The Slow Spread Of Ideas

The ideas of healthy life extension - and the notion that we are close to greatly extending the healthy human life span, if only the funding were there - arrive but slowly in some quarters. The Washington Post illustrates this point with an article on changes in retirement and work at later ages - miniscule changes in the grand scheme of what is to come, but still unwelcome news to some people. I think this fact illustrates the current set of problems well: "In the late 1920s, the chief actuary of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. put a cap of 65 on life expectancy." The same blindness to advancing medical technology - even in the absence of major investment in the development of working anti-aging medicine - is at work now. Change is coming, and since it'll involve longer, healthier lives, how can it be bad?

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301175.html

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