People certainly say: "Well, I wouldn't want to live to 100, or I wouldn't want to live to a 1000."
Someone once asked me the question the other way around.
A guest from the audience said: "How long do you want to live?"
And it sort of jumped out at me, that I could answer this by analogy with others things that are closer to home.
A question that is equivalent: "What time do you want to go to the toilet next Sunday?"
It's an equivalent question. First of all,
you know it's a really stupid question. And you know why it's a stupid question:
You know that it's a ridiculous thing to have an opinion about what time you want to go to the toilet next Sunday.
You know you're going to have better information on the topic nearer the time,
and you're gonna be able to act on that information.
Similarly, it's ridiculous to have an opinion about whether you want to live to 100, let alone 1000.
What you want is to forward-plan, to ensure that when you are 99 you have
the option whether to live to 100.
The differences between
our evolutionary environment and today's environment
are extremely numerous and they have led to a number of different types of failure
of the human intuition - the human way of thinking - to actually adapt.
Some of the ways that technology has changed
have actually been adapted to really well. You know, people use the internet pretty effectively
without really having to be taught how and so on.
But, both in terms of risk management and actually,
in terms of fear of the unknown, we just don't have
anything to speak of in our heritage that helps us to work with it.
So of course, the flip side of over optimism that technology will come along in time to
solve things like climate change - the flip side is over pessimism,
about changes that we may be presented with the possibility of,
but which would alter life a great deal.
My own work, of course, is a prominent example. The idea that we might be able to bring aging
under such comprehensive medical control that there is a side effect of living a lot longer -
People immediately jump to realizing that the world will be very different:
Indeed, in a lot of different ways. The sheer number of different changes that immediately come to mind when you think about that scenario,
is very daunting for many people. It really just leaves them to feel:
"Okay let's not go there." They come up with, really, not very good reasons
it must be said, but nevertheless, they come up with reasons that they feel very ferverently about
why we should just accept the current situation where people get sick and they die as a result.
"What is true currently is what ought to be."
"The world is the best possible world already." It's obviously a fallacy.
Humanity, since the dawn of technology, has acted in contravention of that principle.
If one says that it's natural to die at seventy or even at ninety,
than you know it's equally natural for half of infants to die before the age of one from infectious diseases.
That's what happened until a couple hundred years ago, but I don't see people
saying that's natural or that it's bad that
Louis Pastor and Edward Jenner and everyone who came afterward and did what they did,
and figured out how to reduce infant mortality.
"Well yeah, but that's infant mortality; that's sort of conditional. It was risky, but maybe not so natural."
"The thing about aging is that it kills everybody at more or less the same age -
if they haven't died of anything else first."
But then, one again can appeal to what we already do and what everyone approves of our doing:
Doing our very best to postpone the diseases and disability of old age.
There's alot of money being spent on trying to stop people from getting cancer or to keep them
healthy and postpone their cancer.
Similar for cardiovascular disease or diabetes or osteoarthritis or any of these things.
So then you have to ask: "Why are we in favor of that work?"
"Work that postpones these diseases, why is that good?"
In order to justify the naturalistic approach: "This is how it ought to be for aging."
One has to conclude, basically,
if one's honest, that one's actually only in favor of medicine for the diseases of old age -
so long as it doesn't work very well.
Now, what's that about?
Everyone's got their own tipping point. Everyone's got a different tipping point:
How much they need to see is happening before they can really believe
the whole enchilada is going to happen.
And, that it will be desirable as well. The government or typical public foundations that get money from a broad range of people:
They have essentially a constituency, namely the general public.
They just don't want to put money into things that are going to
impact the public's opinion of their wisdom,
and/or appropriate prioritizing. So, it's very hard for those people to
think positively about causes that the general public are still clearly very ambivalent about.
And this is certainly such a cause.
The carrot and the stick both apply: I think that one can think of this in a carrot term,
as postponing the ill-health of old age and having a youthful time, being able to
keep up with your granddaughter on the dance floor and so on.
But one can also think of it "stick terms," just by focusing on
people who are already sick, and saying: "This won't do. We got to stop this from happening."
"This is causing suffering to those people and to their loved ones and so on."
I don't want the audience to go away having maintained
their emotional distance from this topic, I want people to get angry.
I want people to really feel that this is something that matters just as much as
specific diseases matter like Cancer or Alzheimer's or whatever. In fact more, because it kills more people.
I've always believed that the
main thing that needs to happen in order to change public opinion on the desirability of defeating aging
is to provide actual data. Actual progress in the lab,
that changes public opinion on the feasibility. Especially in mice.
If we get a really really big result in mice - "Robust Mouse Rejuvenation"-
taking normal mice, doing nothing at all to them till they're already in middle-age,
then doing a whole bunch of stuff and getting them to live out to five instead of three:
That's the definition that we've given to "Robust Mouse Rejuvenation."
If we can do that, people will still not have the therapy for themselves, but
there will be a very strong belief in society as a whole
that these therapies are coming. And probably coming in time for them.
So what that means:
Is that all the other aspects of society,
driven by things like risk aversion, will change completely.
People's priorities will be completely different,
in terms of what they want to spend money on and what they want to vote for, for their government to spend money on.