James Taranto attempts a few laughs at Aubrey de Grey’s expense in today’s Best of the Web Today (last item):
All well and good, but when will our leaders act to stop global aging? Unlike warming, aging goes in only one direction: Tomorrow may be cooler than today, but it’s a sure bet you’ll be a day older. Sure, a day may not seem like much, but it adds up. A few thousand days, “and then one day you find 10 years have got behind you.” With 6.7 billion people in the world, we cumulatively age more than 18 million years every day.
“It’s time to break out of our denial about aging,” British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey tells The Wall Street Journal. “Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world.” A difference of 2 degrees seems trivial by comparison to the prospect of an eternity at room temperature.
Apparently the joke here is that the G8 passing its resolution on global warming is as absurd as scientists attempting to develop a cure for aging.
One of Taranto’s oft-recurring bits is to play gotcha with writers or editors who fail to acknowledge the 100% inevitability of death (the last item here is pretty typical). One can only imagine Tranato’s glee every time he reads that some cause may “increase” or “decrease” the likelihood of death. So the news story that he linked, detailing some encouraging longevity research, must have seemed like gift from heaven.
Even so, it seems he curtailed Aubrey’s comments somewhat in order to heighten the comic effect. Here’s what Aubrey actually said (emphasis added):
Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world and a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention.
Hey, a joke is a joke and all, but how could anyone disagree with that statement? Of course, that’s exactly the sort of question that I should know better than to ask. People do disagree, and they say some astounding things in making their arguments against treating aging as a disease. Check out these snippets from the comments on the news story mentioned above:
“a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention”. awesome news to the social security trust fund and medicare liability I am sure. now do I have to retire at 80 or 85 to I can die at 97?
Treating aging as an illness is a really backwards mindset. I would hope the doctor who’s taking that approach would come to see how harmful that is–encouraging people to somehow look at the natural progression of their lives as something malignant. What a misuse of medicine.
Terrible misuse of medicine. Will we need to find more food for the newly longer living population? More fresh water? More plastic, oil and other resources? We already have too many people on this planet. Having a pile of invalid old people to take care of who should have died long ago will surely cripple humanity more than our over-population has.
To what purpose? If it is to serve a Creator then longer life may be desirable, but if it is to continue in a self-serving life of cultural hedonism, what is the purpose?
Those who think taking on aging is a “misuse” of medicine simply baffle me. If medical research came up with ways to eliminate cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, would anyone argue that those treatments represent a “misuse” of medicine? Why is it bad for people to die from those things but okay for them to die from something else?
Imagine somebody asks you to make a donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Would you respond to that by saying, “Why? So those diabetes sufferers can continue their lives of self-serving hedonism?”
Or maybe someone asks you to support Race for the Cure, and you respond with: “Hey, wait a second. If all these women survive breast cancer, what’s that going to do to Social Security?” Or how about: “Where will we get food and fresh water to support all these surviving women?” Or maybe: “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. It just wouldn’t be right to encourage these cancer sufferers to look at the natural progression of their lives as something malignant. Well, okay, granted — cancer is malignant, but you see what I’m saying.”
No, you would never say anything like that, because only a moral cretin of truly world-class proportions would even think anything like that. But turn those cancer or diabetes victims into old people, and they become fair game — people whose continued existence is just too inconvenient to bear — people who need to die already, who it would be a misuse of medicine to help.
I’m no expert, but if you aimed that kind of rhetoric at anyone else, wouldn’t it be called “hate speech?”
Just to summarize: for Aubrey de Grey to call aging a “legitimate target” of medical intervention is absurd. But when the pro-death crowd defines the elderly as a “legitmate target” of their eliminationist rhetoric, they’re taking the moral high ground. Everybody got it?
No doubt, some death apologist is going to protest that all they’re really opposed to is prolonging human suffering. Of course, the problem with that argument is that that’s exactly the position of Aubrey de Grey and others who are actively engaged in trying to cure agin. Nobody wants to extend decrepitude and suffering. That’s a straw man.
On a happier note, I’ll close with one of the comments I really liked:
Joe: Do you want to live to 100?
Pete: Don’t ask me: ask the guy who’s 99.
Exactly.
