Over at the Speculist you'll find another anecdotal look at why it is we advocates for engineered longevity have lot of work yet to do. Building a large and dynamic research community akin to that formed to tackle cancer will require widespread support and acceptance of work to repair and reverse the damage of aging. A hundred thousand people die miserable age-induced deaths every day, and hundreds of millions more struggle with age-related degeneration and suffering - this horrifc toll dwarfs any other, natural or manmade. Yet, as I recently noted here, it seems that the first reaction of a great many people is to declare how terrible it would be to cure aging:

Those who think taking on aging is a "misuse" of medicine simply baffle me. If medical research came up with ways to eliminate cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, would anyone argue that those treatments represent a "misuse" of medicine? Why is it bad for people to die from those things but okay for them to die from something else?

Imagine somebody asks you to make a donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Would you respond to that by saying, "Why? So those diabetes sufferers can continue their lives of self-serving hedonism?"

Or maybe someone asks you to support Race for the Cure, and you respond with: "Hey, wait a second. If all these women survive breast cancer, what's that going to do to Social Security?" Or how about: "Where will we get food and fresh water to support all these surviving women?" Or maybe: "I'm sorry, I can't help you. It just wouldn't be right to encourage these cancer sufferers to look at the natural progression of their lives as something malignant. Well, okay, granted - cancer is malignant, but you see what I'm saying."

No, you would never say anything like that, because only a moral cretin of truly world-class proportions would even think anything like that. But turn those cancer or diabetes victims into old people, and they become fair game - people whose continued existence is just too inconvenient to bear - people who need to die already, who it would be a misuse of medicine to help.

A certain self-destructive Malthusian current seems to flow through many of the more strident objections towards engineered longevity.

And yet, alongside the ethos of human rights and the development of heroic medicine, contemporary society appears estranged from its own humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life in any meaningful way when people - or at least the growth of the number of people - are regarded as the source of the world’s problems. Alongside today’s respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet. ... today’s Malthusians share all the old prejudices and in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself. Is it any surprise, then, that some of them actually celebrate non-existence? The obsession with natural limits distracts society from the far more creative search for solutions to hunger or poverty or lack of resources.

...

Life - and by extension, the necessary means and medical technology to make that life worth living - is the goal of healthy life extension. Oblivion and poverty are the goals of the modern Malthusian. This is a reminder once more that the greatest obstacle to healthy life extension research is not the technological hurdles, but rather those amongst us who would see us all age and die to satisfy their errant beliefs.

Posted by Reason