Since I posted on the topic way back when (and again the next year, even), I should probably note that the legal exchange between the folk running the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) and researcher S. Jay Olshansky - backed to the hilt by the University of Illinois - is at an end. Both sides settled, the suits are dismissed, and the net result appears to be a modest flow of capital in the general direction of lawyers. No victory for freedom of speech if you had to pull out a bigger club and wallet in order to obtain it.

No link either, I'm afraid; this comes via folk of the Gerontology Research Group mailing list. If you're interested in watching scientists and healthy life extension advocates discussing the latest happenings, or threads on the plasticity of human longevity (and the plasticity of our expectations thereof), then you should be signed up.

Insofar as this legal affair goes, the end result is pretty typical of the genre; courts move glacially, and the world of business and research - the world of people in general, really - moves rapidly. The changing activities and public positions of both sides made the original point of the exercise - such as it had one - somewhat irrelevant. Once it became framed as a slugging match, there was little to gain and much to risk in continuing.

I will say this; if a scientist claims - with backing - that your products don't work, or that you are cherry picking studies to make a bad point, lawsuits are a poor response. In fact, they bolster the accusation being made. If you have something that works, you can demonstrate that fact via the scientific method. If you don't, you can't. If you're in that grey zone of uncertainty that exists in complex, poorly understood fields, then that's where you are - but you can't fight reality with the legal system. Instead, get out there and find or develop something better to sell.

The A4Ms and Life Extension Foundations of this world are afterthoughts and sideshows to the real action in the healthy life extension sphere. They are a form of brand pasted onto the normal, everyday businesses of general health and wellbeing. They are aspects of a commercial development and delivery mechanism for healthy life extension science that, as of yet, has nothing meaningful to deliver. This is the failure of the last generation of advocates - the cart placed well and truly before the horse. They could be doing a great deal of good ... but for every person woken to the potential that life span can be extended, there is a person trained to think that it's all about vitamins and what you eat.

The healthy life extension of the future will have nothing to do with the often earnest folk who peddle supplements, exercise and good advice for general health. Take a trip to the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senesence website, or look back in the archives here and at the Longevity Meme. The future is nanotechnology to cure cancer, gene therapies to repair specific molecular age-related damage in nerve cells, the replacement of faulty mitochondria via protofection, replacement of worn, failing stem cells and immune cells with undamaged clones, the building of new organs to order, and a hundred other soon to be realized results of the biotechnology revolution. Advanced medicine - that is what will meaningfully extend your life. Recognize this fact and you're doing better than a great many people who see no further than the materials put out by the "anti-aging" marketplace.

Technorati tags: anti-aging, legal

Posted by Reason at November 16, 2006 9:47 PM | TrackBack (0)