The cultural construction and demolition of old age:

1
The cultural construction and demolition of old
age

• science and anti-ageing technologies.

2
Why study anti-ageing science?

• Predominantly western culture seeks not to
  celebrate ageing but to avoid it.
• Why does western culture currently devalue old
  age so much when compared to many other cultures?

3
Time orders Old Age to destroy BeautyBATONI,
Pompeo Girolamo (1708 1787)

• Despite the success of parts of the
  re-evaluation/ emancipation agenda, the dominant
  contemporary cultural attitude to later life is
  that of anti-aging

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looking ten years younger

• Should anti-ageing practices be considered as
  part the problem of ageism by prejudicially
  acting to segregate off old age and subject it to
  dissection, manipulation and control
• Or, in contradistinction should they be
  considered as part of the resistance to ageism
  acts to overcome the exclusion of the aged?

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Anti-ageing - definitions

• 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, a phenomenon of the bodys interior.
  Ageing is to be tackled by medical strategies
  with the intention of cure.
• The third view of ageing is that it is a
  fundamental biological process particularly
  located in intra cellular bio-chemistry.
  Biological anti-ageing strategies seek to modify
  these processes with the intention of extending
  the life span.
• Fourthly, ageing for some is death, and for them
  the objective of an anti-ageing strategy is to
  achieve immortality, or at least something close
  to it.

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Science and Culture

• 1. Science comes first cultural follows
• 1.1 Naïve version science is truth inevitably
  revealed
• 1.2 Knowledge as power institutional control of
  knowledge mediates which aspects of scientific
  knowledge becomes culturally dominant.
• 2. Culture comes first science follows.
• 2.1 Antipathy to ageing directs scientific
  endeavour.
• 2.2 Cultural concepts loaded with ageist
  preconceptions permeate into scientific thought.

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1.1. The normal view

• Science is seen as steadily and predictably
  revealing the hidden truth of nature and is
  consequently an inevitable and predetermined
  progression.
• This attitude is an important part of the
  motivations and life world of those in the
  anti-ageing movement. They see their work as the
  necessary precursors of inevitable progress.
• This position can be clearly illustrated by the
  work of Aubrey de Grey

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Aubrey de Gray

• The cure of aging must now be taken seriously by
  responsible gerontologists, because it is no
  longer science fiction. It is patently not yet
  science fact either, but it has crossed the
  boundary into science foreseeable. Its elevation
  to science fact is a foregone conclusion, (de
  Grey 2003 934)

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Jurgen Habermas 1.2 The critical view

• Science is the most powerful source of cultural
  knowledge and there is a diffusion effect from
  new science into popular understanding and
  practice. Biological and medical knowledge is of
  such power that dominates and makes self-evident
  the nature of old age.
• This power facilitates the role of the medical /
  corporate structure in the development and
  marketing of medical procedures, including
  anti-ageing ones and the role of consumerism in
  marketising the body.

• Carroll Estes

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Science and Capital Marco Traub

• There is widespread criticism of big pharma,
  essentially a term of abuse identifying the major
  multi-national drug companies, within the
  anti-ageing movement.

• Despite the evidence of commercial sponsorship at
  the anti-ageing conferences studied, the
  rhetoric used is essentially that of small
  capital threatened and excluded by big capital.
  It is a rhetoric which enables both those who
  work within established medical and scientific
  frameworks and the alternative new age
  practitioners to use a common language and
  identify an agreed target.

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Michel Foucault2.1 Archaeology of
discourse

• Science reflects the cultural history of the
  society within which it is practiced. There are
  many good histories of gerontology, and longevity
  which can provide background to how the
  contemporary intellectual apparatus of
  bio-gerontology arose (Katz 1996 Boia 2004
  Haber 1984).

• Knowledge cannot be independent of the human
  knower and so science is one amongst many
  possible knowledge systems. The archaeological
  approach unearths the history of ideas and
  meanings and how they have changed over time as a
  commentary on current ways of understand the
  phenomenon.
• The origins of the contemporary commonsense
  understanding of ageing are related historically
  to (i) the Cartesian division of 'mind' and
  'body', (ii) an extreme individualisation of
  society and (iii) the focus on the body and
  identity. Hence the modern deference to the
  science of the mechanics of the body in the
  characterisation of ageing and old age.

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if men define situations as real, they are real
in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928
572)

• It is peoples belief in the inevitable progress
  of science that makes them arrange for their
  bodies to be frozen with the intention of being
  restored to life when science has made sufficient
  progress.
• Further, their understanding of body and self, as
  derived from Enlightenment thought, leads them to
  think it is they, some personalized
  self-conscious identity, which will be
  resurrected.

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Franz Boaz 2.2. Language and thought

• Science is inside, not exterior, to culture.
  Scientific knowledge has to be formulated in ways
  which conform to the wider cultural practices
  such as language, which are pre-requisites for
  the communication of knowledge.

• Specialist and technical languages develop among
  social groups with particular communication needs
  for example those who study the biology of
  ageing. However, meaning cannot be created
  without the pre-existing base of language with
  its embedded concepts and which shape the
  possibilities of development.
• The use of military metaphors in the anti-ageing
  movement (Vincent 2007) illustrates various
  kinds of anti-ageing practitioners taking well
  know images from one area of life and using them
  as tool to think with and explain anew other
  phenomena, in this case ageing.

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Textbook Definitions

• Although there may be advantages in using ageing
  in this general way, it is rather difficult to do
  so, because in common language ageing implies
  something more than simply getting older. For
  example, it would be unusual to talk of an ageing
  child. We would normally refer to a developing
  child, because in everyday English the word
  ageing carries within the idea of decline and
  deterioration. Most biologists have tended to
  accept these connotations, and think of ageing as
  occurring only after maturity has been reached.
  In fact, as can be seen from some of the
  definitions given below, the terms ageing and
  senescence are frequently used interchangeably.
  (Lamb1977 2)

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Textbook Definitions

• we may define aging as the time-independent
  series of cumulative, progressive, intrinsic, and
  deleterious functional and structural changes
  that usually being to manifest themselves at
  reproductive maturity and eventually culminate in
  death. A simple mnemonic for this definition is
  CPID (cumulative, progressive, intrinsic,
  deleterious).

• Using the points emphasized above as a working
  definition of aging or senescence has the
  advantage of allowing us to be precise in
  categorizing a particular process as a normal
  age-related change. For example, we can easily
  distinguish deleterious changes due to aging from
  changes due to infectious disease (the latter is
  the result of a parasite and is not intrinsic),
  or from changes that have no obvious deleterious
  effect (for example, gray hair). (Arking,
  200611-13)

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Faragher RG. (2000) Cell senescence and human
aging where's the link? Biochemical Society
Transactions. 2000 Feb28(2)221-6

• The term senescence entered science and biology
  from a long history and was present from the
  beginnings of the discipline. The concept was
  derived from wider culture and diffused into
  biology as scientists sort to make sense of what
  they observed.
• The term senescence has transformed its meaning
  over time. Variously in biology its meaning has
  shifted from senescence as the general decline of
  the organism or race, to the loss of efficient
  function in specific organs and functions, to
  special identification with cell function.

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Senescence imaged

• A new test developed by LBL researchers uses blue
  stain to detect the presence of senescent cells.
  The assay top left shows young tissue with no
  presence of blue top right is young sunburned
  tissue, also negative. Older tissue cells,
  pictured in the bottom four assays, contain blue
  areas revealing evidence of the existence of
  senescent cells.

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Senescence

• However the metaphor of senescent cells, conjures
  many images and extensions.
• Normal human somatic cells have a finite life
  span in vivo as well as in vitro and retire into
  senescence after a limited number of cell
  divisions. (Pandita 2007)
• Scientists can talk of old molecules, or
  ageing proteins as well as senescent cells,
  almost as if they had grey beards and used a
  zimmer frame to go and collect their pension.

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Apoptosis

• The term apoptosis was consciously invented to
  describe a newly discovered cell process. The OED
  records a previous much older but now redundant
  meaning of the term but in modern English it is
  clearly and unambiguously a technical biological
  term.
• They cite a 1972 paper by Kerr et al in the
  British Journal of Cancer (1972 vol.26 241) as
  the etymological source. By the nineteen nineties
  the term was well established in the Biological
  literature and its significance in a number of
  fields including cancer research and gerontology
  was understood.
• Further evidence of the generation of the term
  within the scientific discipline is the debate as
  to how to pronounce the word.

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The final stage of apoptosis cleaning up after
the death

• The biology text books and popular science media
  have the apoptosis metaphor conventionally as
  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 (see Raloff 2001 i). However,
  apoptosis is clearly good death

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Apoptosis

• Apoptosis is programmed cell death and although
  we dont realize it, each of us has been dying
  every day, right on schedule, in order to remain
  alive. Death cannot be our enemy if we have
  depended upon it from the womb. Consider the
  following irony. As it turns out, the body is
  capable of taking a vacation from death by
  producing cells that decide to live forever.
  These cells dont trigger p53 when they detect
  defects in their own DNA. And by refusing to
  issue their own death warrants, these cells
  divide relentlessly and invasively. Cancer, the
  most feared of diseases, is the bodys vacation
  from death, while programmed death is its ticket
  to life. This is the paradox of life and death
  confronted head on. The mystical notion of dying
  every day turns out to be the bodys most
  concrete fact.
• Deepak Chopra - August 12, 2005

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Science is both ageist and is a potential agent
of change

• Understanding ageism requires more sophisticated
  models of the relationships between science,
  knowledge and society. A theory of process, a
  method of understanding the intermediation social
  and scientific developments which plausibly
  explains the direction of change in needed.
• The evidence suggests a predominant, but not
  exclusive, direction of movement in the
  contemporary world. One in which science,
  particularly biological science, constructs new
  and ever more negative understandings of ageing
  based on bodily failure. As we have seen for
  biology ageing is by definition bad for you.
• There is a tight association between ageing and
  death which enables some anti-ageing activists
  to characterise their opponents as in favour of
  death. However, science is advancing rapidly and
  the pursuit of knowledge about the basic
  processes of life is producing a new biology.
  Concepts such as apoptosis undermine the
  conventional view of death and offer alternative
  models of the stage next to death with potential
  for cultural change.

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Conclusion

• The crucial issue is not whether anti-ageing is
  science based or not.
• The issue for combating ageism is not the
  effectiveness or otherwise of particular
  anti-ageing technologies but rather giving
  positive social meaning to the final part of life
  before death.
• While whole heartedly endorsing the need to
  expose money marking schemes based on ineffective
  pseudo science and how they play on the fear of
  ageing, I would also want to draw on the
  sociology of science to critique the consequences
  of the role of biogerontology, even in its
  respectable forms. The cultural devaluation of
  old age and the lucrative opportunities this
  opens up for those who control anti-ageing
  technologies, are more vulnerable to genuine than
  bogus science.
• The power of science can be used both to
  reinforce and to challenge ageism. Old Age cannot
  be something which should be avoided. It is
  important to distinguish liberation from old
  age the anti-ageing strategy from the
  liberation of old age the cultural
  re-evaluation strategy.

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Thank you

• This slide show and the paper on which it is
  based can be viewed at
• http//www.people.exeter.ac.uk/JVincent/