Anti-ageing:%20knowledge,%20practice%20and%20conflict%20in%20the%20control%20of%20ageing.

1
Anti-ageing knowledge, practice and conflict in
the control of ageing.

• John A. Vincent (University of Exeter)
• Anti-ageing rhetorics "health span",
  "regenerative medicine", "looking ten years
  younger" and "anti-ageing pralines".
• Jennifer R. Fishman, Robert H. Binstock, and Eric
  T. Juengst(Case Western Reserve University )
• Anti-Ageing Scientists and the Politics of
  Presentation
• John Bond, (Newcastle University) and Tiago
  Moreira, (Durham University)
• Preventing brain ageing anti-ageing medicine or
  what?
• Mone Spindler (Free University of Berlin)
• Anti-aging and spirituality - Surrogate religion,
  spiritual materialism, post-modern Calvinist
  ethic?
• Cassandra Phoenix (University of Exeter)
• Anti-ageing bodies? Considering the dark
  underside of the sport sub-culture.

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Anti-ageing rhetorics health span,
regenerative medicine, looking ten years
younger and anti-ageing pralines.

• John Vincent, University of Exeter

3
Anti-ageing, what is it?

• In recent year there has been a significant
  increase in anti-ageing phenomena activities
  and practices aimed at slowing, stopping or
  reversing the ageing process.
• The anti-ageing label covers a wide variety of
  activities and groups which arise out of the deep
  antipathy to old age embedded in Western culture.
  They construct old age as a naturalised
  self-evidently negative biological phenomenon
  which must be overcome.
• These groups have differing claims to knowledge,
  technical expertise and ability to control
  natural phenomena. They include people,
  organisations and activities designed to make
  people look younger, avoid the diseases of old
  age, challenge the biological processes of ageing
  and to greatly extend the human life span,
  possibly even for ever.

4
What are the issues raised by anti-ageing
activities?

• There are large scale existential issues, ones
  that question the fundamental nature of the human
  condition.
• What is old age?
• What is the purpose of life, and its different
  stages?
• Is life always preferable to death is
  immortality desirable?

5
What are the issues raised by anti-ageing
activities?

• There are issues related to the particular
  cultural, social and political status of older
  people.
• Should old age be considered a valued part of the
  life course or something to be abolished as soon
  as practicable?

6
What are the issues raised by anti-ageing
activities?

• There are intermediate level issues, ones which
  stem from the current advances in biology and
  bio-gerontology.
• What is biological ageing? Is it a single process
  or a variety of different processes? What is the
  potential for control of ageing?
• These issues are sometimes debated around the
  question of whether ageing should be considered
  to be a disease.
• What are the consequences of treating as a
  disease?
• What are the priorities for research
  fundamental biology or disease control?

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What are the issues raised by anti-ageing
activities?

• There are further questions which arise from
  these science issues.
• To what extent is a biological or medical model
  of old age an appropriate basis for policies for
  older people?
• Are there alternative models perhaps akin to the
  social model of disability and thus aspire to a
  more elder friendly society?

8
What are the issues raised by anti-ageing
activities?

• There are smaller scale more immediate issues,
  for example about life style choices.
• What and how much should we eat?
• What exercise should we take?
• What should the responsible consumer do in terms
  of living a satisfactory old age?

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Can it be done? Should it be done?

• There are biologists, bio-engineers, medics,
  pharmacists etc who debate whether life span
  extension can be done.
• There are philosophers and ethicists who debate
  whether is should be done
• There are social scientists who observe the
  anti-ageing movement and seek to understand what
  is being done and why and implicitly with what
  consequences
• Biologists and ethicists are the object of study

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Cultural questions

• As social scientists we can modify Moodys second
  question. not should it be done, but how do
  people seek to justifying doing it what
  sources of values and moral legitimacy do people
  appeal to for and against anti-ageing?
• Hence the interest in the study of the cultures
  within which biologists and ethicist work.
• In this paper I will concentrate primarily on the
  protagonists of anti-ageing. This focus is
  selected because it can tell us something broader
  about the cultural and moral status of old age.

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Methods for the study of cultural meanings.

• In this case the meanings of old age in the world
  of anti-ageing.
• Discourse analysis. This approach is frequently
  characterised as having its origin in the work of
  Foucault as his archaeological method
• Other traditions the anthropology of language,
  and drawing more heavily on structuralist
  assumptions and techniques
• Critical theory - deconstructionists unmasking of
  dominant ideologies.
• The techniques of grounded theory provide a way
  of handling data in the form of text, speech,
  performance and observation.
• The analytic strategy is to examine the language,
  speech and text, of those engaged in knowledge
  exchange in the field of anti-ageing to explore
  how these participants justify their activities.

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Interpretive analysis

• Often legitimation is implicit. It has to be read
  into the presentation, abstract or summary.
  Identifying that which is taken to be a good,
  without it having to be stated that it is good,
  is a key part of the interpretative process. It
  is important because such articulation reveals
  the taken for granted assumptions under which the
  scientists / knowledge creators are working,
  assumptions which are almost certainly linked to
  more fundamental tenets of their culture.
• If we examine the stated and implied
  justifications for the research made in a
  selection of papers presented at the four
  conferences we can extract themes and come to
  general conclusions. We can the see the revealed
  meaning of old age based on the rhetoric used to
  justify the research and knowledge making
  activities.
• If we then seek to identify key concepts they can
  be listed in the following table.

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The case study conferences

• 3rd Annual Anti-Ageing Conference London,
  September 15th 17th, Royal College of Medicine,
  London. (acknowledge funding)
• London Regenerative Medicine Network, Meetings
  October 2005, and December 2006, Kings College
  London.
• 3rd International Conference on Functional
  Genomics of Ageing March 29- April 1st 2006
  Palazzo Normani, Palermo.
• Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence
  (SENS2), Second Conference, Queens' College,
  Cambridge, 7th -11th September 2005 (acknowledge
  funding)

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Anti-ageing discourse emergent themes for
characterisation of ageing.
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• Thus we can summerise the underlying discourse of
  anti-ageing as identifying ageing as something
  that
• is bad,
• is associated with the organs of the body,
• should be the target of intervention and
• should be understood through knowledge of
  particular biological processes.
• Each of these they can be read as a form of
  legitimation, an appeal to taken for granted
  moral values assumed to be universal. We cannot
  be against things that are
• good (rather than bad),
• part of our bodies (as opposed to foreign
  bodies),
• intended to cure (rather than to kill), and
• are based on knowledge (as opposed to ignorance)
  of natural (read biological as opposed to
  unnatural or artificial) processes.

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Contested legitimacy

• This list can then be taken to characterise the
  common ground in anti-ageing rhetorics.
• Those engaged in anti-ageing practices also
  disagree about a number of the key concepts.
• What is bad about ageing?
• What organs should be targeted?
• What constitutes effective intervention, and,
• What counts as biological knowledge?

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What is bad about ageing ill-health or death?

• An appeal to ethics and the authority of the
  sage, prophet, and codes of values.
• Different anti-ageing approaches identify
  different characteristics of ageing as
  problematic.
• There are those people for whom the prime problem
  is that of illness and the accompanying pain and
  suffering.
• There are others for who the prime issue is that
  of life its self, which should not be cut short
  when it could be made longer.
• Can you have healthy ageing, health span followed
  by death, or is death intrinsically bad because
  any further life is always valuable.

18
Arking, R. (2006) The Biology of Aging
Observations and Principles. OUP, 3rd ed.
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What organs should be targeted holistic
approaches or not?

• An appeal to identity and the individual as sole
  source of authority over oneself.
• The anti-ageing scientists in the conference
  overwhealmingly, with some notable exceptions,
  concentrated on very specific cell processes,
  organs and therapies.
• However, very evident at the Anti-ageing
  conference and present but more implicit at the
  others is a division between those who emphasise
  a holistic approach to ageing paying attention
  to the ageing of the whole body as opposed to
  elements of it.
• Cosmetic strategies can also be differentiated
  between those which tackle specific parts of the
  body the skin via a face lift, or holistic
  approaches emphasising change in life-style to
  rejuvenate the approach to life.

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Not a science / anti-science distinction

• This is importantly not to be understood as a
  simplistic distinction between woolly new age
  pseudo science and the real hard nosed
  biologists. There are alternative therapists
  appealing to holistic concepts such
  bio-resonance or mind-body therapies.
  However, there are also important biologists
  arguing for a more comprehensive and integrated
  view of ageing.
• The are biologists such as Rose who make a case
  against the reductionist tendencies of modern
  biology which see biological processes as
  essentially cell chemistry and miss out the
  organism and species levels of analysis. There
  are also biologists such a Tom Kirkwood who are
  seeking theories and methods to integrate the
  vast amount of information on genetic and
  cellular processes into a coherent understanding
  of the process as whole a new branch of biology
  known as systems biology.

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Health span?
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What constitutes effective intervention medical
models or life-style

• An appeal to the authority of medicine and the
  therapist
• The knowledge of anti-ageing experts in terms of
  action and therapeutic strategies differ
  radically from each other.
• The dilemmas of holistic versus reductionist
  approaches are also visible in the clash between
  practices informed by the social model disease,
  disability and ageing and clinical therapists.
• The clinical model follows from reductionist
  science. Its atomistic approach to the body sees
  the ideal therapy as universalistic something
  that applies to all bodies equally, all being
  subject to the same bio-chemical routines. All
  social identities removed from this image of the
  body, all bodies seen as fundamentally the same.
• These legitimation activities have important
  material consequences, not only in terms of
  commercial marketing, but also is researchers
  access to funds. The debate about whether ageing
  is a disease is also a clash about funding
  priorities between biologists and medics.

23
Appropriate therapies?

• Should the strategy be to cure one disease or
  all? Should ageing itself be thought of as a
  disease?
• On display at the conferences were, on the one
  hand there were cutting edge medical therapeutic
  practices, for example the use of stem cells to
  promote cardiac regeneration, and on the other
  accounts of drugs such resveratrol which were
  credited with arresting the whole process of
  ageing.
• Alternative therapies, some of which will be
  lifestyle recommendation designed to beef up the
  whole body while others will be dietary
  supplements, some of which will be directed to
  particular organs e.g. brain food.
• There were presentations on transforming the
  resilience of the whole body in the face of
  ageing through exercise and those who sought to
  transform and beautify particular parts of the
  body by having them restyled through the skills
  of cosmetic surgeons.

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What counts as biological knowledge science or
not

• An appeal to the authority of science and the
  producers of knowledge.
• There are a variety of anti-ageing discourses
  which limit real knowledge the facts - to hard
  science.
• Yet there are other discourses which make the
  appeal to the validity of their knowledge through
  different or alternative sources. These others
  include, for example, practitioners who entertain
  a variety of alternative knowledge systems
  including Ayurvedic, homeopathic, and other
  esoteric forms of medicine.
• The language used tend to make an appeal to
  natural or traditional wisdom secrets from the
  past and from other cultures. Here the
  legitimising authority is presented as knowledge,
  revelation, or experience denied to those blinded
  by western / scientific / establishment
  preconceptions.
• Court cases and competitions indeterminate
  results

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anti-ageing pralines.
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Conclusions

• What can we learn from the way that anti-ageing
  activities are legitimated by their
  practitioners. One thing we can learn is how
  deeply embedded ageist approaches to old age are
  embedded in our culture.
• The identified rhetorical elements in anti-ageing
  discourse are homologous, fit hand in glove, with
  the dominant discourses of modern western
  culture.
• These include extreme individualism, reflected in
  a focus on the body and the rejection of
  collective identities, and the authority of
  science which undermine the value of old age and
  older people.
• But they also reveal the fluidity and contested
  nature of authority in the contemporary world
  which gives hope that it can change.

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A role for social science

• What is the role for the social scientist in the
  anti-ageing debates? The role for social sciences
  is clearly not to participate in the debate in
  the sense of demarcating science from non-
  science, or assay the claims of one anti-wrinkle
  cream as opposed to another.
• The task is rather to reveal the cultural
  processes which some practices seem so natural as
  to require no justification and the power that
  goes with such ideological domination.
• The detailed examination of the culture of those
  engaged in anti-ageing knowledge creation is an
  essential component that will help reveal how
  ageist assumptions are built into these
  endeavours and in turn shape a cultural response
  to the ageing construct.