- Jeff - Humans can live far longer, but will the authorities
allow this? See what Leon R. Kass, MD, the President's bioethics counsel,
has to say about this. -Bill Sardi
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- Excerpted from....
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- L'Chaim and Its Limits - Why Not Immortality?
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- By Leon R. Kass
- President's Counsel On Bioethics
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- "....there is research into the genetic switches
that control the biological processes of aging. The maximum life span for
each species-roughly one hundred years for human beings-is almost certainly
under genetic control. In a startling recent discovery, fruit-fly geneticists
have shown that mutations in a single gene produce a 50 percent increase
in the natural lifetime of the flies. Once the genes involved in regulating
the human life cycle and setting the midnight hour are identified, scientists
predict that they will be able to increase the human maximum age well beyond
its natural limit. Quite frankly, I find some of the claims and predictions
to be overblown, but it would be foolhardy to bet against scientific and
technical progress along these lines.
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- But even if cures for aging and death are a long way
off, there is a second and more fundamental reason for inquiring into the
radical question of the desirability of gaining a cure for death. For truth
to tell, victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern
medical science, indeed of the entire modern scientific project, to which
mankind was summoned almost four hundred years ago by Francis Bacon and
René Descartes. They quite consciously trumpeted the conquest of
nature for the relief of man's estate, and they founded a science whose
explicit purpose was to reverse the curse laid on Adam and Eve, and especially
to restore the tree of life, by means of the tree of (scientific) knowledge.
With medicine's increasing successes, realized mainly in the last half
century, every death is increasingly regarded as premature, a failure of
today's medicine that future research will prevent. In parallel with medical
progress, a new moral sensibility has developed that serves precisely medicine's
crusade against mortality: anything is permitted if it saves life, cures
disease, prevents death. Regardless, therefore, of the imminence of anti-aging
remedies, it is most worthwhile to reexamine the assumption upon which
we have been operating: that everything should be done to preserve health
and prolong life as much as possible, and that all other values must bow
before the biomedical gods of better health, greater vigor, and longer
life.
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- Recent proposals that we should conquer aging and death
have not been without their critics. The criticism takes two forms: predictions
of bad social consequences and complaints about distributive justice. Regarding
the former, there are concerns about the effect on the size and age distribution
of the population. How will growing numbers and percentages of people living
well past one hundred affect, for example, work opportunities, retirement
plans, hiring and promotion, cultural attitudes and beliefs, the structure
of family life, relations between the generations, or the locus of rule
and authority in government, business, and the professions? Even the most
cursory examination of these matters suggests that the cumulative results
of aggregated decisions for longer and more vigorous life could be highly
disruptive and undesirable, even to the point that many individuals would
be worse off through most of their lives, and worse off enough to offset
the benefits of better health afforded them near the end of life. Indeed,
several people have predicted that retardation of aging will present a
classic instance of the Tragedy of the Commons, in which genuine and sought-for
gains to individuals are nullified or worse, owing to the social consequences
of granting them to everyone.
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- But other critics worry that technology's gift of long
or immortal life will not be granted to everyone, especially if, as is
likely, the treatments turn out to be expensive. Would it not be the ultimate
injustice if only some people could afford a deathless existence, if the
world were divided not only into rich and poor but into mortal and immortal?"
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- Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the Addie Clark Harding Professor
in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of
Chicago and author of The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of Our
Nature.
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