The Task of Arguing for Extended Life
Posted by Jeriaska on October 24th, 2007
The Methuselah Foundation held an informal dinner conversation on October 19 to discuss the effort to secure biotechnological strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Questions were fielded by Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. Continued from “The Effort to Postpone Frailty Indefinitely“
The following transcript of Aubrey de Grey’s informal October 19, 2007 talk on the Methuselah Foundation and radical life extension has been corrected by the author and approved for publication.
The Task of Arguing for Extended Life
Audience: Can I ask a non-technical question?
Yeah, I was getting tired.
Audience: I saw in a documentary the guy who wrote that Technology Review article was criticizing you for not having had children.
Sherwin Nuland. Yeah, I don’t have children. I’ve never wanted to have children. I just figure I have too much else to do. I’ve always wanted to make a difference in my life. Ultimately the way that you make a difference is by doing things that other people are not very good at, and lot of people are really good at having children.
Audience: Your mother was good at having children.
The longer version of this story includes the part where I realize that the thing I wanted to do with my life is make a difference, which was when my mother was trying to get me to practice the piano. This was when I was about eight or nine. I was resistant to this, but she had brought me up very well to be logical and to understand my own thinking, and so I reflected on why I didn’t want to play the piano. What I basically realized was that even in the best possible case, if I practiced an awful lot the best thing that could possibly happen would be that I would become a good pianist, and what the hell use was that? So that was how I crystallized the realization that what I wanted to do was make a difference. That’s why I went into science and eventually ended up working in artificial intelligence, and I would probably still be doing that if it hadn’t been that I discovered there was something that was even more urgent.
Audience: Can you tell us more about your wife? She has made some important discoveries.
My wife is older than me. She was already a full professor when we met. She was 45 and I was 26. She was on sabbatical in Cambridge from her post at UC San Diego. She is a biologist and a geneticist and basically taught me biology over the dinner table by accident. It was basically a case of, you know, “What did you do today?” for a couple of years, and I ended up knowing a lot of biology. Gradually it dawned on me that aging wasn’t coming up in the conversation, and I found that this was bizarre, because aging was obviously the major unsolved problem in biology. Obviously it would be the thing that biologists would think about and talk about. I began asking questions about this and started getting really unsatisfactory answers like, “Aging’s a really hard problem, so if you want a good, successful career you won’t go into gerontology, because you’ll end up not making a regular series of discoveries. And secondly, aging’s really boring. You’re not going to find out any fundamental truths about biology by studying aging.” Which is true, but so what? It’s bad for us, let’s fix it, really. And it was through that sort of conversation that I began to appreciate the profound difference of mindset between curiosity-driven thinking and goal-directed thinking.
Audience: Does anyone have any horror stories about talking life extension with family members or friends?
Audience: Reason is far less important than we think it is in these arguments.
Audience: You also find people are very depressed. One person I was talking with, he actually finally got the idea that maybe there was a possibility of seriously extending lifespan and his response was utter horror, and he said, “It’s bad enough as it is without having it extended!”
Audience: Who needs nasty, brutish and long? You really do have to sell this from the heart in a way that I don’t think we’ve done successfully. I think that you are as guilty as any of us in trying to sell it from the head.
Well, hang on. I don’t aspire to convincing the general public directly. My approach is to convince the scientific community, in particular the gerontology community, that they’ve got to basically concede that this is a good approach. Once it becomes possible for journalists to actually get the impression that consensus around this field from the experts is moving in this direction then it’s going to be possible for people to write things that don’t ridicule this idea. It’s going to be possible for Oprah to say aging is a bad thing, let’s fix it. And when that happens, it doesn’t matter whether the public understands the science.
We regard all of those levels as part of our job. I try to relate to people of all levels of expertise and all levels of interest in the science and the social context. And I have a lot of disrespect for scientists who don’t do that, who say, “The social context of my work is not my problem.” But, of course, it’s still a long haul. I try to avoid giving answers to people that are not appropriate to that person. I try to relate to these people as much as I can. Certainly, I think the more that we can talk directly to the public, the better. But the reality is that even though science is very much the new religion and people basically accept scientific consensus as truth, nevertheless the pronouncements of individual scientists are not like that. If I am perceived as an outlier, someone who is saying things that are not in accordance with what other people who are perceived as experts in this area are saying, then the public will continue to be resistant, even if they can’t actually see for themselves what’s wrong with what I’m saying.
Audience: I should think it would be the same thing with nanotech.
Audience: I was just reading an article a couple of months ago that was explaining that the whole thing [molecular manufacturing] was impossible and totally ridiculous. You know, you have to just keep countering that. I don’t quite understand how it is that people are so slow to catch on to new ideas.
Audience: Cryobiologists don’t want to be associated with cryonics, even if you were to address them with some totally legitimate scientific research in the area. They know that because that’s got a crackpot association in the mind of the general public, they dare not associate themselves with it, even if their scientific instincts find no problem with it.
Even if they have to make outrageously unscientific claims.
Audience: What is the psychological factor which makes people, including millionaires and billionaires for whom money is no object, not purchase cryonics policies?
Audience: One of the things is the social factor. We have a room here of people who are talking about cryonics as a perfectly reasonable thing to do and some of the folks are actually signed up. This is an unusual community. Within this community it is reasonable to think about that. In a lot of communities, if you go out and sign up, maybe your spouse objects, maybe your friends look at you askance.
Audience: My mother just laughs and laughs and laughs.
Audience: Something that struck me at the recent Singularity Summit was someone was addressing the anti-aging issue and a woman got up and basically said this is just wrong, in the sense that you shouldn’t litter and you shouldn’t emit too much carbon dioxide, we should all die at an appropriate time. It was just an ecologically or socially correct thing to do.
Audience: There is a public policy issue here, right? If this is a capability that becomes available to everybody, you have an economic problem. If you’re going to be selective about who gets access…
Audience: Selective? Alcor is an equal opportunity freezer.
Audience: Let me ask a deeper question, what if you came up with compelling arguments that in fact showed there would be major upheaval and the upsetting of many of the value systems and economic systems that existed in the past? Would you then conclude it’s moral to kill millions of people by withholding medicine to save us from that?
Audience: That’s not what I’m interested in. I’m asking a pragmatic question.
A lot of what I try to do when I talk about the social context of all of this is to say, Yes, it’s very important to look at the specific answers that we might come up with to address specific problems that would be caused by the elimination of aging. But, ultimately, we have to address all of those questions in the context of two completely universal general truths. One of which is that we have to apply a sense of proportion to this. If we regard old people as people too, which I think generally we do, then we have to regard the saving of lives as actually indistinguishable from the extending of lives, and therefore we have to take the view that maybe there will be these problems, but the decision we have to make today is whether the prospect of those problems should dissuade us from doing our best to develop these therapies. And I say it’s perfectly simple. If you’ve got an argument that says that eliminating aging is probably going to cause problems, then let’s hear it and let’s try and deal with it with forward planning. But if you don’t have an argument that is so strong that it outweighs the benefit of saving 100,000 lives a day, then–
Audience: I’m not interested in the moral questions. I’m interested in the economics.
The moral questions have to come first. It’s really important to do it the other way around because if you think about the numbers in the context of the possibility that you might decide that if the numbers were bad enough then you wouldn’t go that way, then you’re going to be thinking about it in a different way than if you’ve already decided that whatever the numbers are, you’ve got to fix it.
Audience: I’m still puzzled at the question. Because if you have longer, healthier lifespans, it just follows that you are going to have major advantages economically. That’s what “health” means.
When I’m talking to skeptics about this, I certainly find by and large that if one does focus on numbers then it’s not very effective rhetorically, because people say they don’t really believe your scenario. It’s actually much more effective to sweep all of that away and say, irrespective of the scenario, we’ve just got to do this because otherwise we are condemning people to an unnecessarily early death.
Audience: It just means we’d need to retard the birthrate.
Audience: There’s also outer space.
One thing that people always point to when this question comes up is psychologically there might not have been much difference between having two children and having ten children, but having no children is a big psychological difference. However, the question that we have to ask is, At what age is one going to have those children? One thing we have to bear in mind in answering that question is that the birthrate has not simply been declining, women have not simply been having fewer children, they’ve been having them later. Increasingly, people who haven’t got children at all are waiting until it’s then or never, until their mid-30′s or whenever.
Now, one of the things that’s going to be done in eliminating aging is menopause is going to be voluntary as well. We are going to be able to fix that. It’s going to be possible to delay things further. And if we ask the motivation for why women are delaying things as much as they are today, we can say, well maybe they’re enjoying themselves too much and they can always put off this business of having children. Whatever the reason is, there is every reason to expect it will be accelerated when it can be. From a purely demographic point-of-view, this is incredibly good news because it is front-loaded. In other words, this particular change in fertility will happen right at the beginning of the whole process before much in terms of the lowering of death rate has actually affected the global population.
Audience: I have to confess I’m terribly influenced by science fiction here.
I’m always very cynical about science fiction in this area, because ultimately we have to remember that the science fiction we read is the science fiction that makes people comfortable. Talking about life extension is something that does not have the dramatic component to it.
Audience: If you talk about extending fertility for women, I think that would sell, especially for the demographic that is putting off having children until later.
All of these things are genuine. If you go to my website, which is supposed to be mainly science because I’m a biologist, in fact the longest page is the one addressing specifically all of these concerns. I think it is important to come up with as specific responses as we can to each of these questions. Part of it is identifying ways in which we might address the bad sides of each of these various changes, but I think it’s extraordinarily important to clear all that away at the same time and tell it like it is at the moral level. If we are serious about age-ism, if we are serious about the idea that old people are people too, then we’d better damn well show it. And at the level of overpopulation, to answer your question more directly, I think it’s important to recognize that as a species we have always been very clear that people who are alive are more important than people who have not yet been conceived. That’s the way we behave. You know, every sperm is not sacred.
Some people would beg to differ with you.
So here we are. Are we acting immorally in the way we live in that respect? If not, then it’s clear that we have a moral duty to do what we can.
Audience: It’s not just about morality. If you actually believe that heaven is wonderful, death is not quite as oppressive a prospect.
I’ve been through all of this. A lot of people write to me from out of the blue and ask me these sorts of questions all the time, and I’ve got a lot of practice at answering them. Actually there are very strong answers to these things. The question of should we let people die, because it’s natural and all that, is rather effectively responded to by saying, “Is medicine in general something we actually shouldn’t do?” Because, of course, medicine in general is about getting people to live longer than they would have lived if you had not done anything.
