Amazing?
January 13, 2008
In his wordpress blog, Biosingularity, this fellow mentions how scientists, by putting yeast on a calorie-controlled diet and tweaking two genes, have increased the lifespan of yeast by 10 times without any negative side-effects. The article goes on to talk about how the same genetic tweak occurs naturally in some people and about how it could lead to the development of an anti-aging drug.
The Blog in question…
I post this here not to summarize but to ask for discussion. This is amazing, but it is also scary, and raises many ethical questions in my mind. What would a world without aging look like? Who would get access to these anti-aging drugs? Does anybody else see a parallel with Robert Heinlein’s work here? Yikes. What about poor people? If aging were some day eliminated, who would ‘get’ to have children? Who would decide who ‘got to’? What about the creation of an underclass of people unable to afford this or other genetic ‘tweaks’ or special ‘superpower’ drugs?
I know these are pretty random, not to mention entirely theoretical questions, but discoveries like this are to me amazing, yet they seem to be widely ignored. But what could their consequences be? To me it is a little scary…
