Today’s Science Times digs deeper into this not new but suddenly front-and-center obsession with anti-aging science, which I wrote about just the other day.This is really bringing up all sorts of interesting ethical debates. Briefly, medicine’s overarching goal is to make life better and longer. But at what point are we diluting what makes life valuable and humans human? That is, as life gets longer, does it not also by necessity become less valuable and less precious? Few would object to providing a treatment that allows a fifty year-old to live into his eighties, but would the same support be given to technology that could double our current average lifespan from the eighties well above 150? If not, how is that different from the doubling that medicine has already accomplished for society bringing life expentancy from the fourties to the eighties where we currently stand?Enough tough questions for you? (Ed–Uh, that was another question…)
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Today’s Science Times digs deeper int
November 8, 2006
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