4 ms·

Related: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to-argue-that-work-on-radical-life-extension-is-valid-research.php http://www.fightaging.org

Related: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to-argue-that-work-on-radical-life-extension-is-valid-research.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to... "If you only had 20 minutes, what would you do to convince an intelligent (college educated or professional) audience of the significance of life extension beyond 120 years?"

akanet 15y ago
Neat, wish I had seen this sooner.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jessriedel 15y ago
  > Luckily, there is no need to convince anyone at all, except maybe to get research grants (but the true purpose of those can always be disguised as ethically clean basic medical research). There would be many orders of magnitude more funding for life-extension research if most people wanted it. In fact, probably 90% of our health funding would be devoted to it. So I think it is a very bad thing that people generally don't want it (or think they don't want it).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tapp 15y ago
    Exactly so. The primary killers in the Western world are cancer and heart disease, and very few people argue with the billions of dollars in annual funding that these diseases receive. What is often overlooked is that these are both fundamentally diseases of aging. Research in to retarding aging could easily have the highest ROI (where R is measured in the addition of years of healthy lifespan) of any avenue of research, yet it receives almost none because of societal bias that views it as fringe.
    - orangecat 15y ago
      Yes. Also consider that the long-term fiscal crisis in the US is due almost entirely to promised Medicare and Social Security benefits, which are required because the elderly generally can't be as economically productive and are expensive to keep alive. Cure aging, and the need for those programs is greatly reduced.

4 ms·

Related: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to-argue-that-work-on-radical-life-extension-is-valid-research.php http://www.fightaging.org

by reasonattlm 15y ago

akanet 15y ago
Neat, wish I had seen this sooner.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jessriedel 15y ago
  > Luckily, there is no need to convince anyone at all, except maybe to get research grants (but the true purpose of those can always be disguised as ethically clean basic medical research). There would be many orders of magnitude more funding for life-extension research if most people wanted it. In fact, probably 90% of our health funding would be devoted to it. So I think it is a very bad thing that people generally don't want it (or think they don't want it).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tapp 15y ago
    Exactly so. The primary killers in the Western world are cancer and heart disease, and very few people argue with the billions of dollars in annual funding that these diseases receive. What is often overlooked is that these are both fundamentally diseases of aging. Research in to retarding aging could easily have the highest ROI (where R is measured in the addition of years of healthy lifespan) of any avenue of research, yet it receives almost none because of societal bias that views it as fringe.
    - orangecat 15y ago
      Yes. Also consider that the long-term fiscal crisis in the US is due almost entirely to promised Medicare and Social Security benefits, which are required because the elderly generally can't be as economically productive and are expensive to keep alive. Cure aging, and the need for those programs is greatly reduced.