From: Aubrey de Grey (ag24@gen.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2003 - 08:20:32 MDT
Alex Bokov wrote:
> By productive detente I mean: we do science, they do science, and
> nobody calls anybody else 'kooks', at least not in public. By moving
> *any* legitimate scientific study forward, even people who disagree
> with my goals contribute to them. Just some more directly than others.
> Active cooperation is best of course, but I'll take passive cooperation
> over active opposition any day. Heck, even in the field of aging I
> suspect most people view it as 'just an interesting puzzle' and don't
> concern themselves with the implications.
Your last statement is undoubtedly true and is a fine example of what you
go on to say about being programmed to want to die. However, the problem
is that the mainstream actively oppose *all* work that furthers real life
extension in the foreseeable future, on the basis that it's absurdly far
away and hence anything remotely goal-directed at this point is a waste
of money. This is of course self-serving -- by accepting that it's time
to start doing genuinely biomedical gerontology, the researcher who does
purely curiosity-driven stuff implicitly acknowledges that their emphasis
is misplaced -- and I'm afraid that is part of why it's so hard to get
biogerontologists to actually study the relevant biotechnological fields.
(It's difficult to say that something is impossible when you've read the
literature by those who are already most of the way there, but it's easy
when you haven't and can thus maintain your illusion that any such work
that others may speak of is overblown or erroneous or whatever.)
My view, therefore, is that to a certain extent fire must be fought with
fire -- we must make such scientists uncomfortable (though in the nicest
possible way, of course). The best way to make scientists uncomfortable
about their belief in a particular dogma is to challenge them to find a
hole in a position that contradicts that dogma. That's why my "How you
can help" page (<http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/how.htm>) says this:
IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST: write about my work, but most importantly of
all please interview other mainstream biogerontologists (the more
senior and high-profile the better) and ask them to explain why they
don't think we'd cure aging any time soon by the approach I advocate.
I find that my colleagues' opposition to what I say is diminishing very
rapidly -- more so than I'd expected, honestly -- and I believe this is
largely because I've been saying essentially the same thing for a couple
of years now without my position being found glaringly flawed. If other
people start saying it too, to senior gerontologists' faces, it may not
be long at all before the balance of opinion (and funding) tips sharply
in the biomedical direction.
> With regard to logic being on our side. I agree, but a PhD does not
> automatically confer rationality in all facets of life. I've been
> trying all my life to understand the knee-jerk "hubris" reaction people
> like us seem to provoke, and still cannot understand it. It's almost as
> if the majority of the world is somehow programmed to want to die. The
> only useful thing I've learned from years of debates on this topic is
> to circumvent the issue by focusing attention on more 'mundane' aspects
> of the research.
Unfortunately, this circumvents the issue rather too thoroughly (see
above).
> Furthermore, there is one anti life-extension argument that I cannot
> accept, yet also cannot fully refute: overpopulation.
You almost answered yourself here. Since people are so overwhelmingly
fixated on the idea that making everyone live indefinitely is an awful
idea, the problem is not one of sociology, nor even philosophy, but of
psychology. There is no appreciable prospect of making someone more
enthusiastic about life extension by describing how humanity might be
able to cope with overpopulation (or boredom, or loss of "meaning",
etc): as you point out, they can just say "but you're hoping for the
best -- it's safer not to go there in the first place". No: what one
must do is ask them what they would do if given the choice between (a)
living for (say) the next year, but thereby (by some unspecified
mechanism) denying some unconceived person the chance to be born and
some other living person the right to procreate, or (b) giving those
people those chances, but dying in (say) the next year. This is the
choice we will each be making, every day in one way or another, in a
post-aging world in the worst-case scenario where emigration off the
planet does not arrive (or does not appeal), birth rate fails to fall
fast enough, etc. Thus, it is the choice we today give or deny those
who might be alive to have that choice if we develop real anti-aging
medicine as soon as we can but not if we delay. (Those people may or
may not include some of us, of course.) Putting the issue in these
personal terms is powerful, because the only way out of approving of
life extension while choosing (a) above (and while answering similar
questions about boredom etc similarly) is to argue that it's wrong to
give others a choice that one would take if one had it oneself, and
luckily that's a position that most educated people in the developed
world don't enjoy finding themselves taking.
Aubrey de Grey
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