The main purpose of ageing research at present is NOT to make people young and immortal as is often publicised in the media, but instead to prevent/combat disease and disability, allowing everyone to live healthier lives for longer. Is this media representation of ageing research detrimental to the true focus of ageing research? If you disagree with the main purpose of ageing research outlined in the question please state why?
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One of the first people to respond to this question was Aubrey de Grey with the following:
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Your premise is somewhat wide of the mark, in that most people who do research into aging actually regard any appreciable therapeutic benefit from their work as a very remote possibility (in both senses - unlikely, and very distant in time if it happens at all). Thus, their purpose is merely to **understand** aging, rather in the way that the purpose of meteorologists is to understand the weather, as opposed to actually doing anything about it.
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However, there is indeed a small but growing minority of gerontologists (including myself) who do identify the postponement of aging as our main purpose, not least because we are more optimistic than the majority of our colleagues with regard to the possibility of success. For us, you have it exactly right: the goal is to prevent people from going downhill as they become chronologically older. The problem is, we recognise that this will have a side-effect (which most of us regard as a side-benefit, but that's another issue altogether): people won't tend to die peacefully in their sleep either, any more than healthy 30-year-olds do, until and unless they get to an age at which the therapies we develop cease to work. Worse yet (he said, sarcastically), for those of us (like myself) who claim that the therapies that will first make a major impact on aging will be bona fide rejuvenation therapies, i.e. therapies that restore the molecular and cellular (and higher-order) structure of the body to something like the way it was in young adulthood, the situation is particularly extreme, because the likely rate at which such technologies will be improved following their initial development is such that the therapies will never cease to work: aging will be postponed faster than it occurs, so it will never catch up with us. (This is the phenomenon that I've termed "longevity escape velocity".) Thus, I predict that people's life expectancies will be determined only by their incidence of death from causes not related to their age, like accidents and nearby supernovae. That is the simple and inescapeable conclusion of the work I do. Clearly it means people still have a non-zero risk of death each year (or indeed each day) - but unfortunately it does sound awfully like immortality if you're the sort of journalist who wants to sell papers, so that's how it tends to get described.
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So to your main question: is this detrimental? Yes, I believe it is immensely detrimental. (I don't precisely blame the journalists in question, you understand - they're just doing what they're paid to do - but still.) Ultimately, the reason why calling my goal "immortality" sells papers is because it trivialises it - it confuses my work with something that we all know is impossible, i.e. the technological elimination of any risk of death. And an awful lot of people need that confusion - they need to be helped to believe that what I'm doing is really not science but just entertainment. Why do they need that? Because they've made their peace with aging. They've spent their lives in the situation where there was no hope for escaping this terrible, yet rather distant, fate - so they've had the choice of either (a) spending their time preoccupied by that, or (b) putting it out of their minds and getting on with their miserably short lives, making the best of a bad job. And of course the rational thing to do in such a situation, even if it entails quite unbelievably irrational rationalisations, is (b). So now this troublemaker comes along and says there may be a chance. Now, if I were saying "Hey, here is the actual therapy, today, proven and provided", there'd be no problem - just as when Pasteur worked out that hygiene was a good idea, or whatever. But unfortunately all I'm offering is a **chance** that in a few **decades** we will have that techniology. And an awful lot of people don't want to get their hopes up, for fear of having them dashed.... so they stick to what they know, their faith that aging really is still inevitable. But at the same time, they desperately want, in their heart of hearts, to know as soon as possible when breakthroughs are made - which is why I do at least two media interviews every WEEK even though I don't even do any experiments of my own. But that exposure to my work needs to be camouflaged as entertainment in order to be palatable.
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So, clearly, what I would dearly like to occur is for the media to have the guts to tell my story like it is, and to dare/embarrass/coerce their audience into thinking about it properly and then getting off their backsides and contributing whatever they can (money, activism, whatever) to the crusade to save 100,000 lives per day. But as I said, the journalists in question don't get paid to make their audience uncomfortable, so I'm not holding my breath.
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Cheers,
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Aubrey
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