Anti-Aging at the APLS

Abstract

229 ANTI-AGING MEDICINE was a hot topic at the annual meeting of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS), which was held at the Sheraton Society Hill Hotel in Philadelphia, August 28–31, 2003. Founded in 1980, the APLS is an international and interdisciplinary association of scholars, scientists, and policymakers concerned with problems or issues that involve politics or public policy and one or more of the life sciences. On August 28, there was a lively roundtable discussion titled “Life-Extension and Biomedical Research: the Economic, Moral and Political Implications of Turning Back Our Biological Clocks.” The panelists included Ronald Bailey, Science Correspondent for Reason Magazine; Eric Cohen, President’s Council on Bioethics and editor of the journal The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society; James H. Fetzer, McKnight Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota–Duluth and noted philosopher of science; and, F. Brad Johnson, researcher for the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and an expert on telomeres. The moderator was Richard Haubner, director of the Gerontology Program and Associate Professor of Gerontology at the College of Mount St. Joseph. Johnson set the stage with a brief summary of the current state of life-extension science via telomeres, stem cells, and caloric restriction. All of the panelists agreed that the extension of the human life-span via biotechnology is probably inevitable and forthcoming in the very near future (maybe 20 years?). However, they also agreed that given the panoply of other human afflictions, especially automobile accidents, de facto human immortality is well beyond the reach of biotechnology. Moral and political debate focused on the sociopolitical context of aging as a “disease,” and whether life-extension constitutes medical “therapy” or “enhancement”; how these life-extending biotechnologies ought to be distributed in a democratic society; and how that distribution might be positively (or negatively) affected by science, government, and/or multinational corporations. The panel represented a variety of philosophical orientations including free-market libertarianism (Bailey), welfare liberalism (Fetzer), natural law (Cohen), and preference utilitarianism (Johnson). On the evening of the 28th, Ronald F. White displayed a poster titled “The Ethical and Political Implications of Lifespan-Extension Biology,” which included several charts summarizing how the various teleological and deontological moral systems (virtue-based, utilitarian, welfare liberal, and libertarian) tend to approach the issues of biotechnology and life-extension. A variety of materials pertaining to the roundtable and the poster session, including a short bibliography, can be found at http://www.msj.edu/ white/apls_antiaging.htm. On August 30, Arthur Caplan, Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, delivered the keynote address, titled: “Revulsion is Not Enough: Why the Bioengineering of Human Beings is Not