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M Prize For Anti-Aging Research Hits $1,000,000
Reason writes "William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences (the 'father of regenerative medicine') has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and Dave Gobel - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved! Read the press release here."
There will never be a discovery (publically at least) of indefinitely life-extending consequence. There will, however, be discoveries that prolong life. But not too much at a time.
If you figure out a way to make people life forever or at least a very long time, you can only make them pay for it once. If you discover a way to make people live an extra decade, they'll pay through the nose for it, eventually die, move on and you'll have a new generation of customers.
It's just like medications and diseases. It's not in the interest of commercialized medicine to research and discover CURES. It's in their interest to research and discover medications that make living with a disease tolerable or prolong your life with the disease rather than eradicate it.
A conclusion you reach based on what? Plenty of medical treatments that started out expensive are widely available now.
Hell, that's true of technology in general, not just medical technology. Think about flying from New York to Shanghai on a schoolteacher's salary in the 1930s, when the term "jet set" actually referred to air travel. Should money have not been spent on the aviation infrastructure we all enjoy today, since it was just a bunch of vain bastards using it at first?
Only big companies and the military could afford early computers. UNIVAC was clearly no use to starving kids in Africa, so for the betterment of humanity we really should have put a stop to that line of research and put those scientists to work in soup kitchens instead. We'd all be so much better off now.
After all, if it benefits one rich person a decade or two before it benefits ten poor people, it should never be developed and all eleven people should suffer. Or at least that seems to be the logical result of what you're saying.
If you'd rather skip using any treatments that were initially high-priced, that is of course your prerogative.