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A Modest Proposal: How to Stop Aging Entirely
(Friday September 25 2009)
 | You'll find an Aubrey de Grey reprint in the latest issue of Discover: "Many people, when thinking about the idea of adding years to life, commit the 'Tithonus error' - the presumption that, when we talk about combating aging, we're only talking about stretching out the grim years of debilitation and disease with which most people's lives currently end. In fact, the opposite is true. The defeat of aging will entail the elimination of that period, by postponing it to indefinitely greater ages so that people never reach it. There will, quite simply, cease to be a portion of the population that is frail and infirm as a result of age. It’s not just extending lives that I'm advocating; it's the elimination of the almost incalculable amount of suffering - experienced not only by the elderly themselves, of course, but by their loved ones and caregivers - that aging currently visits upon us. Oh, and there's the minor detail of the financial savings that the elimination of aging would deliver to society: It's well established that the average person in the industrialized world consumes more health care resources in his or her last year of life than in an entire life up to that point, irrespective of age at death, so we're talking about trillions of dollars per year." |
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