Title: Anti-ageing and the scientific avoidance of death.
1Anti-ageing and the scientific avoidance of
death.
- John A. Vincent
- Egenis Seminar Presentation
- 2nd February 2010
2Structure of the presentation
- Outline the problem how to understand the
cultural devaluation of old age. - Comparative material from anthropology and
history locate unique features of contemporary
construction of age and death. - Use Roses work to think about the consequences
of the biologisation of old age and death.
3Time and the boundaries of old age
- Old age defined by end of middle age and the
onset of death - Cultural construction of life stage is dependent
on cultural ideas of time and of death
4Cultural construction of time
- Types of time
- Western arrow of time
- Hindu round of time
- Australian Dream time
5Anthropology of ageing and death
- Key analyses in this literature describe the way
societies understand and manage the transition
from the world of the living to the world of the
dead. - One theme is that of social transition and looks
at inheritance of property and resources, and the
succession of statuses from one generation to the
next. - Another theme is that of symbol and ritual,
including the way different communities give
meaning to this transition through recreating
collective or individual identities
6Selected examples
- Dinka,
- Mardu, and
- Madagascar
7Celine Lafontaine La Société Post-Mortelle
- For Lafontaine the key factors in understanding
modern attitudes to death - what she calls the
post-mortal society are - individualisation (existential meaning is only to
be found in individuals not collectivities) and - de-symbolisation (the lack of ritual and
symbolic meanings for death).
8Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself
- The main thesis of this work is that in the
contemporary world at the start of the 21st
century the way life itself has come to be
understood has changed. - It has been biologised and reconstructed to lie
at the sub-cellular and molecular level. - The advances in bio-chemistry and the
understanding of genetics and cell science have
atomised the biology of life into a string of
complex genetically induced cascade of complex
molecules.
9Politics of death itself
- We can take this idea about the changing
understanding of life and apply it to death. - If life has been biologised, fragmented, reduced
to a bio-chemical essence and rendered political
by new potentialities for control, then so too
has death. - This is the realm of anti-ageing science.
10Anti-ageing and the avoidance of death
- In other work I have classified anti-ageing
phenomena into four types. - Firstly there is an approach in which ageing is
the appearance of old age, a phenomena of the
bodys surface. This anti-ageing is thus cosmetic
in intention. - The second approach is to consider ageing to be a
disease to be tackled by medical strategies with
the intention of cure. Ageing from this
perspective is a phenomenon of the body interior.
- The third view of ageing is that it is a
fundamental biological process particularly
located in the intra cellular bio-chemistry.
Biological anti-ageing strategies seek to modify
these processes by manipulation of cell
chemistry. - And fourthly, for some ageing is death. These
anti-ageing activities aim to achieve
immortality, or at least something close to it.
11Managing death in the post-mortal world
- The policing and control of life, implies the
same processes for death. Not only in the sense
of avoiding death and prolonging life, but
dealing with the inevitable fact of death. - For all the culturally enwrapped denial, we all
still die, and this fact has to be managed. The
extent of the denial makes this a difficult task.
As Lafontaine points out, death has been removed
from the world of symbol, ritual and meaning and
turned into a mundane biological fact. As such,
without its sacred quality and apparently subject
to technical biological analysis and control, it
creates new problems of management.
12Key processes
- Rose suggests five process through which to
understand changes to the politics of life
itself. We can look at these in turn and examine
what they mean for death in the post-mortal
world. They are
- molecularisation,
- optimization,
- subjectification,
- somatic expertise, and
- the economics of vitality.
13molecularisation
The final stage of apoptosis cleaning up after
the death
- According to Rose, the essential vitality which
animates life is now seen as a molecular process.
Molecularisation, or at least modern cell
science, has profoundly influenced contemporary
understanding of death. Cell death apoptosis
and senescence. - The biology text books and popular science media
habitually describe apoptosis as cell suicide.
Sometimes they call it murder (when the cell
responds to external stimuli but I have only
found one case where it is referred to as
euthanasia). However, apoptosis is clearly good
death. Its death at the right time and the right
place is a necessary and desirable outcome.
14Old age at the cell level
- On the other hand senescence is the cell in old
age. The metaphor is a powerful one even if the
belief that there is a specific direct link to
organism ageing is contentious. - Historically in biology the meaning of senescence
has shifted from specific form of decline, loss
of efficient function in all aspects, including
the accumulation of junk, to being used
specifically in the sense of replicative
senescence - the cessation of mitosis (cell
division). - Even at the cellular level old age is imaged as
bad.
15optimization
http//stemcells.nih.gov/info/scireport/2006report
.htm
- life is no longer simply constrained within the
parameters of health and illness, but that it can
be manipulated in order to optimise such features
as intelligence or longevity. He links these
developments to a stress on functionality -
enhancing the bodys ability to perform what the
individual desires from it. - Death is seen as the ultimate loss of
functionality. Optimization requires the body to
overcome time and function for ever thus avoiding
old age and death. - Stem cell research holds out the possibility of
replacing worn out or failed bits of the body by
growing genetically matched replacements to be
transplanted as the need arises. Cloning
technology not only offers the prospect of
cloning your favourite pet so it is replaced by a
genetically identical substitute, it offers the
possibility of reproducing yourself. - Post-human aspirations
16subjectificaton
- Roses third theme is that of subjectificaton
and the individuals responsibility for body
management. the politics of life itself in his
title refers to the development of a
biocitizenship with rights and duties for life,
body and risk. He suggests this creates somatic
ethics not ethics as moral precepts but as
values about the conduct of a life placing the
body and its management at the centre. - Death becomes someones fault, perhaps the
individual who did not look after themselves
properly, perhaps the expert who failed to
prevent death from a specific disease. The
prologeviste movement, those striving for
immortality take this position to the logical
conclusion, death is the ultimate failure, the
final sin/ dereliction of an individual. - From this perspective ageing becomes the fault of
the individual. It is slackers, morally culpable
people who do not follow the best practices of
healthy living that will lose out on immortality
and die.
17somatic expertise
- the rights and responsibilities of others for
biological control over our bodies. - He identifies a professionalisation of expertise
concerning the body. There is a proliferation of
sub-branches of biology and bio-chemistry and
specialisms which control the technical expertise
of these sciences. - There is also professionalization of the pastoral
response to life and death, experts who offer
counselling and advice on how individuals should
manage grief. - Rose notes bioethics as a new discipline in
which people claim expertise with which to
legitimate research and medical activities. - Rose analysis thus directs us to look at death
managers and death avoidance experts and the role
they play in policing death. - We can divide policing death into two kinds,
policing the dead and policing the survivors.
18Policing the dead
- Historically policing the dead was the apparatus
of church and religion, the proper processing of
souls to pass from this world to the next. In the
modern secular world is becomes a health issue,
hygienic disposal of corpses through properly
sanctioned crematoria and prohibition of bodily
disposal in any but authorised sites. - The post-mortal society creates new dilemmas
and institutions in the policing of the dead.
There are those who seek immortality through
revival of the corpse when science has progressed
to perform such miracles, in other words
entrusting their body to future life and death
experts.
19cyronics industry
- The most well developed of these is the cyronics
industry with active facilities in both USA and
Russia. Despite the absence of current to
technology for thawing out and resuscitating
those that have chosen this method of bodily
disposal, faith in the progress in science is
felt to justify such procedures. - An essential feature of cryonics is the location
of the individual, the persona, personality, in
the body, indeed in the brain, and that the
preservation of the chemical constituents will
preserve the essence of the person. - Such a radical approach challenges a number of
our key institutions, the legal system recognises
the frozen as dead, inheritance laws apply and
there is no way of ensuring the revived are not
destitute. The freezers are run by commercial
firms who are liable to economic failure and
bankruptcy as any other economic institution thus
potentially leaving immortality in the hands of
administrators.
Photo courtesy Alcor Life Extension FoundationIn
an operating room at Alcor Life Extension
Foundation, a cryonics patient is cooled in a vat
of dry ice as part of the "freezing" procedure.
20Policing the living
- At a death we have institutions for policing the
living. For example, we have institutions to
manage the laws on succession and inheritance of
property and status. We have judicial and law
enforcement institutions to hold to account those
who commit homicide. Older people are vulnerable
to mass murder c.f. Harold Shipman. - In modern world psychological well being of
survivors post traumatic stress, grief
counselling has become an additional realm of
professional expertise. However, individuals are
expected to engage in personal self policing. In
terms of somantic ethics they have a
responsibility for coming to terms with
bereavement. The living are required to manage
the morning process - the psychological process
of consigning the dead to quiescent memory and
there are psychological experts to help people
through this process. To fail to do so in due
time is to open up moral/medical accusations of
being morbid, of insufficient self-control.
21Euthansasia
- Policing, and self policing of the living, also
leads us to the realm of euthanasia and choice of
ones death. The Western culture with its values
of individualism and choice, produces a profound
ambivalence to suicide. It is the ultimate act of
individual control and choice. It is also in
terms of somantic ethics the ultimate sin
destroying the material basis of existence. - Euthansasia therefore might be seen as the
converse of attempts at immortality such as
cryonics. It involves both a rejection of the
power of science and reason to solve the problem
of disease and pain satisfactorily and involves
the abdication of self. Yet it involves the
expression of individuality through choice - the
ultimate choice to live or die.
22Moral responsibility for death
- The medical technicians at the scene of death
have to work within the moral framework which
gives them power and responsibility. They have to
strive to avoid being blamed. - The moral apparatus of the post-mortal society
seeks cause, and therefore blame, in the material
facts of a material world scientifically
understood, a world of cause and effect. Either
the individual deceased is responsible for the
cause, not engaging in the necessary risk
management, or those responsible for not alerting
the individual to making the correct safe
choices are at fault. In these circumstances a
good death is not possible. - Even, euthanasia becomes a problematic answer to
the construction of a moral death. Somatic
expertise implies there must be a discernable
cause behind the desire to die whose failure is
behind that desire? Candidates for culpability
might include weakness in the moral standing of
the individual, or weakness in the psychological
make up of the individual due to parental
upbringing, or clinical failure on the part of
medical technicians to control pain, to control
the course of the illness, or failure of public
authorities who have not yet devoted the
resources which will (inevitably, eventually)
find a cure.
23economics of vitality
- the vital elements of life can be
- decomposed into a series of distinct and
discrete objects that can be isolated,
delimited, stored, accumulated, mobilized, and
exchanged, accorded a discrete value, traded
across time, space, species, context enterprises
in the service of many distinct objectives.
(Rose 20087) - This trend is clearly identifiable in the world
of anti-ageing science and medicine. Bio-capital
is being sought by a wide range of anti-ageing
entrepreneurs. The market serves as both source
of capital and as outlet for consumer products.
24Biovalue
- A good case example is that of the history of the
search for a method of using teleomere science to
create an anti-ageing therapy. Bio-value is the
realm of the anti-ageing foundations
institutions which forge links between the
scientist in the lab and the market. On one level
the search for bio-value and ways to exploit it
are based in the straight forward entrepreneurial
profit motive. A patent on a once a day pill
which enables you to live for ever is the
ultimate cash machine. - However, there is a more profound and subtle
critique of capitalism in which bio-capital can
be seen as part of the objectification of people,
undermining their humanity and dissolving human
relationships and collective solidarity through
the market. To the market, as with science, death
is impersonal, mundane and essentially trivial.
25Anti-ageing science and time
- Biological ageing requires a sense of biological
time at what rate does the body age, how can we
measure it? Biological time has to be independent
from chronological time. In order to establish
biological time we need biomarkers, points which
indicate its forward march.
- Measuring functionality - Looking good for our
age, looking ten years younger, being fit for
your age requires appeal to such bio-markers.
Culturally we a very familiar with the visible
symbols we identify as signs of old age, grey
hair, wrinkles, changes in posture, loss of
hearing, eyesight and mental acuity. The problem,
over and above the key issue of defining
someones humanity by their visual appearance, is
that these phenomena do not standardise into
predictable chronological age with a high degree
of accuracy.
26Science outside time
- Optimisation can mean more that looking good, or
being functional for ones age. It contains an
implicit view of the perfect body, the fully
optimised body is one that never fails but is
immortal. The construction is embedded in the
concept of time inherent in modern science. In
one sense the view of time as inevitably
progressive underlies the optimisation drive.
Science is seen as making inevitable progress -
the future is more knowledgeable than the past
history of science the history of elimination of
error. - However, in an important sense, science is
understood as outside of time. It is about the
universal laws of nature, true for all time. The
laws of nature at not seen as subject to time, to
history and to change. Once they are known it is
assumed they always were and always will be the
same. Thus in the Petri dish or under the
election microscope, in an important sense there
is no time. - Failed experiments are false, imperfect while
the truth will live on for ever. Perfection steps
outside time. This is the world of the
bio-gerontologists who see immortality as a
practical project. It is a world without time a
world which exists in the laboratory at the level
of the cell and bio-chemical processes which
animate it. It is not a world with human
relationships and history. The logic then becomes
- when we discover the laws of life we will be
able to prevent death for ever because those laws
never change. - Perfect understanding, creates immortal
functionality and avoids death.
27Conclusion
- As life becomes something to be biologised,
essentialised, manipulated and the subject of
struggle and contest, so too does death. In the
modern world, embedded in the belief in
progressive science is the implication that it
will provide the solution for death. - Scientists claim to have the techniques for
increasing human life span, if not exactly now,
at least the potential for the future. Scientific
medicine acts as if it should have, and
eventually will, find the cure for death. For the
medical technician every death represents a
failure. - The modern world and its dominant scientific
modes of accounting and legitimising knowledge
have their share of the fountain of youth myths.
Immortality, and the defeat of disease and injury
are a common place of science fiction. These
cultural manifestations come from the same mind
set as that which sees the goal of science as the
elimination of death. - The timeless individual has no age, the
functionally perfect body does not die. In such a
world we struggle to find rituals and to
demarcate the sacred or anything meaningful in
death.
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