The Food & Drugs Administration does not think of aging as a disease. However the FDA only allows to test drugs which potentially fight a disease. One disease. Just one disease. This has practical consequences: the FDA cannot authorize testing drugs which would combat aging. Since, according to the FDA, aging is not a disease.
I disagree. Philosophically considered, aging is obviously a disease. On the face of it, dis-ease means one is not at ease anymore. Not only is aging a reduction of comfort: watch old people bent over, shrunk, transpierced by various pains related to all sorts of inflammations. Moreover nearly all diseases which affect people, and are ultimately impossible to treat are age related. But, moreover, clearly, aging is not comfortable:
Brigitte Bardot In Her 20s, & More recently: If That’s Not A Disease, What Is? Aging Is A Disease, Like Elephantiasis
The FDA’s position is arguably the greatest obstacle to progress in health care. Why? If aging is not a disease, and no drug can be developed to cure this non-disease, most diseases known will not be treated, as most diseases are age-related: when people are in their prime, say between 25 and 45 years of age, they are pretty much disease free.
Theories of how aging proceeds exist. They are not complete, but they fit well with the plausible modes of action of the five substances which are known to have anti-aging effects.
Some will philosophically object to the desire of having people live 1,000 years or so. However, suppose people did. It would be then very easy to persuade people to save the biosphere from the Greenhouse Gas catastrophe.
The one billion people living within 10 meter elevation from the sea would not appreciate to see their properties flooded within a small fraction of their lifetimes. Indeed, it’s pretty much guaranteed that sea level will go up tens of meters in a few centuries, displacing billions of people. Such a displacement of population will bring huge wars, and misery, among other problems.
Thus with long lives will come a better stewardship of the planet.
Some have dared to idiotically proffer that we would not want to live that long. Well, I am all for voluntary euthanasia: let them idiots and people of little appreciation die, that will help the biosphere. And it will help the ambiance too: who wants people in such a bad mood, with a jaundiced attitude to life, sticking around? Would not they start wars, just to get out of their colossal ennui?
Not fighting aging is tantamount to calling death a necessary calling, short-term, of the human experience. It’s nearly tantamount to approving of young people dying in war. It’s the reign of the philosophy of the Dark Side posing as Enlightened.
Ageing as something to be respected has to be disposed of, be it just to improve the philosophical mood of humanity.
Patrice Ayme’
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 