Living longer: should we try to live forever?

The fourth seminar in the ESRC funded Seminar Series: The 'New' Ageing Populations: Mapping identities, health, needs and responses across the lifecourse.

Wednesday 26th January 2011, 3.30 - 6pm, King’s College London

Lecture Theatre 1, New Hunt’s House, London SE1 1UL

*This seminar, led by the Institute of Gerontology, King’s College London, is co-hosted with the Division of Research Strategy UCL, University of Surrey and BioCentre.

Programme:

A Modest Proposal of Geriatric Storage

Bryan S Turner, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

Medical sciences rarely consider the social and economic consequences of a radical life extension project. What are the implications of gerontological and demographic changes for housing, employment, pensions, retirement and the environment? Without radical social reform, the life extension project will intensify social inequality and increase intergenerational conflict. Gerontological sciences cannot help us distinguish between mere existence and life, and hence cannot provide a convincing account of the severe boredom that might accompany indefinite longevity. The populations of the affluent North will continue to age steeply with no real policies to cope with this outcome. The Japanese re-locate their elderly populations to geriatric holiday camps in Thailand & Malaysia, and the British translate their surplus elderly to Spain & Portugal. However, following Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (1729), I propose more radically that governments address the geriatric surplus by creating large storage facilities to house the cryonically frozen in anticipation of further medical discoveries to postpone disability and death indefinitely and to restore them to active participation in society.

Longevity as a Side-Benefit of Truly Good Health: What's the Problem?

Aubrey de Grey, Chief Scientific Officer, SENS Foundation

Trillions of pounds are spent worldwide in the attempt to fight the various diseases of old age - to depressingly little effect. All these diseases are age-related for a simple and almost truistic reason: they are aspects of the later stages of a degenerative process that goes on throughout life, namely, aging. Thus, aging is a plausible and massively cost-effective potential target for medicine: such medicine would be simply preventative geriatrics. Yet, virtually nothing is spent in the quest for such medicines, largely because of widespread fear of one likely side-effect of making them really work, namely a sharp increase in longevity. This increase would indeed probably have dramatic societal consequences - but so what? We have a problem today, namely the misery of being old and frail, which far outweighs any problem that the defeat of aging might herald. It is thus our clear and present moral obligation to strive our utmost to achieve the postponement, and ideally the defeat, of aging as soon as possible.

Call for poster abstracts:

New Ageing Populations challenge our understanding of the boundaries of old age by extending issues conventionally associated with gerontology to wider groups of people. To widen debates surrounding how health, identity, disability and ageing impact on new ageing populations we welcome poster submissions from any discipline that are broadly related to the seminar’s title. Please email a 250 word abstract to newagepop@kcl.ac.uk by Friday 14th January 2011. There are two poster prizes of £100 and £50.

Booking:

This seminar is open to all but participants are asked to book a place in advance by emailing newagepop@kcl.ac.uk.

There will be a wine reception following the seminar.

For more details about the series, visit: www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/geront/news/esrcseminar/programme.html