Writing in the European Molecular Biology Organisation’s journal EMBO Reports Cambridge UK biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey makes the case for pursuing complete human rejuvenation as an achievable and desirable goal in an article entitled “Resistance to debate on how to postpone ageing is delaying progress and costing lives”.
Before moving on to discuss the second, widely overlooked, source of political resistance to funding ageing research, we can already note how the traditional gerontological rhetoric has become an albatross&emdash;and perhaps always was. “Ageing is not a disease”, as I noted earlier, has long been a slogan of gerontology. Politicians may be inclined to feel that, well, if ageing is not a disease, it is probably not something we ought to be spending much effort combating, then, is it? When we reflect that this is a gut feeling that most people, and thus most politicians, probably have at the outset&emdash;what Miller (2002) termed “gerontologiphobia”&emdash;and also that when money is tight its allocators seek excuses to narrow the list of candidate recipients, we see clearly that describing ageing as “not a disease” has severe rhetorical drawbacks, regardless of the value it may once have had in distinguishing biogerontology from other biomedical research.
This problem is in my view dwarfed, however, by the second difficulty that politicians may have in embracing biogerontologists’ arguments: the merit of spending money in pursuit of a given goal depends not only on that goal’s desirability but also on its feasibility. Those of us who do not suffer from gerontologiphobia are persistently awed by the logical contortions that gerontologiphobes perform when asked to justify their pro-ageing stance. Similar awe&emdash;although that might not be the word they would use&emdash;may be felt by politicians who encounter the efforts of gerontologists to extract from available data an argument that their work will probably cause substantial compression of morbidity in the foreseeable future.
Although the concept is much older, the term ‘compression of morbidity’ was introduced by James Fries in a paper published in 1980: “Present data allow calculation of the ideal average life span, approximately 85 years. Chronic illness may presumably be postponed by changes in life style […] Thus, the average age at first infirmity can be raised, thereby making the morbidity curve more rectangular. Extension of adult vigor far into a fixed life span compresses the period of senescence near the end of life” (Fries, 1980). Even ignoring the questionable assumption of a fixed lifespan, we immediately see that Fries is not predicting that combating ageing will compress morbidity. Instead, he stresses “changes in life style”&emdash;not a noted sphere of biogerontological influence. Fries’s hope that US morbidity would be compressed has been realized in the meantime, and the details of that change duly support the theory that lifestyle, rather than biomedical progress, is responsible. All the compression observed is in mild to moderate disability, which is substantially achievable by lifestyle changes, whereas absolutely no compression of severe morbidity has occurred (Fries, 2003).
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