Anti-ageing and the scientific avoidance of death.

1
Anti-ageing and the scientific avoidance of
death.

• John A. Vincent
• Egenis Seminar Presentation
• 2nd February 2010

2
Structure of the presentation

1. Outline the problem how to understand the
   cultural devaluation of old age.
2. Comparative material from anthropology and
   history locate unique features of contemporary
   construction of age and death.
3. Use Roses work to think about the consequences
   of the biologisation of old age and death.

3
Time 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

4
Cultural construction of time

• Types of time
• Western arrow of time
• Hindu round of time
• Australian Dream time

5
Anthropology 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

6
Selected examples

• Dinka,
• Mardu, and
• Madagascar

7
Celine 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).

8
Nikolas 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.

9
Politics 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.

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Anti-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.

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Managing 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.

12
Key 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.

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molecularisation
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.

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Old 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.

15
optimization
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

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subjectificaton

• 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.

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somatic 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.

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Policing 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.

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cyronics 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.
20
Policing 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.

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Euthansasia

• 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.

22
Moral 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.

23
economics 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.

24
Biovalue

• 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.

25
Anti-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.

26
Science 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.

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Conclusion

• 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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