitable interpretation of OP’s question as I interpreted his concerns to be more about how that kind of breakthrough would be used/disseminated/tolerated.
We will have “significant” life extension at some point, immortality aside.
Signification extension of life must come before ‘immortality.’ But isnt 15-20 years significant? Given 70-100 years on earth., I’d argue 15+ years is well on the way to significant life extension. I respect you disagree with that. But my response clearly talks about slow incremental improvements in research, not immortality.
it’s settled science that a cell doesn’t have to die(many cells in our body do not die or degrade during a lifetime and remain active or available for activation) Rather its poor error checking in adjacent cells or external insults and a host of other things that can be looked up like cellular tails being clipped/shortened. (I say that as a doctor with novel papers/presentations on the topic of molecular biology but not related to aging or aging processes.)
And i think given human nature, we aren’t given to stopping when we hit a goal. We like to keep going. If we live to 150 some will want 200, then 300?
I can think of a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be immortal or live to 200. Loss of loved ones who missed out, having seen it ‘all’, making room for my offspring/ allowing diversity of thought… and the case for that magnifies as the extension increases/approaches ‘immortality.’ But there are some who won’t take that view…
In fact, I’d trade time on earth to be able to have a talk with a grandparent I never met or one I didn’t see enough because of career. Theres more to life than length of time alive.
There are think tanks working on this topic today and some of their positions may be unpalatable to many people on this board. Their ideas will shape the publics opinion/ be picked up by politicians on different sides and that is something that we shouldn’t shy away from recognizing. And I was hoping my post would encourage people to look into that a bit more.
Double post
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