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Saturday, November 24, 2007

Longevity Without Superlativity

Over at Existence Is Wonderful, Anne Corwin has posted a fascinating review of a research project somewhat misleadingly -- but nicely pithily -- named Ageless Animals which is investigating the most long-lived (but still in fact aging, however negligibly) animals on earth. The review is full of interesting information on its own terms, but it is in her concluding paragraphs that Anne really says the things that interest me most in her piece, as she articulates the general perspective from which she writes about some of the rhetoric and politics of longevity medicine along with some of the science.

It seems to me that Anne has managed a fairly rare balancing act, at once aware of the radical implications of emerging medical technique and aware of the sociocultural context that articulates the shape and distribution of such technique. I'd like to see a little less deployment of statistical generalities about rising life expectancies that can cover over actually-existing catastrophic inequities in the distribution of basic healthcare, nutrition, and hygiene -- inequities that are as likely to be exacerbated as ameliorated by emerging techniques unless planetary governance ensures otherwise (as it shows little sign of doing for now) -- but her writing is showing ever greater sensitivity around these questions lately in any case. Even better still, she has a pretty good sensitivity to the pitfalls of superlative, techno-utopian, and transcendentalizing technodevelopmental discourses, which sometimes seems to be an inescapable occupational hazard for folks who focus on emerging technologies.

Here is an excerpt from her concluding paragraphs:
[I]f metabolic damage can be addressed in humans, it might be that many of the health problems we currently associate with "old age" today will instead eventually be associated with a specific category of treatable conditions.

It is important to stress... that mitigating metabolic health conditions will certainly not mean that people will cease to get old, or that everyone will be granted comic-book-like superpowers once we find out how to stop oxidative (and other) damage from accumulating to the point where it destroys our organs. Longevity medicine proper is not to be found in the "fetishization of youth" or in fantasy, but in recognizing that getting old should not have to mean getting sick…

And it is also important to emphasize that longevity medicine is simply one essential component of health care as a whole, and working to help elderly people experience a less precarious existence (at least in my estimation) falls into the same ethical category as working to improve sanitation and nutrition throughout the world. In short, saving lives is about saving lives -- not about only saving certain people's lives based on their age, gender, nationality, or economic status.

The explicit repudiation of Superlativity here and all its fantasies and fetishizations (of eternal "youth," "comic-book… superpowers," invulnerability, immortality, and so on), together with the helpful reframing away from the Superlativity of "Technological Immortalism" into consensual healthcare of "treatable conditions" are both indispensable moves for useful technoprogressive discourse about emerging modification medicine.

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