{"id":3081,"date":"2016-10-06T13:18:45","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T12:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=3081"},"modified":"2016-10-06T13:18:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T12:18:45","slug":"were-all-gonna-die-eventually","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2016\/10\/06\/were-all-gonna-die-eventually\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re all Gonna Die… Eventually"},"content":{"rendered":"

It might just be a product of the turnover of people with whom I have much professional contact, but I’ve not heard as much about human enhancement in the past couple of years as I had in, say, 2010.\u00a0 In particular, there seems to be less being said about radical life extension.\u00a0 Remember Aubrey de Grey and his “seven deadly things<\/a><\/span>“?\u00a0 The idea there was that senescence was attributable to seven basic processes; those basic processes are all perfectly scrutable and comprehensible biological mechanisms.\u00a0 Therefore, the argument went, if we just put the time and effort into finding a way to slow, halt, or reverse them, we could slow, halt, or reverse aging.\u00a0 Bingo.\u00a0 Preventing senescence would also ensure maximum robustness, so accidents and illnesses would be less likely to kill us.\u00a0 To all intents and purposes, we’d be immortal.\u00a0 Some enterprising people of an actuarial mindset even had a go at predicting how long an immortal life would be.\u00a0 Eventually, you’ll be hit by a bus.\u00a0 But you might have centuries of life to live before that.<\/p>\n

Dead easy.<\/p>\n

I was always a bit suspicious of that.\u00a0 The idea that death provides meaning to life is utterly unconvincing; but the idea that more life is always a good thing is unconvincing, too.\u00a0 What are you going to do with it?<\/em>\u00a0 In essence, it’s one thing to feel miffed that one isn’t going to have the time and ability to do all the things that one wants to do: life is a necessary criterion for any good.\u00a0 But that doesn’t mean that more life is worth having in its own right.\u00a0 Centuries spent staring at a blank wall isn’t made any better by dint of being alive.<\/p>\n

But a letter published this week in Nature<\/em><\/a><\/span> suggests that there is an upper end to human lifespan after all.\u00a0 In essence, the demographic data seem to suggest that there’s an upper limit to survivability.\u00a0 That being the case, we should stop worrying about making people live longer and longer, and concentrate on what’s going on during<\/em> the 125 years or so that Dong, Milholland and Vijg think is allotted to us.<\/p>\n

Others reject the claim.\u00a0 According to the BBC<\/a><\/span>, James Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute has apparently labelled the study a “dismal travesty”, which is a gloriously intemperate thing to say.\u00a0 But it is true that the work reported in the letter is empirical, and so tells us little about what is possible in principle.\u00a0 It may be that we’re reaching the upper limits of how long people can expect to live given prevailing conditions – but there may be a huge shift in our modes of life in a generation or so that’ll make what we take to be inevitable now not inevitable, and our acquiescence to it may come to appear na\u00efve.\u00a0 Indeed, Dong, Milholand and Vijg get close to admitting that they don’t know why their hypothesised upper limit is where it is:<\/p>\n

What could be the biological causes of this limit to human lifespan?\u00a0 The idea that ageing is a purposeful, programmed series of events that evolved under the direct force of natural selection to cause death has now been all but discredited.\u00a0 Instead, what appears to be a “natural limit” is an inadvertent byproduct of fixed genetic programs for early life events, such as development, growth and reproduction.\u00a0 Limits to the duration of life could well be determined by a set of species-specific, longevity- assurance systems encoded in the genome that counteract these inadvertent byproducts, which are likely to include inherent imperfections in transferring genetic information into cellular function.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This reminds me of a book I was reading about a year ago: Nick Lane’s The Vital Question<\/em><\/a><\/span>.\u00a0 The wet sciences have never been my happy place, and I fear that a lot of Lane’s argument went over my head – but one of the take-home messages there is that there are good reasons based in biophysics to think that there’s a natural upper limit to human lifespan.\u00a0 And that upper limit is… around 120 years, give or take.<\/p>\n

It’s strikingly close to the empirical work in Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Now, of course, we could respond that if<\/em> this time limit is written in the cell, it doesn’t follow that we have to be bound by it.\u00a0 We could imagine a world in which we discover how to manipulate the biophysics in such a way as to increase life expectancy by an order of magnitude.\u00a0 If dying is bad, or if preventing a death is the same as saving a life and we have a duty to save lives where possible, then we could generate an argument for researching that kind of manipulation.\u00a0 Lots of people have already gone down that route.\u00a0 But, all the same, there’s still the question of whether it’s worth it.\u00a0 I’m not convinced that it really is.<\/p>\n

What, really, would be the point?\u00a0 Don’t we have much better things to do with our lives than to worry about their duration?<\/p>\n

I don’t have the space here to provide a detailed argument about why.\u00a0 But try this as a stopgap.\u00a0 There’s a ton of videos on YouTube from the annual Cooper’s Hill cheese-rolling thingy.\u00a0 Inevitably, there’re images of people shuffling slowly down the hill, filming themselves as they do so.\u00a0 This is absurd.\u00a0 They’re putting so much into recording their participation in the event that they aren’t actually participating in it at all – which means that their record is meaningless.\u00a0 People who maunder on about extending life-expectancy strike me as doing the same thing.\u00a0 I think that Nick Agar makes a similar point in Humanity’s End<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It may be that it’s the way we run society that makes it hard to break the 120-year barrier; it may be biology.\u00a0 Both those things are changeable.\u00a0 I don’t know which is the harder to change.\u00a0 But… Well, speaking as someone just entering middle age, 120 years seems more than enough, no?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might just be a product of the turnover of people with whom I have much professional contact, but I’ve not heard as much about human enhancement in the past couple of years as I had in, say, 2010.\u00a0 In particular, there seems to be less being said about radical life extension.\u00a0 Remember Aubrey de […]<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2147,1542,511,591,328,576,472],"tags":[1856,317],"class_list":["post-3081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetic-jiggerypokery","category-in-the-journals","category-in-the-news","category-life-and-death","category-philosophy","category-the-art-of-medicine","category-thinking-aloud","tag-enhancement","tag-research"],"yoast_head":"\nWe're all Gonna Die... Eventually - Journal of Medical Ethics blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2016\/10\/06\/were-all-gonna-die-eventually\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We're all Gonna Die... 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