I'm not yet making plans for New Year's 2099 but I also won't be shocked if an anti-aging drug is proven to work to some degree in the near term.We should, however, be careful what we wish for. As attractive as it seems, an anti-aging drug will likely be a Pandora's box filled with difficult ethical, societal and environmental questions.
From the New York Times...
It may be the ultimate free lunch — how to reap all the advantages of a calorically restricted diet, including freedom from disease and an extended healthy life span, without eating one fewer calorie. Just take a drug that tricks the body into thinking it’s on such a diet.
It sounds too good to be true, and maybe it is. Yet such drugs are now in clinical trials. Even if they should fail, as most candidate drugs do, their development represents a new optimism among research biologists that aging is not immutable, that the body has resources that can be mobilized into resisting disease and averting the adversities of old age.
No comments:
Post a Comment