"What we’re trying to do is hit the biggest point of suffering right now in the industrialised world, which is the diseases of ageing.” Biotech boss Elizabeth Parrish has tried out her company’s anti-ageing gene therapy with, she says, amazing results. Too good to be true?
This was the strapline on a post on the Guardian's Facebook feed on Sunday.
Having ignored her slightly clumsy use of the Queen's english in her quote, I was intrigued enough to read the accompanying article. The answer to the last question, 'Too good to be true?' seems to be, 'Probably.'
Whether or not Ms Parrish has indeed discovered how to stop ageing only time will tell, by which time I will be to old to care, after all I'm nearly too old to care now.
Trying to discover more about this wonder woman I trawled the internet, actually I googled her and read her Linkedin profile by which time I found myself losing the will to live, and I found that surprisingly she didn't seem to be any sort of scientist.
Liz (it seems) is known as "the woman who wants to genetically engineer you," she is a humanitarian, entrepreneur and innovator and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of gene therapy, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. One of them then.
It seems that so convinced is she that these therapies work that she has tried them on herself. She couldn't do that in the US because they have laws about that sort of thing so instead she went to Bolivia, and had it done there. As I understand it Bolivia has not hitherto been renowned for its medical research, but of course that might be about to change, especially as they are quite happy, apparently to allow testing of unproven therapies on human patients. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised as anecdotally several Nazis fled there after the war. Maybe their work continues.
And this leads me to the kernel of what I want to talk about today. It all hinges on ethics. Gene therapy undoubtedly offers a great deal of hope to those who suffer from diseases which may be cured or halted by techniques which will emerge from research in this ares. I am all for hope and am delighted that such research is being carried out. I have absolutely no objection, ethical or practical to that being done.
Ms Parrish however, while claiming that she is trying (not her personally, you understand, she just promotes it motivationally) to cure the diseases of ageing. As someone who already suffers from rather too many of these diseases I ought to be excited at the prospect that they may be curable, although I fear that there must be a point of no return, beyond which no amount of gene therapy will help. So perhaps it might be considered strange that I am deeply uneasy about the whole thing.
It actually seems from reading the Guardian article that many scientists working in the field are sceptical about her claims and whether the results she claims will actually benefit her. My unease runs deeper however. Should we even be looking for a cure for ageing at all?
Let us look at just some of the possible effects of being able to say, double the normal life-span of a human being. In that case the average age at death would be about 150 in the developed world but of course considerably less in less developed countries. Doubling the allotted span would emphasise these differences. Nevertheless the effect on the total population of the world must be to increase it further. I have been quoted studies which show that the 'worst case scenario' in Sweden would be an increase of only 35% over 50 years. Quite why Sweden was chosen was not made clear but if we project even this crude estimate over the globe I think we will still find ourselves with a rather crowded planet, probably more crowded than it otherwise would have been. I will not be alive in 50 years so if this stuff starts to happen, good luck to those of you that still are. A rather over enthusiastic espouser of this anti-ageing therapy also directed me to a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_cqEdDtEQ . I couldn't watch it all, it made me so cross but others might find it less annoying. He really lost me when he said the way to avoid overpopulation is not to have children. I don't think that would happen. He might be happy to be childless, Mrs Green and I don't have children, through choice, but we are definitely not the norm.
Besides I don't even think that overpopulation is the most significant reason for not wanting an anti-ageing therapy.
For a start it is not going to be cheap. I think I can predict with some certainty that it won't be available on demand on the NHS. This immediately creates an imbalance. Society is already divided into the haves and the have-nots. What if we found ourselves in a situation where the haves not only have much more than the rest of us, but they live for much longer as well? One of the positives about cockroaches like Philip Green is that he is old and fat and may well not live a great deal longer, although looking up his details I see he is only eighteen months older than me. The prospect of him being able to buy another sixty or seventy years in which to enjoy his ever increasing fleet of luxury yachts fills me with anger and I am not a struggling ex BHS employee.
If by some miracle it were to be made available to all on demand, I am still not sure I would want it. The government is already pushing retirement age over the horizon. The prospect of living say 150 years and working till you are 140 does not appeal to me. Ah, I hear you say, but we are all going to be replaced by robots so we won't have to work and will all have much more time to enjoy ourselves. Could I just respectfully point out that enjoying ourselves costs money, feeding, clothing and housing ourselves costs money. If we are not working where will this money come from? This bright bold new future is not actually quite as bright and bold as it might seem. And not everything can be done by robots, so what about those of us who still have to work? More resentment. More Chaos.
Taken to its extreme each country will have an immortal elite and a mortal proletariat. I bet the North Koreans are looking forward to that. Kim Jong Un living forever while the rest of them struggle and starve. It won't be much better here. Philip Green aside, how about an immortal Cliff Richard, Tamara Ecclestone, Queen Elizabeth (poor old Charlie), Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Branson, Roman Abramovich, Jose Mourinho? We really would have a 'them-and-us' society. Each country could have its own immortal elite. Imagine an immortal Trump, an immortal Berlusconi, an immortal Putin, an immortal Jeremy Hunt. If it ever happens I off to Dignitas on the next plane and you can sort out the mess yourselves.
Just like nuclear fission which was supposed to provide us with eternal free energy and instead provided us with nuclear waste we can't get rid of safely and nuclear weapons whose destructive power is unimaginable, a therapy for immortality or even significant prolonging of our natural life-span is a genie which should not be let out of the bottle.
Take Care
Love Tim xx
Take Care
Love Tim xx
No comments:
Post a Comment