Most medical research is done by trying to prevent people dying. And Aubrey says we should simply extend this into ageing. Actually, now, we are in a situation of being able to harness what comes from the basic biomedical research to try to devise a better way to age.

And if that leads to life extension, that’s great. But it’s difficult to see the path to make that happen.

-Professor Tom Kirkwood

Dr. Kirkwood is gerontologist with a very impressive resume. So it’s discouraging to to see him discounting the possibility of life extension.

Fortunately for all of us, researchers don’t necessarily have to see “the path” to make a contribution to it.

I wonder also how sincere Kirwood is being in his assertion that “it’s difficult to see the path to make that happen.” The path looks long and difficult, but it seems obvious too. Aging is a complex group of problems. If any treatment makes any of Aubrey de Grey’s “seven deadly things” less deadly, then you have life extension.

The problems that cause aging can and probably will be addressed initially as preventative medicine. Established medicine will stoop to calling it “life extension” only after it’s blatantly obvious to every 100-year-old on the tennis courts.

I support efforts to devise “better ways to age” the same way I support efforts to devise better ways to hit yourself in the head with a hammer. Both projects would be good, but wouldn’t it be better to avoid the underlying activity?

More seriously, “better ways to age” and “life extention” is a distinction without a difference. Now I suppose that there are some problems of old age that can be addressed without extending life. Viagra and Rogaine are drugs that address two problems that are often associated with advancing age. Neither will extend your life.

But any treatment that directly addresses the aging problem – something that slows degeneration – will extend life. Unless Kirkwood’s hopes are limited to palliatives like Viagra and Rogaine, “better ways to age” is just “life extension” by another name.

Reason at Fight Aging! has a follow-up to Stephen’s post from earlier this week:

Advocacy is certainly a spectrum – it’s quite possible to be supporting efforts to obtain large-scale funding for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) with one hand, while trying to dispel widespread and elementary myths with the other. Still, one would hope that some progress can be made in banishing the Tithonus error to the past. If half the population no longer knee-jerks in opposition to healthy life extension based on a false conception of “older for longer” – well, that can’t be a bad thing for the prospects of raising a broad platform of support for research, can it?

Nope, sounds like a good thing to me. I think what will really slow the knee-jerking — and in fact might start them jerking in the other direction — is when people begin to realize that a few (at first a very few) of their friends and loved ones are enjoying longer and longer lives. The operative word there being enjoying.

A lot of folks cling to life even when it becomes painful and undignified. Few will hang on to the delusion that some law of nature or moral obligation requires us to be happy about our eventual demise when they see an alternative of more productive, healthy, happy years in their lives. At some point, the largely unspoken truth will be acknowledged more or less universally.

This looks promising

Researchers in Germany have identified a potential source of reprogrammable cells in adults that could be used for regenerative therapy. The cells would be taken directly from the testis and cultured. No cloning or destruction of embryos would be necessary.

The discovery opens up the possibility, at least for men, of having an endless source of fresh stem cells tailored to one’s genetic makeup, which could be turned into any kind of body tissue and used for treatment. This has been the promise of stem cells taken from cloned embryos, but the use of cloned embryos has run into considerable ethical and technical problems…

The big question is whether human males have the same cells. And, as the article explains, even if this stem-cell-source pans out in humans, it’s only good for half of the species. So far, no corresponding source of cells has been found in women.