The foreseeability of real anti-aging medicine: focusing the debate

There has recently been a sharp and very welcome increase in the rate of appearance of articles discussing the concept of medical interventions that would greatly increase the maximum healthy human lifespan. Much of this literature has emphasised the current non-existence of any such therapies, and has done so with laudable accuracy and authority. Regrettably, however, such articles have frequently extended their ambit to include the issues of how soon such interventions could be developed and of how advisable such an effort would be anyway, and have addressed these much more weakly, thereby diminishing the force of their main message. Here a survey is made of the more conspicuously flawed arguments suggesting tremendous difficulties or dangers in developing such interventions, with the aim thereby to tow those arguments firmly out into the ocean and give them the decent but unambiguous public burial that they so richly deserve. It is hoped that, by clearing the debate on future anti-aging advances of these obfuscations, the many aspects of this topic that have hitherto received much less attention than they warrant will be brought to the fore. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.