ROSS ANDERSEN: Radical Life Extension Is Already Here, But We’re Doing it Wrong.

When you’re talking about medicines that help us live longer, it’s important to realize how much we’ve already accomplished. In the last 150 years or so, we’ve doubled our life span from 40 to 80 years, and that’s primarily through the use of things you can characterize as being medical science. In some cases it’s clear that we’re talking about medical enhancement—vaccines, for instance, or surgical hygiene and sterilization. And then more broadly there are other, non-medical things like the sanitation of the water supply and the pasteurization of milk and cheese. All of these things have saved an enormous amount of life.

It used to be that people would die of an infectious disease; they’d be struck down when they were very young or when they were older and their immune system was weak. Now almost nobody in the first world dies of infectious disease; we’ve basically managed to completely eradicate infectious disease through medical science. If, at the outset of this process, you asked people if we should develop technologies that would make us live until we’re 80 on average instead of until we’re 40, people might have expressed these same kind of misgivings that you hear today. They might have said, “Oh no that would be way too long, that would be unnatural, let’s not do that.”

So, in a way, we shouldn’t view it as being extremely strange to develop these medicines, but in another sense we’re at a new stage now, because now we’re at the forefront of having medicines that actually address the aging process. And that’s what I’m interested in talking about—the kinds of medicines that actually slow down the aging process, or at least some of the mechanisms of aging.

Faster, please.